Revelation about “final things” in the sense of absolute or ultimate importance (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), “Problem of Apocalyptic,” 104–5 and n. 16). “Eschatology” in this sense can be seen as already “inaugurated” through the work of Jesus and of Paul; but its beginning implies no end. Rather, “inaugurated eschatology” manifests in the quotidian, coding for Christology, or for a post-Jewish/post-ethnic consciousness (“grace, not race”) (The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and The Law in Pauline Theology (London: T&T Clark, 1991), 240) or for improved community ethics, for eschewing the fustiness of Jewish ancestral observances, or for enjoying a “resurrected mind.”7 Finally—a most elegant expedient—the term(s) for and the idea of an impending end to normal historical time, when investigating these ancient figures, can simply be ignored.
In dispute, for current scholarship, is not the claim that (some of) Jesus’ earliest followers thought that he had been raised from the dead. It is, rather, that this conviction came embedded within a vivid expectation of the end. On this point, in support of the argument advanced by Allison above, our earliest evidence, Paul’s letters, is decisive. Jesus had an inner core of twelve followers, a number that recalled the plenum of Israel, itself an eschatological idea (1Cor 15:5, cf. Rom 11:26, referencing the eschatological plenum of twelve tribes) (Cf. Allison, Constructing Jesus, 67–76, 232–33). The earliest post-crucifixion community, originally in Jerusalem for the Passover pilgrimage holiday, (re)assembled in the city and stayed there (cf. Gal 1:17, 2:1), and it was in Jerusalem, specifically from the Temple Mount, that Paul expected the returning Christ to manifest (Rom 11:25–26) ( Allison, Constructing Jesus, 50–51). The community’s expectation of a messianic, eschatological finale, in other words, alone accounts for its relocation and continued residence in the holy city. Jerusalem remains prime eschatological real estate: see, e.g., Justin, Dial. 80–81; Irenaeus, Haer. 5.35; cf. Origen, Princ. 4.3,8. As with late Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic traditions, so for later (and current) gentile Christian ones, the kingdom launches from Jerusalem. And, even decades after “Easter faith,” Paul construes Jesus’ resurrection as the first of a universal, eschatological series of pneumatic transformations, which he himself expects to live to undergo (e.g.,1Cor15:20, 52; cf. 7:6, 29,10:11;1Thess 4:15–18; Phil 3:20–21, 4:5; Rom 13:11–12, 16:20). Ἀλλὰ ἐρεῖ τις, Paul is not Jesus.
Paul’s conviction that the end was nigh does not of necessity entail that Jesus taught the same thing. The “Christ event” might have spurred Jesus’ earliest followers to think (clearly incorrectly) that the kingdom approached. Hearing this belief expressed by those whom he “persecuted” (in Damascus? Gal 1:13, 17), then subsequently receiving his own Christophany, Paul may have drawn the same incorrect inference, namely, that Christ’s resurrection signaled the general one, thus the impending end (e.g., 1Cor 15 passim). Such a reconstruction indeed firewalls Jesus of Nazareth from eschatological error, imputing temporal miscalculation to the post-crucifixion community instead. Later gospel traditions, incorporating this misapprehension, then wrongly ascribed apocalyptic teachings to their messianic protagonist. Possible? Yes. History is radically contingent. But this argument, while protecting the historical Jesus from error, comes at a very high cost. It cuts him off from our earliest evidence about him, rendering it fundamentally irrelevant to historical work.
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