I got a question from someone recently asking about the meaning of “eternal life” in the Gospels. He takes it that the expression “age to come” refers to the time after either the collapse of national Israel or the collapse of the pagan oikoumenē. That is also my view. But at the end of the story of the wealthy ruler Jesus appears to connect the age to come with “eternal life” (Lk. 18:30); and later it is closely associated with the resurrection (Lk. 20:35). Does this not suggest that “age to come” refers not to a historical but to a resurrected existence?

I want to answer the question a little indirectly—and perhaps incompletely—by considering the criticism of Tom Wright’s understanding of Jesus’ eschatology and kingdom ethics that Nicholas Perrin puts forward in [amazon:978-0830838974:inline].

As a thoroughly Gentile church we take the logic of a mission to the Gentiles for granted, but it’s not as obvious or inevitable as we might think. Jesus appears to have been almost entirely occupied with a mission to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:6; 15:24; cf. Jer. 50:6) and, while in the flesh, even to have opposed the proclamation of the gospel to the Gentiles (Matt. 10:5). The community of believers in Jerusalem—the direct heirs of his mission to Israel—had a hard time coming to terms with the unconditional inclusion of Gentiles in the renewal movement. It was clearly not a self-evident extension of the program. So how did it come about? What was its theological underpinning?

I spent a day this week with a group of leaders from a network of churches in the UK who were discussing how best to teach theology across the movement. They went about it with a refreshing candour: “We have an anti-intellectual history—we need to embrace learning.” The discussion revolved around the questions of what should be included in an “in house” theological training programme and how it might most effectively be delivered.

The rather less practical question that kept going through my mind, however, was: What do we want this sort of programme to achieve? What is the guiding vision? Are we looking to theology to underpin our ecclesial structures and doctrinal commitments? Or do we need it to take us somewhere? In the context of the consultation that would probably not have been a very helpful contribution—the network in question already has a solid vision for the coming decade. But I want to explore a bit further here what we currently need theology to do in our churches.

There is a strong dissident view that the nobleman in Jesus’ parable, who gives ten minas to each of his servants to do business with, before travelling to a far country to receive a kingdom, is an unjust rather than a just “lord” and that his “kingdom” is quite antithetical to the kingdom of God. Lloyd Pietersen makes use of it to illustrate how “readings from the margins completely subvert the natural Christendom reading which is still favoured by commentators”.

What has especially recommended this line of interpretation is a story in Josephus’ Antiquities. The appointment of Archelaus as king in 4 BC was contested before Augustus by a delegation from Judea, accompanied by a large number of Jews who were living in Rome. The Jews were understandably afraid that Archelaus would follow in the footsteps of his father Herod: before setting out for Rome to have his kingship confirmed by Caesar he had violently suppressed opposition from the Pharisees. To avoid a repeat of Herod’s brutal reign, the Jews asked that:

they might be delivered from kingly and the like forms of government, and might be added to Syria, and be put under the authority of such presidents of theirs as should be sent to them (Jos. Ant. 17:314)

In the second part of [amazon:978-0802868077:inline] Richard Horsley first discusses a number of methodological issues, then outlines his view of Jesus as a prophet leading the renewal of Israel against the rulers of Israel. I will give a quick summary of his arguments and then briefly discuss the failure of the reconstruction adequately to take account of the theme of the coming of the kingdom of God, which seems to me to be the major shortcoming of the book. The first part of the review can be found here.

I have read a fair bit of Richard Horsley’s work on the social and imperial background to the New Testament. It’s always been interesting stuff, but my impression is that he has been more interested in the critique of political and economic injustice in the abstract than in the particular Jewish-historical reaction to pagan empire that, in my judgment, shapes the emerging Christian narrative. I haven’t read his [amazon:9780800697082:inline] (2010), but this review by Kevin McCruden suggests that he presents Jesus as a prophet of covenant renewal primarily against a background of economic exploitation. That seems to me a less valuable perspective, on the whole, than the argument of the present book, [amazon:978-0802868077:inline] (2012), which considers the historical Jesus in the light of a revised understanding of Jewish apocalypticism.

The first part of the book deals with the debate over the apocalyptic Jesus, which in Horsley’s view has dominated study of the historical Jesus since Schweitzer. It is presented as a neat oscillation between two misguided scholarly positions taken with respect to the apocalyptic content of the Gospels, and I will do little more than summarize his analysis here. The second part, which I will review in a separate post, presents Horsley’s own account of Jesus as a prophet of renewal.

I recently outlined what I see as the apocalyptic Christology of Acts and suggested that most of what is said about the post-Easter Jesus in the New Testament needs to be interpreted within this narrative framework: Jesus was unjustly killed by the rulers of Israel and the Gentiles; he was raised from the dead and given authority to rule as king at the right hand of YHWH; and the historical outworking of this would be judgment first against the Jews, who had rejected the prophets and finally the Son, then judgment against the idolatrous Greek-Roman oikoumenē, the pagan world.

Part of this story is the belief that Jesus is the one “appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead” (cf. Acts 10:42; 1 Pet. 4:5). We would normally understand this as a reference to a final judgment at the end of the world as we know it, but it seems to me that the language of judgment in the New Testament is too closely tied up with the vindication of the early persecuted churches and the overthrow of Rome for us to think that it can be indefinitely deferred. In the 1 Peter passage he writes that the “end of all things is at hand” (1 Pet. 4:7). There is a clear and consistent expectation that this day of judgment was coming soon.

Since the idea that Jesus was “destined to judge the living and the dead” is also found in The Epistle of Barnabas, The Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, and 2 Clement, I thought I’d have a go at reconstructing the apocalyptic Christologies—and the surrounding narrative—of these texts. They probably date from around AD 100-110. They are not the only texts in the Apostolic Fathers that speak of a future judgment, though they may be the most important. If you’re not interested in the details, you can skip to the end for a quick summary.