How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying About God and the Bible by Richard M. Smoley

Author:Richard M. Smoley [Smoley, Richard M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-06-06T23:00:00+00:00

The Apocalyptic Jesus

In the discussion of Jesus’s teachings above, I have taken the Gospels’ evidence about Jesus more or less at face value. That’s because I think his teachings as described up to this point are reasonably clear. Maybe Jesus didn’t say every last thing in the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe some of the parables about the kingdom of heaven don’t go back to him. Maybe some of the denunciations of the scribes and Pharisees were tacked on later. But the basic message comes out the same.

It will come out different only if you decide—for whatever reasons of your own—to eliminate a whole category of sayings, whether it is about the kingdom of heaven or about scribes and Pharisees or whatever else you pick. And this strikes me as being very high-handed with the evidence.

From here on, however, the problem becomes harder to sort out. Here what Jesus really said—as opposed to what was put into his mouth later—does make a great deal of difference to what one decides about his original teachings. And there is no authoritative external criterion for figuring out how much in the Gospels is genuine and how much was added. Thus the conclusions are going to have to be much more tentative.

To show what I mean, let’s turn to Jesus’s apocalyptic messages. The core of these messages is found in a section of the synoptic Gospels called the Apocalyptic Discourse. It is found in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. Scholars generally agree that Matthew and Luke relied on Mark’s account to write their own, so let’s take Mark.

You may remember that scholars generally date Mark to around AD 70. What’s their reasoning? Much of it relies on this chapter. If you were to read the thirteenth chapter of Mark completely fresh and without any preconceptions, you would probably come to this conclusion: Jesus was predicting a Roman invasion of Judea and the sack of the Temple, to be shortly followed by the end of the world.

Scholars do not, as a rule, believe that Jesus really made these predictions. They may have been vaticinia ex eventu (vaticinium ex eventu in the singular): supposed prophecies that were actually cooked up after the events they are supposed to predict.

Say that I want you to believe in a holy man who died in 1910. It would help my case considerably if I could get you to think he predicted the two world wars and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, along with the 9/11 debacle for good measure. So I might concoct some prophecies of this sort and put them in his mouth.

Today recordkeeping is good enough that this would be hard to accomplish. But in the first century, it would have been much easier.

Thus scholars date Mark to around AD 70 because it’s the most likely context for verses such as this one, where Jesus says about the Temple, “Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone after another, that shall not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2).

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