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2. AND HE SENT THEM TO PREACH THE KINGDOM OF GOD

What cannot be debated is that John the Baptist and Jesus went about the business of evangelizing in entirely different ways. From everything we know of John, he was "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness" (Mk 1.3, referring to Isaiah 40.3), a solitary figure who stayed in the desert and required his followers to come out of the cities and towns to hear his message of God's imminence.

Jesus' evangelism was far more corporate in structure and consumer-friendly in execution. Luke 9:1-2 recalls Jesus' charge to his disciples before sending them out on the road: "Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases. And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the sick." This is followed by specific instructions, which are likely Jesus' own words: "And he said unto them, Take nothing for [your] journey, neither staves, nor luggage, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece." These disciples, thus attired in only the shirts on their backs, are then instructed to find a suitable patron in each town, staying there until their business in that town is finished. (Mark 6:7-10, in offering virtually the same instructions, permits a carrying a staff and wearing sandals.)

The specificity and regimentation of Jesus' instructions is remarkable. They go well beyond merely striking an appropriate pose of ascetic mendicancy. They come into sharper focus if we observe that in a culture where horses were curiosities that even rich Jews rarely owned, the fastest possible means of communication was a stripped-down human runner, unburdened by luggage or even shoes. In that context, what we see in the instructions to Jesus' disciples is the organization of the world's first Christian broadcast network. It was a network that Jesus evidently was intent on expanding; in Luke 10.1-9 seventy more disciples are sent off with the same charge and an even lengthier list of travel restrictions designed to boost the speed of transmission -- e.g., don't stop to chat with fellow travelers along the way. And these seventy were not only instructed to heal, but were obliged to provide advance work for Jesus, visiting "every city and place" where he himself intended to go.

However, before we go too far in deconstructing Jesus as the prototype of a television evangelist, we should consider what Jesus might have had in mind when he instructed his followers to preach "the kingdom of God" -- and what he himself meant in his frequent use of that term. As we have seen, the kingdom of God would have been a politically charged concept for the Jews among whom Jesus and his disciples preached; first-century Jews understood the kingdom to be an egalitarian, utopian Jewish state presided over by God, not Caesar or Caesar's flunkies. The question which currently possesses biblical scholarship is whether Jesus himself believed that God would soon intervene in human history and establish His kingdom on earth as in heaven, or whether Jesus regarded that kingdom as a spiritual domain already present in everyday life.

Certainly Paul, the first identifiable Christian writer, the man most responsible for transforming Jesus into Christ and bringing the good news of His salvation to the Gentile world, did not discard his belief in the eschatological Israel when he apostatized his conventional Jewish faith. We see the persistence of Paul's fundamentally Jewish belief in his letter to the Romans 11.25-26, where he writes: "That blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles comes in. And so all Israel shall be saved." What Paul is saying is merely his own necessary adaptation of intertestamental faith: When all the Gentiles accept the good news that Jesus is the Messiah, then even Israel, presently blind to Jesus' divinity, will believe it and be saved. The eager anticipation of a Jewish kingdom is also preserved in Acts 1.6, where the first question put to the resurrected Jesus by his disciples is, "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?"

Paul undoubtedly believed that he would live to see the fulfillment of God's promise to Israel. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Paul consoles the Christians of Thessalonica, who were troubled that some members of the community had already died without witnessing the apocalyptic deliverance. "Sorrow not..." he writes, "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.... For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive [and] remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air...."

The Mark gospel, written shortly after Paul's last letters, also reflects the continuing expectation that Christians will see the end of time before they die. The words of Mark 13.26-30 are reputed to Jesus and are written in the familiar images of the prophetic books of the Bible and the intertestamental pseudepigrapha: "And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.... Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done."

That Jesus shared the apocalyptic beliefs of his immediate followers (and, presumably, those of his mentor, John the Baptist) was once an unchallenged tenant of biblical revisionism. It was the view introduced by early revisionists like Reimarus and Albert Schweitzer, and still held by many contemporary scholars. But the most aggressive trend in contemporary Jesus research -- seen to best effect in the work of John Dominic Crossan and the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar (see The Quest of the Historical Jesus) -- is to disassociate Jesus from the apocalyptic expectations of his own followers.

The anti-apocalyptic theory is summarized in The Five Gospels, the report of the Jesus Seminar. The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar don't question that "The views of John the Baptist and Paul are apocalyptically oriented. The early church aside from Paul shares Paul's view." However, the Fellows conclude that various sayings attributed to Jesus establish his belief that the kingdom was already present and merely unrecognized by almost everyone except him -- the ignorant including his acknowledged mentor and his own disciples. "Jesus conceived of God's rule as all around him but difficult to discern. God was so real for him that he could not distinguish God's present activity from any future activity.... But Jesus' uncommon views were obfuscated by the more pedestrian conceptions of John, on the one side, and by the equally pedestrian view of the early Christian community, on the other."

One of the featured exhibits in the case against an apocalyptic kingdom is Luke 17.20-21. Jesus, questioned by Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God will come, tells them that they will not be able to observe the coming of the kingdom of God; they will not be able to say "Behold, it is here, or Behold it is there. For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Significantly, this passage has a parallel in an earlier text, the Gospel According to Thomas, where Jesus again suggests that you won't be able to say "'Here it is' or 'There it is.' Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out over the earth, and people do not see it" (Th 113).

In Luke 17.23-24, however, this "Behold, it is here, behold it is there" phrasing turns up in a decidedly apocalyptic context. Jesus tells his disciples that when they are told to look here or look there for the kingdom, they should not follow those who make such claims. "For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shines unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day." The coming of the Son of man -- an apocalyptic usage -- will be a cosmic event as evident as a flash of lightning that illuminates the entire sky.

However, Jesus usually described the kingdom of God in agricultural rather than meteorological parables. One such parable, which appears in all three synoptic gospels and the Gospel According to Thomas, is seen in its simplest and probably earliest form in Luke 13.19. Here Jesus likens the kingdom to "a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it."

While the mustard seed metaphor may refer to a kingdom that has already "waxed a great tree" from its minuscule seed, Jesus is just as likely to imply that the kingdom is a cosmic harvest that has yet to take place. Matthew 13.24-30 clearly refers to the apocalyptic winnowing of good and evil that pervades intertestamental literature, rendered in popular rural colloquialisms: "The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat...." The parable goes on to say that when the tares (darnel grass, a wheat look-alike which often carries a poisonous fungus) sprouted, the sower's servants asked him if they should be pulled up. "No; unless while you gather up the tares, you root up also the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn."

Disregarding the even more obvious apocalyptic imagery of such passages as Matthew 13.49-50 ("The angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, And shall cast them into the furnace of fire"), which the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar reject prima facie precisely because of its strident apocalypticism, perhaps the best insight into Jesus' concept of the kingdom of God is a passage the Fellows prominently feature in support of their anti-apocalyptic argument. This is Luke 11.20, where, after performing a successful exorcism, Jesus tells some Pharisees, "But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you." Though here again Jesus appears to imply that the Kingdom is present, he describes his mission in terms that are strongly apocalyptic: In casting out devils, he casts himself as God's agent in the cosmic war against evil. And it is unlikely that Jesus would have regarded the war as won and God's rule established on earth so long as Satan's minions remained at large. He is, rather, describing a single skirmish in a war that would not culminate until the great cosmic battle of the last day, waged both in heaven and on earth, that would vindicate the righteous and liberate Israel.

While Jesus' concept of the kingdom was subtle and complex, it was not, as represented by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar, an "uncommon view" during the intertestamental era. The English scholar Geza Vermes, one of the leading experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, offers an interesting insight into the beliefs of the Qumran Sect in his book The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London: 1987). "Immortality was not conceived of as an entirely new state," Vermes wrote, "but rather as a direct continuation of the position attained on entry into the Community. From that moment, the sectary was raised to an 'everlasting height' and joined to the 'everlasting Council', the 'Congregation of the Sons of Heaven.'" So the Qumranites, whom no one doubts held fanatically apocalyptic beliefs, also regarded themselves as already present in the kingdom of god, which they believed would soon be restored to the entire earth. It is also worth noting that the Qumranites believed they had entered the kingdom of god upon completion of their initiatory ritual. As we will see later, at the conclusion of this appendix, admittance to Jesus' "inner circle" was probably accompanied by a rite in which the initiate was allowed a vision of the kingdom of god. Afterward, Jesus' intimate followers, much like the Qumran initiates, could regard themselves as already resident in the heavenly community, in which they would be joined by all righteous men in the last day.

Regardless of how Jesus may have privately instructed his inner circle, the message his disciples and broadcasters carried to the villages and towns of Galilee, Perea, and Judea was inherently apocalyptic, brimming with promises of the new age in which the poor would receive their reward. We can probably hear echoes of the exuberant arrival of those messengers in Jesus' own words: "Blessed are you poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now: for you shall feast" (Lk 6.20-21, with parallels in Mt 5.3-6 and Th 54, Th 69.2).

But it is in the realm of actions, not words, that Jesus the apocalyptic agent most clearly emerges. There is little doubt among even the most skeptical scholars that Jesus engaged in a fundamental act of political protest, one that John the Baptist was never bold enough to attempt: Jesus went to Jerusalem and directly -- most likely, violently -- challenged the Temple hierarchy. And, for a reason that has yet to be cogently presented by the scholars who have stripped Jesus of his apocalyptic politics, there the Roman Prefect of Judea decided to execute him.

Next: AT THE HANDS OF PONTIUS PILATE

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