Re: New creation and the kingdom of God

Andrew, your historically contextual reading of Jesus actions and teachings leads to the vexing question of whether the substance of Jesus’ message has relevance to other than the very Israelite-Jewish setting within which it makes the most sense.

I don’t see that Paul is overly concerned that Jesus may have lost relevance. When writing to a mostly gentile convert audience, Paul seems to assume a familiarity with the gopel narrative and then move on from there. The 4 gospels themselves, being mostly later than Paul in final form, also seem to assume that Jesus’ story will be readily understood/believed as THE good news by anyone who can read Greek. Allusions to OT prophecies (Mtt 13:35, Acts 2:16) that are formulaically introduced again do not seem to assume that the reader needs a knowledge of the original context. The story on the whole is not difficult to understand, nor to believe.

I too wholeheartedly agree with your reading of Jesus’ parable. I also agree that the evangelical tradition, by being very selective in its understanding of a rather secular tale, has done a great disservice to the gospel that Jesus preached and himself lived out.

Certainly a methodologically rigorous, historically sensitive, reading goes a long way to challenging any proof-text approach to the bible. Certainly a sensitivity to how the writers linked the gospel story to the Israelite covenantal tradition and the broader context of the Roman occupation mirroring the Babylonian conquest also anchors and fleshes out the original context and meaning of many a pericope.

But when taken as a whole, the narrative force of the gospel story - the story of Jesus, really does not need these anchors. Greek speaking gentile NT readers in NT times who did not have any knowledge of the OT, nor of Israel’s hoary past, still linked up to the gospel story without great difficulty. This is evidenced by the lack of much explanatory stuff in the gospel texts themselves. Even the extended explanations in John’s gospel do not insist on an Israelite filter in order to be largely understandable.

I would ask whether insisting too strongly on a particular contextual reading and one that also insists on a particular eschatological framework, really does help to dig us out of the evangelical tendency to start with Paul before we have understood Jesus in the gospels. The inevitable consequence being that Jesus’ own centrality to Paul’s thinking is entirely lost. And all of Paul’s own foundations in the gospel narratives get thrown out with the Evangelical bath water?

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