Re: We have to go back, but not to square one

Yes, these questions inevitably arise when we attempt to read New Testament eschatology historically.

1. I don’t really think that the New Testament has much to say about the existence of Israel following the war against Rome. The conviction was that Israel was under judgment, that this would take the form of a devastating war, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the loss of the kingdom, the death of many, and the scattering of Jews from their homeland. These events are decisive and terminal at least to the extent that Jesus was justified in gathering an alternative community around himself as Torah, temple and king - and then he sends them out to claim the whole world as God’s holy land.

So from our perspective perhaps the diagram is flawed, but as a representation of how Jesus, Paul and others saw the future of their people, I think it is correct.

2. It seems to me that the New Testament regards the prophetic narrative about suffering and vindication, which reaches its climax in the victory over Greek-Roman paganism, as definitive not in the sense that the church would never again experience violent persecution but in the sense that it is this narrative about Jesus and the community that suffers in his footsteps that establishes the lordship of Christ over his people in place of the lordship of Caesar.

My argument, at least, would be that the story of the Son of man, which is a story about the defeat of pagan oppression and the giving of the kingdom to the suffering community of the saints of the Most High, is used to define the nature of the transition that God’s people must make from judgment to restoration, from oppression to the reign of God over them, from second temple Judaism to the renewal of the covenant in the Spirit. Having made that transition, I think the assurance to the church as a whole is that it will never again have to face such comprehensive oppression and the threat of annihilation. Christ is now Lord over the people of God and his place can never again be usurped.

Yes, churches and believers have been persecuted and oppressed since then, and it would be appropriate to speak of their experience in the light of the New Testament narrative. But I would say, again, that the New Testament doesn’t really look that far ahead. What mattered to the churches was their immediate situation. The fact is that if these small pariah communities had not remained steadfast in the face of extreme hostility from both the synagogues and from the pagan authorities, they would probably have gone the way of countless other oriental religious movements that had attempted to infiltrate the Roman world.