Re: Why the historical Jesus matters

Sam, it seems to me that there is a significant tension in Paul’s writings between the experience of ‘new creation’ life and the experience of suffering. To proclaim that Jesus is Lord is not merely to oppose Caesar and invite persecution; it is to embody the new life that the covenant community has found in the Spirit. But I think it is important to recognize that this new life was experienced under conditions of adversity - and of considerable uncertainty regarding the outcome of the missional venture of the early churches. Would the Jesus movement be proved right in defying historic Judaism? Would it survive the opposition of imperial paganism? Plenty of messianic movements and oriental cults have simply disappeared from the radar screen of history. My argument is that New Testament eschatology basically addresses that anxiety. Would the Jesus movement be vindicated?

The powerful experience of new life was undoubtedly there, but would it survive? This is the question that Paul addresses in Romans 8. They have been set free by the law of the Spirit of life (1-11); but they are called to be ‘fellow heirs with Christ’, which means that they must share in his suffering and glorification (17) - they have begun to find life but on the narrow path of suffering to which Jesus called his disciples. So in 8:18-39 Paul assures them that nothing, not even persecution and death, will overcome the faithful Jesus movement: they have the eschatological promise that they will overcome adversity. This is exactly what Jesus is talking about when he says that the gates of Hades, that is death, will not overcome his church (Matt. 16:17-18).

My argument in The Coming of the Son of Man is that it is this hope of vindication that is captured in Paul’s belief that the parousia of Christ, the fulfilment of the vision of the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven to receive the kingdom from God, would happen in the foreseeable future. It would mark the defeat of the imperial figure who set himself on the throne of God in defiance of the anointed one, deliverance of the church from systematic persecution, the end of paganism’s hegemony over the Greek-Roman world, and the public vindication of the faithful community.

So I don’t think Paul was wrong about this. We are mistaken in looking for a fantastic apocalyptic happening. He uses familiar and entirely realistic Old Testament imagery to construct a story of hope for communities which had found life at the expense of death, which had taken up their crosses and let go of their lives for the sake of Jesus and the announcement about what YHWH was doing for his people.

We look back on this period with inevitable complacency - we know that the church survived and went on to become a massive cultural and political force. But the early churches were going out on a limb, and I think it right that we see in the parousia motif the expression of a critical, urgent, and life-sustaining hope that was eventually fulfilled.