Jesus Before Christianity (Part 4 - Jesus' Good News about a Very Different Kingdom)

The third section of Jesus Before Christianity is comprised of seven chapters (chapters 6 through 12) about "Good News" in which the author focuses on the "kingdom of God" and how utterly different it is from all of the kingdoms of this world.

In chapter 6 Nolan writes of how Jesus understood the kingdom of God; the most common ways Jesus talked about the kingdom of God was through the pictures of a household or a walled city: "The fact that his way of speaking about the 'kingdom' is based upon a pictorial image of a house, a city or a community leaves no doubt about what he had in mind: a politically structured society of people here on earth. A 'kingdom' is a thoroughly political notion...The difference is between a community of humankind in which evil reigns supreme and a community of humankind in which goodness reigns supreme...Jesus was convinced that the 'kingdom' of God would eventually triumph over the 'kingdom' of Satan and replace that 'kingdom' here on earth."

The next four chapters are chapters dealing with the value system of God's kingdom and how radically different God views these matters; the author presents all of this in light of the world Jesus lived in and gives wonderful insights to what Jesus' words and actions meant in His day:

• Chapter 7: The "Kingdom" and Money
• Chapter 8: The "Kingdom" and Prestige
• Chapter 9: The "Kingdom" and Solidarity
• Chapter 10: The "Kingdom" and Power

Chapter 11 deals with the idea of "time". This is a fascinating chapter in which Nolan contrasts the way Westerners view time (more quantitative) with the way a Hebrew views time (qualitative). "For the Hebrew, to know the time was not a matter of knowing the date, it was a matter of what kind of time it might be...Time was the quality or mood of events...When individuals reach a fixed point, for example, the Passover festival or a time of famine, they become in a sense contemporaneous with their ancestors and their successors who have passed or will pass through the same qualitative time. The individual's ancestors and successors share the same kind of time, no matter how many intervening years there happen to be between them."

Jesus was announcing that there was coming a time qualitatively different from anything that went before. "It will be a qualitatively new time, not a new measurement of time" (as we westerners would assume)...The newness of Jesus' time can hardly be exaggerated." We are not to confuse John the Baptist's message (of doom) with Jesus message (of good news). "Goodness is triumphing over evil. God has relented and is no longer intent upon punishing the people. God now wants to save them..." This can be seen in all that Jesus did and said: "God has come down from the heavenly throne, the highest position of prestige in the world, to be intimately close to men, women and children, who may now address God as abba...The success of the cures and of all Jesus' liberating activity showed him that God felt with those who suffer, that God wanted to live in solidarity with humanity and to use the godly power to serve them and protect them."

In chapter 12 Nolan concludes this long section on "good news" by talking about the coming of the 'kingdom' as miraculous: "In view of the extraordinarily high values that are supposed to reign supreme in this 'kingdom', it should not be difficult to appreciate that its coming would be a miracle...This kind of 'kingdom' can only come, it cannot be built...The 'kingdom' itself cannot be achieved, it must be received - as a gift."

Although Jesus didn't know the time of the coming kingdom, the urgency in His preaching was because He understood that if there was no repentance, for sure a catastrophe would come; and the catastrophe did come with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE, to be followed with a merciless massacre in 135 CE when the Romans completely destroyed the nation of Israel and expelled the Jews from Palestine.

"Jesus' message, like the message of any prophet, was not timeless. Nevertheless it did point to something about humanity and God that was so fundamentally and definitively true that it could be re-interpreted in relation to other times and other places...We can see the beginnings of this process of apocalyptizing the message...in the gospel of Mark...Matthew takes the process very much further..."

Nolan ends the chapter by saying that in order for us to recover what Jesus meant to the people of His day (before Christianity), we need to read the gospels without the "apocalyptized" process being applied to them. He attempts to do this in the following chapters.