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Regnum Dei Deus Est
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
‘The kingdom of God’ is central in the proclamation of Jesus, the reality to which his preaching points and which the parables are designed to explicate; the student of the New Testament must understand this concept if he is to appreciate dominical theology and the ecclesial theology which developed from it. Since Albert Schweitzer's well-known study, it has been taken as a matter of course that Jesus' kingdom concept was ‘apocalyptic’. Yet just this assumption has necessitated crucial qualifications. To take two notable examples of this, Rudolf Bultmann asserted that Jesus rejected ‘the whole content of apocalyptic speculation’, and Norman Perrin went a step or two further by saying that ‘the difference between Jesus and ancient Jewish apocalyptic is much greater than Bultmann will allow’. At this point, the term ‘apocalyptic’, as applied to Jesus' preaching, is practically evacuated of content. On purely logical grounds, the propriety of its continued usage in this connexion is seriously to be questioned.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1978
References
page 261 note 1 This is an opinio communis, shared by, e.g., Perrin, Norman, ‘The Kingdom God’, in Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.
page 261 note 2 (Tr. Montgomery, W.), The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London, 1910, 1963 from the 1906 German edition), see p. 365Google Scholar, ‘The eschatology of Jesus can therefore only be interpreted by the aid of the curiously intermittent Jewish apocalyptic literature of the period between Daniel and the Bar-Cochba rising.’
page 261 note 3 (Tr. Smith, L. H. and Lantero, E. H.), Jesus and the Word (New York, 1934, 1958 from the 1926 German edition), p. 36Google Scholar; the italics are not my own.
page 261 note 4 Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (London, 1976) p. 77.Google Scholar
page 261 note 5 ‘The Kingdom as Cosmic Catastrophe’, in F. L. Cross (ed.), Studia Evangelica, III, part ii: Texte und Untersuchungen 88, pp., 187–8. In fairness, it should be noted that Psalms of Solomon 17.3 (‘The kingdom of our God is eternal…’) provides a near equivalent to our phrase, but the passage in question could not be called apocalyptic.
page 262 note 1 Glasson, p. 190; Manson, , The Teaching of Jesus (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 130–132.Google Scholar
page 262 note 2 The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus (London, 1963, 1966), pp. 95, 24–7.Google Scholar
page 262 note 3 Two readable introductions to this subject: Bowker, J. W., The Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LeDéaut, R., Introduction d la littérature targumique (Rome, 1966)Google Scholar. All citations from the prophetic Targums are taken from the Aramaic text of Alexander Sperber (Leiden, 1962). The Isaiah Targum has been translated into English by J. F. Stenning (Oxford, 1949), cf. the seventeenth-century translation of all the prophetic Targums by Bishop Brian Walton in his monumental Biblia Sacra Polyglotta.
page 262 note 4 Targum Jonathan to the Prophets (New Haven, 1927)Google Scholar; he cites Targum Isaiah 28.1, where reference is made to a wicked high priest (p. 23), and 21.9, where a second judgment on Babylon is predicted (p. 28). Levey, S. H., ‘The Date of Targum Jonathan to the Prophets’, Vetus Testamentum 21 (1971), pp. 186–196CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues for a tenth-century terminus ad quem. While he does show a continuing interest in the prophetic Targums in the period of the Geonim, his argument is vitiated by the fact that his most convincing datum (the ‘Romulus’ cipher for Rome at 11.4 which Saadia also used) is only a variant reading (see Sperber's critical apparatus). Since, however, the line between editorial redaction and textual transmission in Targum studies has not yet been clearly drawn, his contribution is a useful warning against assuming the antiquity of any reading.
page 263 note 1 A recent contribution to this field which is very important, if preliminary, is offered by M. Aberbach and B. Grossfeld, Targum Ongelos on Genesis 49: Society of Biblical Literature Aramaic Studies 1 (Missoula, 1976). For the treatment of renderings which appear to cohere with New Testament passages, see McNamara, M., The New Testament and the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch (Rome, 1966)Google Scholar and Targum and Testament (Shannon, 1972).
page 264 note 1 Isaiah 24.23; 31.4; 40.9; 52.7; Ezekiel 7.7, 10; Obadaiah 21; Micah 4.7, 8; Zechariah 14.9, cf. the Masoretic text and Septuagint.
page 265 note 1 See, e.g., Dalman, G. (tr. Kay, D. M.), The Words of Jesus (Edinburgh, 1902), p. 97Google Scholar, and Moore, G. F., Judaism II (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), p. 374.Google Scholar
page 265 note 2 Mekilta Exodus 17.14 (p. 186, lines 4–7, of the Horovitz and Rabin edition (Jerusalem, 1960): ‘and the Place will be alone in eternity and his kingdom will be forever’, and a citation of Zechariah 14.9 follows).
page 265 note 3 A Life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden, 1962), pp. 27–32.Google Scholar
page 266 note 1 See Perrin, The Kingdom, p. 184, and Jeremias, Joachim (tr. Hooke, S. H.), The Parables of Jesus (London, 1972), pp. 210–214Google Scholar; 176–80; 151–3. Chapter III of Perrin's Jesus and the Language updates Jeremias with a competent review of the recent discussion (and see pp. 195, 196).
page 267 note 1 In a forthcoming issue of Themelios, this verse is analysed in detail.
page 268 note 1 In the preface of the 1900 edition of Die Predigt Jesu.
page 268 note 2 For a handy review of this controversy, see Knoch, O., ‘Die eschatologische Frage’, Biblische Zeitschrift 6 (1962), pp. 112–120.Google Scholar
page 269 note 1 Strack, H. L. and Billerbeck, P., Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch I (München, 1926), p. 164, citing the Jerusalem Talmud, Taanith 1.1.Google Scholar
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