“The Time Is Fulfilled”

Jesus’s Apocalypticism in the Context of Continental Philosophy

Lynne Moss Bahr

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780567695222
• eBook ISBN:
  9780567684370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In this study, Lynne Moss Bahr explores the concept of temporality as central to Jesus's proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Using insights from continental philosophy on the messianic, which expose the false claim that time progresses in a linear continuum, Bahr presents these philosophical positions in critical dialogue with the sayings of Jesus regarding time and time's fulfillment. She shows how the Kingdom represents the possibilities of a disruption in time, one that reveals the intrinsic relation between God and humanity.

In illustrating how Jesus's sayings regarding time are thus expressions of his messianic identity-as of the world and not of the world--Bahr argues that the meaning of Jesus's identity as Messiah is embedded in the disjuncture of time, in the impossibility of "now," from which the Kingdom comes . Bahr's use of critical theory in this study expands the concept of God's Kingdom beyond the traditional confines of the discipline.

Chapter 1

Introduction

He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”

Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”¹

— Mark 8:29

What does it mean to profess that Jesus is the Messiah? My question follows closely on the one posed by Jesus in Mark 8:29, not only because a cluster of associations surround Messiah as a title—in its first-century context and today—but also because Jesus himself is both a historical and a theological figure and cannot be limited to either category. Because the historical sources about Jesus of Nazareth are not objective data but rather arose from memories of Jesus for particular audiences, historical Jesus research cannot be assumed as normative. Rather, as Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza writes, early Christian texts are rhetorical constructions and as such arose from the evolving political and theological conflicts of their time. In themselves, they demonstrate that the meaning of Jesus must be continually put into new contexts, where it can be debated and reinterpreted.² Toward this end I offer here an interpretation of Jesus’s messianic identity that is grounded in sociohistorical and literary criticism but extends beyond it, by using modern philosophical thought on the messianic as an analytical resource. By seeking intertextualities between divergent sources—ancient and modern, theological and philosophical—I offer a way through the binary that has characterized studies of Jesus as either a historical or a theological figure, and I offer one possible answer to the question that has accompanied these studies and persisted for more than 2,000 years: “But who do you say that I am?”

Central to the issue of Jesus’s messianic identity is the extent to which he espoused the worldview of apocalypticism. By this term, I refer to both the first-century CE literary genre apocalypse and the social movement of resistance by Judeans to Roman rule of Palestine that emerged in the period of Second Temple Judaism (583 BCE–70 CE), culminating in the Jewish wars. This sociopolitical worldview imagined God’s restoration and vindication of Israel, an event signaled by the arrival of the Messiah. The Jewish sources from this period, which are contemporaneous with Jesus’s lifetime, develop a variety of meanings and identities assigned to this figure, ranging from Davidic king to teacher to warrior.³ A common theme concerns the idea of time pressing in on itself, as coming to an end in an act of fulfillment that would bring God’s reign. Whether the early church imposed such material upon Jesus’s authentic sayings or he himself espoused this worldview and theological position is one of the key issues in historical Jesus studies. At stake is the historical authenticity of the claims about Jesus as Messiah, which, depending on the weight one applies to historical claims within Christianity, either diminishes or strengthens the theological meaning that might be made of this aspect of his identity.

Continental philosophy—particularly in the writings of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben—offers an alternative route through the problem of Jesus’s apocalypticism, one in which the significance of the messianic as a concept comes to the fore. All three thinkers have explored the concept of the messianic for their own purposes on a range of issues, and each one addresses temporality as central to the experience of Being. For Benjamin—who, not incidentally, cites Luke 17:20–21 in one of his letters—the messianic consists in recognizing the past as determinate of the present, not in the sense of a forward progression of development but in terms of the possibility of redemption via a connection to past generations. Derrida deploys the messianic as a structure of radical alterity that continually holds open the possibility of the impossible, which he understands as constituting an “undecidable” that shifts the meaning of presence, or Being. For Agamben, the aporias of the messianic are a site of truth, in that they reveal hidden structures in the understanding of time and the human subject before the law. In these philosophical expressions of the messianic that reject any positive content, temporality is a conceptual framework that is decidedly nonlinear. As I will show in the chapters that follow, Jesus’s proclamation of the Kingdom of God expresses in its own idiom a nonlinear conception of time as well, one that reveals salvation as already within humankind but that is made known through the medium of Jesus’s messianic identity.

To provide an overview of the historical and literary context in which this study unfolds, I offer in this chapter three sections that address interlocking issues: the scholarly debate on Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, time in Jewish and Greco-Roman texts from the Second Temple period, and Jesus’s messianic consciousness. In outlining the major scholarly positions in the debate on Jesus as apocalyptic prophet, I aim to show how underdeveloped conceptions of time limit the interpretations all sides. The overview of time in the Second Temple period indicates the diverse interpretations of time in Jewish and Greco-Roman texts from this period. Finally, a discussion of the issues surrounding Jesus’s messianic consciousness illuminates the extent to which we can discern Jesus of Nazareth’s own attitudes toward time and its contribution toward whether he understood himself as Messiah. Taken together, these foundational issues underlie the interpretation of the four apocalyptic Jesus sayings that form the core of this study, all of which integrate the exegetical findings with the messianic as a concept in Continental philosophy. In this intertextual reading strategy, I illuminate the contours of both a p hilosophical and a theological messianism, which, held together in tension, point toward Jesus’s identity as Messiah as revealing that the broken and fractured state of the human condition—which the linear conception of time conceals—is the means by which the Kingdom comes.

Jesus as Apocalyptic Prophet

The contentiousness of the issues surrounding Jesus’s apocalypticism is no doubt exacerbated by the confused nature of the term apocalyptic and its associated meanings. In an effort toward greater precision, scholars today distinguish between apocalypse as a literary genre, as I indicated above, and apocalyptic as a social movement. Broadly defined, an apocalypse is “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.”⁴ Besides describing the conceptual structure of an apocalypse, this definition points to how the framework of the genre invites an imaginative solution to the problems faced by the audience. Apocalypticism, on the other hand, can be seen as a social movement insofar as it “refers to the symbolic universe in which an apocalyptic movement codifies its identity and interpretation of reality.”⁵ Apocalypticism therefore is not limited to the content of apocalypses. Thus, John J. Collins describes a movement as apocalyptic if “it shared the conceptual framework of the genre, endorsing a worldview in which supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, and eschatological judgment played essential parts.” He adds that this affinity to apocalypses is always a matter of degree.⁶

The work of Collins and his predecessors, particularly Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss, in emphasizing apocalypticism as a critical feature of early Christianity, was made possible by the discovery in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Jewish Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Texts such as 1 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, and 4 Ezra all illuminated connections to the sayings of Jesus that provided more precise literary and historical contexts. These texts revealed some patterns of thought that could be used, although not unproblematically, by Christian scholars.⁷ For instance, Johannes Weiss in Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God analyzes the apocalyptic content of the Jesus tradition on its own terms. Refuting the claims of Julius Wellhausen and other scholars of the late nineteenth century who insisted that the Jesus sayings represent an ethical dimension in Christian piety, Weiss concludes rather that they reflect a “thoroughgoing eschatology” that is entirely otherworldly. Emphasizing Jesus’s religious perspective, he argues that the super-worldly aspect of the Kingdom necessitates that there is no inner-worldly development of the Kingdom.⁸ Most important, he states, “the Kingdom of God is not a matter of human initiative. The only thing man can do about it is to perform the conditions required by God.”⁹ Weiss emphasizes Jesus’s proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom, a feature that theologians of the time tended to diminish in a favor of the Kingdom that is to come. For Weiss, the desire that the world pass away so that God’s reign might come now is critical to Jesus’s preaching, and he offers no alternatives to the otherworldliness of Jesus’s message other than to approximate Jesus’s attitude by living “as if you were dying. We do not await a Kingdom of God which is to come down from heaven to earth and abolish this world, but we do hope to be gathered with the church of Jesus Christ into the heavenly Βασίλεια.”¹⁰

Albert Schweitzer, a contemporary of Weiss, was captivated by Jesus’s apocalypticism as well and treated it as the content undermining all attempts at retrieving the historical Jesus, a genre of literature broadly titled “Lives of Jesus” that was popular in Schweitzer’s day. In particular, he reacted strongly to studies such as William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret, which sought to expose a theological strategy of the early church at the core of Jesus’s commands of secrecy in the Gospel of Mark, arguing that the historical Jesus had no messianic intentions. Schweitzer thought all such attempts to excise the apocalyptic content were deeply erroneous. To the many “Lives of Jesus” studies of the late nineteenth century, he writes,

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But he does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own.¹¹

To say that Jesus has no place in a modern context may seem pessimistic, but at the end of his study Schweitzer saw the apocalyptic content, paradoxically, as the site of greatest theological potential. While most biblical scholars today no longer agree with the details of Schweitzer’s analysis, especially his assertion that Jesus willingly went to his death as a failed Messiah, his work nevertheless remains paradigmatic in his serious consideration of the prominence of Jesus’s apocalypticism in the gospel tradition. Especially relevant for our purposes, he suggests that Jesus’s apocalypticism offers a hermeneutical resource.

The advent of form criticism, particularly in the work of Rudolf Bultmann in the 1930s, allowed a more precise analysis of the Jesus tradition than Schweitzer was able to achieve. In The History of the Synoptic Tradition, Bultmann includes a section on the apocalyptic and prophetic sayings in which he extracts modernizing and doctrinal elements by means of intertextual comparisons in order to locate the original forms of r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 2 CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY ON THE MESSIANIC: WALTER BENJAMIN, JACQUES DERRIDA, AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN
• Chapter 3 THE SEED GROWING SECRETLY: MESSIANIC TIME—CREATION AND SALVATION
• Chapter 4 THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT FEAST: HOSPITALITY, TIME, AND THE MESSIANIC DISRUPTION
• Chapter 5 THE PARABLE OF THE NIGHT WATCHERS: TO WAIT AND WATCH IN THE TIME OF THE NOW
• Chapter 6 THE THINGS WITHIN: TEMPORALITY AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
• Chapter 7 CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright