It is quite mistaken, however, to speak as modern theology does, of the “service” here required as belonging to the “new ethic of the Kingdom of God.” There is for Jesus no ethic of the Kingdom of God, for in the Kingdom of God all natural relationships, even, for example, the distinction of sex (Mark xii. 25 and 26), are abolished. Temptation and sin no longer exist. All is “reign,” a “reign” which has gradations—Jesus speaks of the “least in the Kingdom of God”—according as it has been determined in each individual case from all eternity, and according as each by his self-humiliation and refusal to rule in the present age has proved his fitness for bearing rule in the future Kingdom.
For the loftier stations, however, it is necessary to have proved oneself in persecution and suffering. Accordingly, Jesus asks the sons of Zebedee whether, since they claim these thrones on His right hand and on His left, they feel themselves strong enough to drink of His cup and be baptized with His baptism (Mark x. 38). To serve, to humble oneself, to incur persecution and death, belong to “the ethic of the interim” just as much as does penitence. They are indeed only a higher form of penitence.
A vivid eschatological expectation is therefore impossible to conceive apart from the idea of a metamorphosis. The resurrection is only a special case of this metamorphosis, the form in which the new condition of things is realised in the case of those who are already dead. The resurrection, the metamorphosis, and the Parousia of the Son of Man take place simultaneously, and are one and the same act.[277] It is therefore quite indifferent whether a man loses his life shortly before the Parousia in order to “find his life,” if that is what is ordained for him; that signifies only that he will undergo the eschatological metamorphosis with the dead instead of with the living.
The Pauline eschatology recognises both conceptions side by side, in such a way, however, that the resurrection is subordinated to the metamorphosis. “Behold, I shew you a mystery,” he says in 1 Cor. xv. 51 ff.; “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”
The apostle himself desires to be one of those who live to experience the metamorphosis and to be clothed with the heavenly mode of existence (2 Cor. v. 1 ff.). The metamorphosis, however, and the resurrection are, for those who are “in Christ,” connected [pg 365] with a being caught up into the clouds of heaven (1 Thess. iv. 15 ff.). Therefore Paul also makes one and the same event of the metamorphosis, resurrection, and translation.
In seeking clues to the eschatology of Jesus, scholars have passed over the eschatology which lies closest to it, that of Paul. But why? Is it not identical with that of Jesus, at least in so far that both are “Jewish eschatology”? Did not Reimarus long ago declare that the eschatology of the primitive Christian community was identical with the Jewish, and only went beyond it in claiming a definite knowledge on a single point which was unessential to the nature and course of the expected events, in knowing, that is, who the Son of Man should be? That Christians drew no distinction between their own eschatology and the Jewish is evident from the whole character of the earlier apocalyptic literature, and not least from the Apocalypse of John! After all, what alteration did the belief that Jesus was the Son of Man who was to be revealed make in the general scheme of the course of apocalyptic events?
From the Rabbinic literature little help is to be derived towards the understanding of the world of thought in which Jesus lived, and His view of His own Person. The latest researches may be said to have made that clear. A few moral maxims, a few halting parables—that is all that can be produced in the way of parallels. Even the conception which is there suggested of the hidden coming and work of the Messiah is of little importance. We find the same ideas in the mouth of Trypho in Justin's dialogue, and that makes their Jewish character doubtful. That Jesus of Nazareth knew Himself to be the Son of Man who was to be revealed is for us the great fact of His self-consciousness, which is not to be further explained, whether there had been any kind of preparation for it in contemporary theology or not.
The self-consciousness of Jesus cannot in fact be illustrated or explained; all that can be explained is the eschatological view, in which the Man who possessed that self-consciousness saw reflected in advance the coming events, both those of a more general character, and those which especially related to Himself.[278]
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. What else, indeed, are the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline letters, the Christian apocalypses than products of Jewish apocalyptic, belonging, [pg 366] moreover, to its greatest and most flourishing period? Historically regarded, the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul are simply the culminating manifestations of Jewish apocalyptic thought. The usual representation is the exact converse of the truth. Writers describe Jewish eschatology in order to illustrate the ideas of Jesus. But what is this “Jewish eschatology” after all? It is an eschatology with a great gap in it, because the culminating period, with the documents which relate to it, has been left out. The true historian will describe the eschatology of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul in order to explain Jewish eschatology. It is nothing less than a misfortune for the science of New Testament Theology that no real attempt has hitherto been made to write the history of Jewish eschatology as it really was; that is, with the inclusion of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of Paul.[279]
All this has had to be said in order to justify the apparently self-evident assertion that Mark, Matthew, and Paul are the best sources for the Jewish eschatology of the time of Jesus. They represent a phase, which even in detail is self-explanatory, of that Jewish apocalyptic hope which manifested itself from time to time. We are, therefore, justified in first reconstructing the Jewish apocalyptic of the time independently out of these documents, that is to say, in bringing the details of the discourses of Jesus into an eschatological system, and then on the basis of this system endeavouring to explain the apparently disconnected events in the history of His public life.