When an ordinary person wants to listen to a Brandenburg Concerto, they put on a CD. When a musician wants to listen to a Brandenburg Concerto, they leaf through the score. A musician hears far more from the score than an ordinary person hears from the CD.
Likewise:
When a student wants to delve into Christianity, they examine the texts, especially the Bible. When a theologian wants to delve into Christianity, they examine the kernel of life, the personalities who produced the texts, especially the Bible. A theologian gets far more from the kernel of life, the personalities, than a student gets from the texts.
What is the reason for this phenomenon? Why is life inherently personal? Jim [The Rev. Dr. Professor James A.] Sanders said that the message of the prophets is concern for the giver (God, personality) rather than the gift (Bible, bauble, etc.). He said that taking the gift for important is the prophets’ definition of idolatry.
We are under the impression that a sizable contingent of the Christian population of the First Century expected a “Second Coming” of Jesus within a time frame they felt justified indicating by use of the word “soon.” Sometimes we feel able to argue that even in the early years of the Second Century remnants of this expectation was extant. There is no question that the expectation recrudesces at something like regular intervals right down through the millennia.
It is arguable that not as many people in the First Century expected a second coming of Jesus as the NT would lead us to believe did. That is debatable. Since the texts are redactions of mostly indeterminate dates, and since we have no terminus ad quem for when the redaction was finally halted (my vote is for Jerome and then, finally, the papacy of Gregory I), we are always in the condition, when trying to ascertain anything solely from NT texts, of fundamental uncertainty regarding the ontogenesis of the religion. We can see what it got to but we can’t see, just from examining the NT, how it got there and, especially, where it came from. The layers and lateness of the redactions make a solely NT-derived systematic ontogenetic profile of the religion impossible to construct.
Nonetheless, the expectation of a second coming of Jesus did exist and is supported by NT textual segments. And to that extent, we have to say that the NT is not a bearer of truth, not a trustworthy guide.
What happened? Writers heaped up writing upon writing, right from the days of Jesus’ Palestinian and subsequent ministries, and pretty soon a great big mess was made, part of which was this notion that Jesus is going to return “soon” or even at all. The expectation was invented by writers. Jesus did not say He would come again because that was not true. What Jesus said was, “He Who sent me will come again.”
This is something else, a paradox, something not in the realm of the looked for. It is the truth, bearing out palpably right today. Jesus meant that the Father would come again. Now we are in a realm of trans-cultural expansion, such as actually existed then — and now. We are examining the kernel of life, the personalities who produced the texts. This realm is the locus of all useful NT scholarship.
Finally, my confidence in Paul as the greatest of the apostles and an unsurpassed sage leads me to take so-called Pauline support of an early second coming as simply not Pauline. Paul would have known better. Great founders do not have unrealistic expectations. Their greatness is in their seeing facts. This is one of several instances in which writers use Paul’s name to support positions he would never have entertained. Another instance is the put-down of vegetarian diet, an anti-Pythagorean, anti-Essene polemic loaded into a meta-Pauline textual stream by one opposed to the dietary discipline of spirituality. Again, Paul would know better.
AMDG