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Jesus's Scenario of the Future

FOR many years Johannes Weiss's rediscovery in 1892 of the meaning of eschatology (an insight fleshed out in the second, much fuller edition of 1990)1 passed for a great breakthrough. In recent years we have heard the announcement of its reversal made ever more frequently and confidently. First of all, some of the original recoil from scandal that greeted Weiss has staged a comeback. (The scandal in fact was not altogether original to the 1890s. A number of Deists early in the history of modern biblical studies caught wind of it, and argued that if Jesus could be wrong about the coming of the end of the world, he could be wrong about many other things, as well.) Second, Weiss himself made it clear in 1900 that, eight years after the publication of his discovery, he was still unequal to the task of integrating it into a theology for the present. We might add that since then no such integration has imposed itself in generally accepted fashion among New Testament scholars (though the translation of eschatology into existentialist categories mounted a surprisingly potent generation-long appeal for general acceptance). Third, the most far-reaching negative result of the debate has been the incapacity of biblical scholars, and especially of practitioners of research into the historical Jesus, to define the various contexts in which future events signified by words and acts of Jesus might be convincingly placed. The problem has been the failure to get hold of Jesus's own scenario of the future. The purpose of this study is to survey, briefly, the grounds for reaffirming Weiss's discovery; to review a particular development thereof a proposal for the reconstruction of Jesus's scenario, that of C. H. Dodd, as revised by Joachim Jeremias; to fill out the scenario and make it concrete by recovering 'the eschatological ordeal' as the context for numerous sayings of Jesus about the historical future; and, finally, to commend an already available (if still to be fully and finally developed) solution to the theological problem that Jesus's future scenario raises.