End-time Sayings
End-time Sayings
Although some, as we have noted, doubt that Jesus would have spoken about the future, particularly in images resembling those often found in apocalyptic literature, their skepticism probably reveals more about their presuppositions about Jesus than about the evidence, as Albert Schweitzer pointed out long ago.203 Jesus’ message about the future pervades the tradition and in a first-century context is hardly inherently incompatible with Jesus the sage. Gentile Christians would not have introduced such Jewish imagery, and one doubts that Jewish Christians need have been more inclined to it than their teacher.204
Scholars debate whether the Synoptics applied Jesus’ predictions of imminent destruction only to the Temple or also to a later end of the age. What is most important for our purposes here, however, is that Jesus spoke about what he expected in the future from his vantage point. Though Jesus’ eschatological imagery is not apocalyptic revelation in the strictest sense,205 it is thoroughly Palestinian Jewish, and reflects motifs common to apocalyptic literature.206 Even the motifs of imminence and prerequisite signs appear together in apocalyptic texts as well as in this discourse.207 Disciples may have assembled elements of the tradition before Mark’s composition during some crisis of eschatological significance such as Caligula’s public intention to have his statue erected in the Temple.208
Jesus’ “eschatological discourse,” which weaves together a prophecy of judgment against the Temple and eschatological imagery, certainly predates the Gospels. Roughly twenty years after Jesus’ execution, the earliest New Testament sources already were using many of Jesus’ eschatological teachings. Despite limited correspondence in exact wording, Paul’s eschatological material in 1 Thess 4-5 (cf. also 2 Thess 2) corresponds so closely in content to eschatological material elsewhere attributed to Jesus that it reads almost like an interpretive summary of it.
The allusions in the earliest extant Christian document (1 Thess 4:13-5:11; cf. 2 Thess 2:1-12) include clouds, gathering of the elect, angel(s), lawlessness, apostasy, defilement of God’s temple, the parousia (common to Matthew 24 and the Thessalonian correspondence), coming as a thief, unknown times and seasons (Acts 1:7), sudden destruction on the wicked, and so on.209 (Though some detractors remain, most scholars recognize the correspondences.)210 Jesus’ final discourse in Matthew includes not only Markan and Q material but also special Matthean elements, yet even some of Matthew’s redaction (such as the trumpet in Matt 24:31//1 Thess 4:16; coming as a thief in the night in Matt 24:43//1 Thess 5:2; and the “parousia”) appears to echo genuine oral Jesus tradition.
Other explanations for the correlation between Paul and eschatological language attributed to Jesus falter. Paul’s and Jesus’ eschatological imagery fits their early Jewish environment, but in contrast to the vast array of early Jewish motifs, the degree of correspondence between Paul and Jesus is overwhelming. Thus both Jesus’ discourse and Paul in these passages lack many other themes of Jewish apocalyptic (e.g., mutant babies).211 This coincidence of particular motifs and absence of others also refutes the idea that merely early Jewish-Christian scriptural embellishment rather than Jesus himself would stand behind both the extant Jesus tradition and 1 Thessalonians. The latter probably constitutes our earliest Christian document and derives from a very nonapocalyptic milieu.212
The Jesus tradition does not borrow from Paul: that various Jesus traditions all happened to reproduce so much of Paul’s correspondence with one church is hardly likely.213 The same coincidence of motifs refutes the thesis that Paul and the Gospel tradition have a common source in some early Christian prophecy.214 Given the abundance of prophecy in early Christianity, probably multiple prophecies during the average weekly gathering (cf. 1 Thess 5:20; 1 Cor 14:26-31) and the number of eastern Mediterranean house churches, tens of thousands of prophecies must have been uttered in the early churches before Paul wrote. Why would a particular prophecy or particular set of motifs come to preeminence?215
The only genuinely workable explanation for the coincidence and the “you yourselves already know” (1 Thess 5:1-2), hence the meaning of Paul’s “word of the Lord” (1 Thess 4:15) and “traditions delivered to you” (2 Thess 2:15), is that the earliest dominical tradition stands behind Paul’s Thessalonian correspondence as well as behind the Gospels. With many scholars,216 I am virtually certain that this material in Paul reflects dependence on Jesus’ eschatological teaching — a dependence that confirms both the preservation of such teaching and the likelihood that Jesus was viewed as a prophet. (Paul applies it to the end of the age, though this does not tell us how the Gospel writers after 70 CE might interpret it.) I treat this subject much more extensively in Appendix 4, where I also provide a chart of some of the motifs.