Chapter 47 of 404

Forced Choices?

Although the reader will recognize that I agree with Sanders’ basic thesis and agree with most of his approach, I wish at this point to note some areas where I think Sanders has treated the evidence too narrowly.¹¹⁰ Like many other scholars, Sanders sometimes presents alternatives in such a way as to force choices, offering two alternatives without allowing for the possibility of other options. For example, he argues that Jesus either attacks purity or the necessary business arrangements in the temple, if he is attacking anything at all;¹¹¹ but a detractor could (if one wished) suggest that Jesus’ complaint had some other basis than these two alternatives (for example, the location of the trade).

More importantly, while I believe that Sanders is right to argue for the future kingdom, he may too readily play down some evidence for its presence in Jesus’ ministry. In the gospel tradition, the kingdom is received as a gift, entered as a child (Mk 10:14-15), and apparently parabled as a current, smaller foretaste of the future (Mk 4:26-32). Here again, the division of options seems part of the culprit in excluding potential evidence. Dividing material about the kingdom into six categories, Sanders includes this “present” material in two other categories (covenant¹¹² and the kingdom’s character).¹¹³ Because he includes each piece of evidence in only one category, he thus excludes them from the category of the kingdom-as-present in Jesus, a category that consequently has so little remaining in it that Sanders can essentially reject it.¹¹⁴ Yet many of these sayings could belong to multiple categories, a possibility excluded only by the arbitrary choice of including them in only one category each. Even so, Sanders does allow it as at least conceivable that Jesus believed that the kingdom was breaking in through his message,¹¹⁵ in the same way that some other prophets of his day may have thought this for their own activity.¹¹⁶

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