In the previous chapter, I examined the way in which a particular element within Jewish hopes for restoration – the expectation of a sign – was subverted by Jesus' declaration that the coming sign would be one of national judgement. I have argued that in doing so Jesus countered a particular stream of Jewish reflection on Israel's sacred traditions with a quite different understanding of those traditions. In this chapter, I continue to develop the idea that sacred traditions which had been developed in service of an expectation of national restoration were taken up by Jesus in his proclamation of impending national judgement and a new understanding of the meaning of Israel's election. The particular motifs to be examined are the vineyard, the eschatological banquet, and Jesus' polemic against ‘this generation’.

Prophetic criticism in the parables

A recent emphasis in parable studies has been to highlight the way in which Jesus' parables subvert conventional wisdom. My intent in this section is to show that in some parables, at least, the subversion takes a particular shape. I have referred above to J. A. Sanders' description of ‘prophetic criticism’, that is, the prophets' use of Scripture to subvert accepted use of sacred tradition. Of particular importance is the fact that in their critique of views substantiated from Scripture the prophets often appealed to alternative sacred traditions. My contention is that the subversive element in a number of Jesus' parables is precisely this sort of prophetic criticism cast in narrative form.

I have argued in the preceding chapter that Second Temple Jewish attitudes toward the Land and concerns about purity cannot be dissociated from fundamental convictions about the centrality of the Temple. Thus the conclusions reached concerning Jesus' marginalization of Israel's purity and corresponding territorial expectations would seem to imply an analogous stance toward the Temple. If the Temple was ‘the linchpin of Jewish territorialism’, the evidence that Jesus distanced himself from common expectations concerning the Land would seem also to suggest a similar distance from common notions concerning the role of the Temple in the eschaton. Is this the case?

In this chapter, I examine a number of sayings and actions of Jesus concerning the Temple and attempt to show that they are sensible and that the tensions evident in them find resolution within a particular eschatological framework which formed the basis of Jesus' conception of the relationship between the society of the eschaton and life in the present. I wish to argue that Jesus' conviction that the time of fulfilment had arrived was such that he believed that the eschatological Temple should already be functioning. Thus the failure of the standing Temple to be the eschatological Temple stands at the heart of his indictment of the Temple and prompts a conception of the eschatological Temple which drew on sacred traditions quite distinct from those of Jewish restorationism. To these traditions I turn first.

In the foregoing chapters I have argued that the eschatological proclamation of Jesus must be viewed as the paradoxical announcement that the judgement and restoration of Israel were to be experienced as simultaneous realities. In this and the following chapter, I wish to examine the way this assessment of the eschatological situation of the nation played out in Jesus' intentions toward three central and interrelated constitutional features of the eschaton: purity, Land and Temple. Few Jews believed that Israel's restoration would take place on a strictly spiritual or theological plane. Dramatic changes were expected, changes which would alter Israel's social structures and institutions. This is not to say that the sacred traditions which serviced these expectations were univocal. This diversity lies behind the divergence of Jesus' aims from the expectations of many of his contemporaries. Central to the eschatological hopes of Second Temple Judaism were the beliefs that Israel would be reassembled in a pure Land and reconstituted as a pure people. A crucial question, then, is how Jesus' message of national restoration and judgement affected his intentions concerning the purity and Land of Israel.

Purity, society and Israel

Purity and the Temple

On the Pharisees of Sanders and Neusner

A useful, if not wholly obvious, point of departure is the recent debate between E. P. Sanders and Jacob Neusner over the purity practices of Pharisees in the first century.

This book is an attempt to make sense of Jesus as one whose intentions were decisively shaped not only by Jewish restoration eschatology but also by his own creative reworking of restorationist expectations. This tack is neither new nor unguided by presuppositions. The attempt to relate Jesus in some way to Israel's hope of national restoration has been a key feature of much recent work on Jesus. Foremost among the guiding principles of this approach to Jesus are the convictions (1) that Jesus must be understood within first-century Palestinian Judaism and (2) that Jesus' intentions are substantially accessible. Though they run counter to much Jesus-related scholarship of the twentieth century, these convictions have become foundational to the so-called ‘Third Quest’ for the historical Jesus and form the basis of the present study.

Issues and questions

Present and future

All studies of history are historically positioned. This applies not least to the study of Jesus as a figure of history. The present study was initiated at the end of a century which began with the work of J. Weiss and A. Schweitzer, whose studies have served as either guide or foil for much of what has followed. Weiss' and Schweitzer's portrayal of Jesus as a prophet of the end of the world attracts few adherents today, but the perception of Jesus within the milieu of Jewish eschatological expectation continues to command broad adherence. Of course there are exceptions.

Summary

I have attempted to further the discussion of Jesus' eschatology by considering his aims in relation to several key elements within Second Temple Jewish restorationism. If Jesus held a partially realized eschatology, it is in principle unlikely that he would have done so in isolation from the concrete, this-worldly expectations of the eschaton which characterized Jewish eschatology in this period. In attempting to specify the degree to which Jesus' eschatology was realized, much scholarship in the last hundred years has assumed that if eschatological reality was present for Jesus it must have been abstract or spiritual. This study represents an advance over such approaches by considering Jesus' intentions in relation to central constitutional features of the eschaton within Jewish restorationism.

The use of Jewish expectations for the eschaton as a measure of the degree to which Jesus' eschatology was realized is complicated enormously if Jesus also announced a coming national judgement. Since the realization of Jewish eschatology was to take the form of national restoration, how can the announcement of national judgement be reconciled with the belief that Israel's restoration had already begun?

If the conclusions of chapters 2–3 are sound, Jesus did proclaim coming national judgement. The point emerges from a consideration of Jesus' use of Israel's sacred traditions, for it appears that Jesus not only drew on sacred traditions which had previously served a message of national judgement but also appropriated sacred traditions in a way that subverted widespread conceptions of national restoration.

I have thus far concluded that the scriptural traditions used by Jesus in his assessment of the nation's salvation-historical location were not those which projected the imminent return of Israel to national dominion but those which anticipated a coming national judgement and serviced a reconception of Israel's election. This, however, is not to say that Jesus held no positive expectation of Israel's restoration. In what follows I take up some of the key ways in which Jesus made positive use of restoration traditions and propose a model for understanding Jesus' conception of the eschatological people of God as restored Israel. My aim is to show that contrary to the common belief that Israel's restoration would entail its reconstitution as a tribal league, Jesus believed the eschatological shape of Israel had already been determined through the ministry of John the Baptist. Such a belief implies a conviction that God had so restored Israel that even certain constitutional features of the eschaton had taken form.

Elijah's restoration

A passage which has received insufficient attention in the now commonplace description of Jesus as a prophet of Jewish national restoration is ironically the only text in the synoptic traditions in which Jesus explicitly employs restoration language. The text is Mark 9.11–13 (par. Matt. 17.10–13):

In this chapter and the next, I focus on negative elements in Jesus' response to Jewish national restorationism. I will attempt to show that certain constituent features, themes, and assumptions of this restorationism which had been generated by eschatological reflection on Israel's sacred traditions were challenged or reworked by Jesus in the light of alternative traditions. Moreover, in doing so, he not only rejected certain elements of Jewish restorationism but altered them in such a way as to make them serve a message of national judgement.

The particular concern of the present chapter is to trace the role and meaning of signs within Jewish expectations of restoration and to assess Jesus' response to and use of this feature of national restorationism.

Jesus' assertions of obvious but unrecognized fulfilment

Jesus' critique of the rejection of his message of eschatological fulfilment

Unless we reject large swaths of the Jesus tradition, the following propositions are firm: (1) Jesus preached the arrival or imminent arrival of the time of fulfilment; (2) Jesus' ministry stirred broad interest but his message did not finally gain wide acceptance; (3) Jesus believed that the rejection of his message was morally culpable.

Inasmuch as Jesus believed that the rejection of his message of eschatological fulfilment was blameworthy, it is clear that he took the reality which he announced to be obvious and discernible. Such a perspective lies behind a number of parables (e.g. the parable of the wedding feast) and much of Jesus' interaction with the Jewish leaders.

The recent trend in Anglo-Norman studies to avoid using 1066 as a sharp dividing line has made possible a much broader and more historical treatment of eleventh-century social change. This has involved a refreshing new look at feudal institutions. A long tradition dating from at least the work of Spelman in the seventeenth century to that of J.H. Round in the nineteenth has led to the dominance, first of the legal, then of the military aspect, of ‘feudalism’. This view still held the field when both Pocock and Douglas, in discussing Spelman's definitions of ‘feudal custom’ and ‘feudal law’ (Spelman never used the word ‘feudalism’), hailed him as almost modern in his approach. Pocock wrote in 1957 of eighteenth-century historiography:

In fact the undermining of the whole feudal interpretation of the Norman Conquest became apparent soon after Pocock wrote.

In the first place, historians were looking critically at the actual course of the conquest itself, and at the condition of Normandy before 1066. R.H.C. Davis, in a short and perceptive summing up of the Norman Conquest in 1966, pointed out on the military side that ‘for some time the Normans lived as an “army of occupation” based on their castles with their household knights. The date at which it would have been safe for the household knights to be enfeoffed and live on their own lands would have varied.’ D.C. Douglas, in 1964, challenged the view of Haskins that ‘Norman society in 1066 is a feudal society, and one of the most fully developed feudal societies in Europe.’On the contrary, he argued that ‘such definition as was attained in the duchy during the Conqueror's reign is recorded for the most part in Norman charters after the conquest of England.’

The one hundred and fifty years, from about 1050 to 1200, which will be briefly reviewed here was a period of intense architectural activity and change, from the pre-romanesque of Anglo-Saxon England, to the developed gothic styles of c. 1200. While the architecture of Normandy followed a relatively stable course through this period, that of Englandwas convulsed in 1066, one of the clearest signs we have of the profound cultural change brought about by the Conquest. While the conquering Normans imported a style developed in the duchy, they also brought England into the wider orbit of European architecture, and the architectures of England and Normandy followed surprisingly different courses from the late eleventh century onwards.

Romanesque, as with many post facto style labels, is resistant to convenient definition. The term is used to describe the predominant style of architecture in western Europe in the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries, which was characterised by clearly articulated spaces, well-cut masonry, and decorative schemes subordinated to the overall architectural conception. This was accompanied in some areas by a renewed interest in vaulting techniques and the adoption of a number of Roman architectural forms, for example Corinthian capitals. The style, such as it was, varied markedly in different regions of Europe, and in a fashion which did not always closely follow either contemporary political boundaries or modern ones. It also developed at an uneven pace across the continent, and while Normandy in 1066 appears to have been somewhere near the leading edge of developments in Europe, the picture in the Anglo-Saxon world is far more murky.

Discussion of late Anglo-Saxon architecture is made difficult by the destruction of most of the great churches, and the doubtful dating of many smaller monuments. Indeed, the methodology of periodisation has been the subject of lively scholarly debate; the question is not purely an academic one, either, as the direction, if any, taken by Anglo-Saxon architecture in the mid-eleventh century depends on the body of buildings which are taken to precede the Conquest. Much the most comprehensive coverage is provided by Harold and Joan Taylor's three volume Anglo-Saxon Architecture, which tends to be generous in is assessment of the number of buildings completed under the Anglo-Saxons, and credits them with developing features others prefer to see as imported from elsewhere.

As Haskins in his now classic study of the Renaissance of the twelfth century reminds us, too close a focus on Latin obscures the fact that, over and above the revival of learning with which it is synonymous, the twelfth century was also ‘an age of new creation in literature and art beyond the mere imitation of ancient models’. Notwithstanding his own almost exclusive preoccupation with the achievements of the monastic and ecclesiastic intelligentsia, Haskins was well aware of how profoundly the secular world was also affected by the general broadening of horizons and the renewed intellectual vitality which characterised the twelfth century.

This is especially true of the field of literature. Here a whole series of innovations, generic, thematic and formal, laid the foundations for a written vernacular culture that was to flourish with ever-increasing creativity over the ensuing centuries. Such pervasive and durable concepts as chivalry, courtliness and Courtly Love, for example, trace their origins directly back to the lay world of the twelfth century. More general developments of the time, such as increased historical consciousness and a more acute sense of the relevance of the past to the present, the ‘re-discovery’ of the individual, the evolution of handwriting, book production and the decorative arts from Romanesque to Gothic modes, not to mention the political self-affirmation of the baronial classes or the growth of aristocratic patronage, are all reflected in one way or another in the pages of its secular texts.

Pride of place amongst the literary innovations of the century must go to the narrative genre of romance, one of whose founding fathers, Chrétien de Troyes, writing in French during the 1170s, explicitly links his own literary activity to the topos of the translatio studii. There was, we are told, not only continuity of culture between the ancient world and his, but also a direct transfer of learning from one to the other – a cultural counterpart to the translatio imperii – from Greece to Rome and ultimately to the French-speaking world of the twelfth century. Hand in hand with this appropriation of the written heritage of the past to the present goes a widening in the accessibility of knowledge, contemporary as well as ancient, as a whole new sector of society is brought within the purview of written culture.