I told you that you wouldn't like it

I am smiling reading the comments on my last blog post. It shows how people read what they want to read, not what was written.

1. I never said that my method recovered the historical Jesus or his message about the Kingdom of God. Did I?

2. What I said (and apparently it needs repeating) is that what I would recover with my method would be the earliest constructions of Jesus by the early Christians. This is not the same thing as the historical Jesus. Rather it is how the first Christians were remembering him early in the transmission of the traditions. And it is quite clear when these sorts of detailed studies are done and looked at comprehensively, that the second generation of Christians thought his message about the coming of the Kingdom of God was an eschatological message that did not fulfill itself as expected. Really, let's be honest, is this something new? Paul is all about the problems of the unfilled eschaton already in our oldest Christian writing in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians.

3. I told you that you wouldn't like it.