one of the few things biblical scholars agree on is that the kingdom of God was the cornerstone of Jesus’ preaching. The “kingdom of God” is an interesting phrase, because it not only denotes a theological meaning but an exegetical method expressed in the acronym PaRDeS, representing the third of the four basic types of Jewish exegesis used during the first century. To review what we learned in chapter 1, these methods were peshat (simple inquiry), remez (hinting, typological), derash (complex metaphorical midrash), and sod (intuitive, revelational).
