Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

by Craig L. Blomberg

This disproportionate amount of attention to the last events of Jesus' life reflects the centrality of the crucifixion in early Christian thought. It also prompted Martin Kähler, a century ago, to give one of the more famous descriptions of the form of the Gospels as passion narratives with extended introductions (recall above, p. 116, n. 16).

Mark is convinced that Jesus' death will make possible the forgiveness of humanity's sins.

This sense of action is enhanced by Mark's forty-two uses of “immediately” (Gk. euthus), at times virtually equivalent to little more than “the next important thing I want to tell you is…” The word appears only seven times in Matthew, once in Luke, and three times in John. Mark also delights in using the “historical present”—present tense verbs for past tense action—particularly with verbs introducing Jesus' speech, for the sake of emphasis and vividness. See, e.g., Mark 1:12, 21, 40; 2:5, etc.

Jesus came announcing the end of the Jewish exile,

One of the main reasons certain scholars still disagree as to how much of the Gospel portraits can be corroborated by historical research has to do with initial presuppositions. An antisupernaturalist worldview will clearly rule out much a priori. A second important issue involves the “burden of proof.” Does one assume a saying or deed of Jesus to be authentic unless contradictions or inconsistencies with other data emerge? Or does one assume all the data to be inauthentic unless good reasons can be marshaled for accepting them? The former approach is the standard one in the investigation of other ancient historical documents, but the latter approach, unfortunately, is the one more often applied to the Gospels.

The “kingdom” of God is a concept that is best understood as God's “kingship.” It refers primarily to God's rule or reign rather than to a geographical realm. It is a power more than a place.

established his ethic on an internalized righteousness that cannot be adequately fulfilled merely by an assessable performance of a collection of laws, no matter how detailed.

This ragtag band of followers accompanying a Galilean peasant riding a donkey would have looked like a parody of the standard welcome and fanfare for governors and generals astride their white horses with a retinue of soldiers.

So it seems most likely that Jesus is referring to deeds of compassion done for suffering, persecuted Christian emissaries.

Matthew 25