Gospels

Required primary sources

Diachronic development

Already and/or not yet (realized eschatology)

If this is the good news, what’s the bad news?

Criteria

Distinguish and note relative emphasis on:

Influences and influence

Pay attention to how NT sources are interpreting older sources, and try to distinguish authorial intent from history of interpretation.

Questions

  1. How would you characterize each of the synoptic gospels on a spectrum of realized eschatology? In other words, how does each imagine the kingdom of God relative to the present?
  2. When did each author think Jesus would return, and what should readers two thousand years later think?
  3. What can we say about how historical context shapes the eschatology of each gospel?
  4. Who is being judged in Matthew 25? What are the criteria? What relevant concepts did you learn in your moral theology courses?

Further reading

The readings listed under March 2/5 could function as a look back and look forward in the course. That is, the book is written from the perspective of contemporary systematic theology and gives a short summary of eschatology in the Bible. I can also see a case for looking at those pages now that we are focusing on the Bible, to give a summary of the major themes important for later theologians.