Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins - Hardcover

Ferda, Tucker S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080287990X ISBN 13: 9780802879905

Publisher: Eerdmans, 2024

Synopsis

In this pioneering study of Scripture and reception history, Tucker S. Ferda shows that the hope for Jesus’s second coming originated in his own message about the coming of the kingdom after a time of distress. 
 
Most historical Jesus scholars take for granted that Jesus’s second coming was invented by his zealous early followers. In Jesus and His Promised Second Coming, Tucker S. Ferda challenges this critical consensus. Using innovative methodology, Ferda works backward through reception history to Paul and the Gospels to argue that the hope for the second coming originated in Jesus’s own grappling with the prospect of death and his conviction that the kingdom was near; he expected a return that would coincide with the final judgment and the end of the age within the space of a generation. 
 
Ferda also makes a major contribution to the reception history of the Bible, shedding light on how Christians distinguished their faith from Judaism by deriding “Jewish messianism” as earthly minded and militaristic. In the early modern period, critics found an expedient way to distance Jesus from this caricature of “Jewish messianism”: they pinned the expectation for the second coming on Jesus’s early followers.  A new appreciation for the diversity of Judaism and messianism in the Second Temple period makes possible a fresh reconstruction of Jesus.  
 
Bold and historically astute, Jesus and His Promised Second Coming breathes new life into a long-stagnant conversation. It also offers readers fresh insight into the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Students and scholars of the New Testament will need to read and engage with Ferda’s provocative argument.

About this title

About the Authors

Tucker S. Ferda is Errett M. Grable Associate Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His research interests include the Gospels, the historical Jesus, the history of New Testament research, Second Temple Judaism, eschatology, and hermeneutics. He is the author of Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis and Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins.

Dale C. Allison Jr. is the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. His academic research focuses on the historical Jesus, the Gospel of Matthew, Second Temple Judaism, and the history of the interpretation and application of biblical texts. His numerous books include Interpreting Jesus, His numerous books include Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age, and Interpreting Jesus.

Edition details

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080287990X
• ISBN 13: 9780802879905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 564