 How much does the Christ event solve? I'm not going to comment on the title. I'm just going to let that percolate during the lecture and we'll see where we end up at the end. But the title of the lecture implies that there is something at stake when in relation to writings that eventually became the Christian New Testament, Judaism is drawn into the conversation. Of course, to those today who locate themselves firmly within one religion or the other and thus adhere to values and practices not shared by the other, it might not seem necessary that such a conversation take place at all. And there are New Testament scholars, if I can say, that don't require it or don't think that it is of any real significance. After all, being conscious of one's religious identity goes hand in glove with discerning features that distinguish one form of persuasion from another. When compared with Second Temple Judaism, however, comparisons are not always easy to draw, especially since many followers of Jesus in the early generations were Jews themselves and shared with other Jews through the rich, diversifying and evolving heritage found in sacred tradition and practice. Nevertheless, as we well know, comparisons have been drawn precisely in order to determine those elements of tradition that diverged just enough from the mother religion to forge a path that would lead eventually to an irretrievable parting of the ways. For many, the essential departure lies somewhere in the area of Christology. That is, the extraordinary claims Jesus' followers would make about his exalted status in relation to God. We are witnesses to such a debate during the last 25 years. Between, for example, Maurice Casey, may he rest in peace, James Dunn, Larry Hurtado, and Richard Balkum, and many others about the winds, the hows, and the whats of convictions about Jesus that cannot be anchored comfortably within the framework of Second Temple Jewish traditions. When, however, we look at the question of evil in the New Testament and again through a glance at traditions that took shape during the Second Temple period, we find ourselves dealing with a different kind of problem. One can quickly observe that according to most writings of the New Testament, the place of Jesus at the very heart and center of God's activity, a Jew in recent times who was crucified and whose followers claimed was resurrected from the dead and exalted to the right hand of God, makes the movement we anachronistically call early Christianity stand out in relief. There is plenty of theological content and indeed ritual practice to imagine that here we have to do with the emergence of an innovative way of thinking centered as it was and what has happened in recent history. Although it is casually claimed that Christ is God's quintessential answer to evil, we are dealing with a more functional problem, which we may formulate as follows. What did Jesus' early followers who wrote about him expect their understanding of God to do for them and their audiences? Put another way, what is the impact, since it's REF time, you know, impact of a given conviction about God's activity in cosmic space and time? For those who take human experience as a point of departure, language about God offers a way to put life's problems into overwhelming into perspective. Such a perspective does not entail removal of or flight from evil so much as offers a way to handle or negotiate it as an inextricable part of life. The content of religious conviction, however diverse, functions in some way to come to terms with the world that for much of the time looks or threatens to be very different. Okay, such statements of realism may seem uncontroversial. However, if the content of theological expression in one religious tradition is compared with that of another, an acknowledgement of a common or shared function can quickly evaporate or suffer neglect. If differences in the story or narrative about God's interaction with humanity and the cosmic order come into focus. When we consider the more obvious differences between early Christian tradition as it began to emerge from Jewish roots within the socio-cultural complex of the Eastern Mediterranean world, we do not have to reach very far before identifying a claim that God has acted through Jesus in a singular way. One might go on to claim, for example, the motto that devotion to and inclusion of the exalted Jesus and the worship of God for all the continuity with contemporary strands of Jewish thought likewise marks a departure from Second Temple tradition. However, closely bound up with such a claim is a theological judgment that renders Christian tradition as better or more effective in dealing with the persistent problem of evil in human experience. I'm saying that a lot of what New Testament we were all bound up not only with our descriptive task of what is going on in these documents but when we do religious comparison of religions between our set of texts in the New Testament and our set of texts that lie outside the New Testament not least Second Temple literature, we find ourselves working hermeneutically underneath the surface. Before we jump to such a conclusion though which I think is in considerable need of nuance it is worth thinking about how many if not most scholars of the New Testament have articulated ways Jesus and his early followers including the apostle Paul burst through certain bounds set by pious Judaism during the Second Temple period. In this respect it is precisely in the understanding of God's redemptive activity in time that many of our colleagues past and present have found essential distinguishing features that in turn present Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God and subsequent faith claims about his significance not merely as definitive moments in salvation history but also as better or more effective in the removal or management of evil. Much of the discussion can be organized around the notion of apocalyptic. Here I have inverted commas a term that has been subjected to a lot of debate during the last 50 years. Though the term itself suggests the disclosure of something that is hidden it has been contested as a theological category through which both the closeness of Christian tradition and its distance from Jewish religiosity from the Second Temple period can be discerned. I'd like to name a number of examples here. First in relation to claims about the historical Jesus and then in relation to what is frequently maintained in constructions of Pauline theology. Of course it was C.H. Dodd who is known in the post-war years for having presented Jesus as one who proclaimed the nearness of God's kingdom in such a way that it was no longer as in Jewish tradition the object of hope for an imminent or remote time. The implication is that Jesus was able to convey something that no one else in his time could have and that therefore his activity was more effective in a combat against evil in bringing salvific activity of God to bear on his immediate environment. And if not then on the heels of Pauline and more general New Testament theologies of recent years I want to apply this view to Paul's claims about the significance of Christ and I will deal with then three Pauline theologians as a way of bringing together what they claim about Paul in relation to Judaism. But first allow me to cite two New Testament scholars from Germany, one older, one younger to illustrate this point. First there is Ferdinand Hahn retired from the University of Munich in his Theologitus Neune Testaments the last version of which was published in 2011. As he begins to comment on the message of Jesus in the Gospels, Hahn speaks for many when he matter-of-factly declares the following and here I just translate his text. During the course of history Israel's hope for salvation became increasingly future in orientation. Salvation could only be partially attained at the earlier period in the present while the notion of future salvation gathered strength. This emphasis developed to such a degree that in Jewish apocalyptic tradition it was essentially that Jewish apocalyptic tradition was essentially empty of salvation as far as the present is concerned with einer völligen Heilslehre der Gegenwart gerechnet wurde. With the result that hope could only be realized by a decisive act of God. The future character of God's activity is supported by the notion of this age in which God's reign cannot become a reality and the current world and that the current world and time for salvation to occur at all must be replaced by an age to come when things will be different end of quote. A younger example of such an attitude comes to us from Michael Tilley current holder of the chair for Noyesistament and Antikus Judentum in Tuvingen. In his otherwise very good little book on apocalyptic published in 2012 I quote from a socio-religious perspective early Christianity shows many parallels with Jewish apocalyptic. Nevertheless the claim that there is unbroken continuity between apocalyptic and Christian faith or that apocalyptic is the mother of Christianity as Kazemann maintained is questionable. Christian faith is in no way simply shaped by an apocalyptic world view. The most important difference between the early Christian koregma and Jewish apocalyptic has to do with the early Christian conviction regarding the activity of God in the world and in history. Determinative and descriptive of early Christian apocalyptic is the already of God's salvific activity. This very point is in tension with understanding of the world and eschatology of Jewish apocalyptic. History is for early Christianity no longer the place of godlessness as it is in Jewish tradition and a lack of salvation. Christian faith is not only grounded in the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God but at the same time is a recognition of the historical reality of salvation that is in Jesus. End of quote. What's happening here? If salvation is present in Christian tradition in a way that it is not in any part of Judaism then an underlying assumption may be a form of what I would call existential supersessionism brought to bear on our texts from antiquity. Christian faith did it better that is it dealt with the problem of evil better amongst other things than Judaism. The words of Han and Tilly are not isolated opinions. I'm sure many of you can recognize other literature and when you've heard things like this even Norman Perrin and others you don't have to go very far and it repeats itself in almost every introduction to New Testament or even theology of the New Testament that is published today. That may be too sweeping but I think it's not far from the truth. They reflect by and large what many if not most Christian theologians and scholars in New Testament studies ultimately think about how early Christian apocalyptic tradition relates to its Jewish counterpart. To emphasize how pervasive this approach is I'd like to offer a sketch of the problem in relation to Pauline's scholarship before offering a suggestion about how Jewish apocalyptic tradition may be re-read or understood. So the two ages this is maybe what you're thinking already in the background. If we ask New Testament specialists from very recent times to the end of the world war if we ask them we may not be surprised to encounter more than one answer. Nevertheless there has been a remarkable convergence in relation to Paul's understanding of time as it can be compared with Jewish tradition. This convergence however has less to do with what is being claimed for Paul himself than with the way Jewish apocalyptic thinking against or upon which Paul's thought is understood has been portrayed. In other words Jewish tradition operates as a kind of foil at each level and what is one to make of this without trying to make even the Jewish world look better than it really was either. Drawing mostly on the scholarly work of influential studies of ancient Jewish apocalyptic including those of R.H. Charles in particular who spoke very casually and wrote voluminously on the doctrine of the two ages largely taken from rabbinic tradition and imported into the earlier period. Literature in Paul has regarded this doctrine the two ages in which one age follows or succeeds on the other as the essential Jewish framework within which Paul's or in relation to which Paul's gospel was engaged. The two ages Paul is seen to have modified consists respectively of the present age in the future eschatology eschatological age to come. The former is a time marked by evil manifested through suffering and wrong doing within the created order. The latter envisions the establishment of divine rule that will wipe out evil and put to right all wrongs and injustices in line with God's purposes for the created order. Of course it has been recognized that construals of time and second temple Jewish literature cannot be simplified into such a bipartite scheme. It is noted for example that the age to come could be understood in some sense as a return to primordial time and with thus not merely manifest itself as an unprecedented future age. That's something we want to return to a little bit later. Moreover some Pauline scholars have observed that several texts depict the future within the present world order as the unfolding of a series of events. Usually catastrophic and sometimes with the advent of a messianic figure who will herald the conclusion of this age in anticipation of that divine act that will integrate the eschaton. Now there's no need to question the existence of the notion of a distinction in Jewish apocalyptic and related literature between a present age and a future world order and we've already heard some papers that relate very nicely to this scheme. There's also no need to question whether this understanding of time can be nuanced in the ways just mentioned. However it is helpful to discuss two points. First, what it means to talk about the way Paul has appropriated such an outlook and in view of this, second, whether in fact more can be said about how some Jewish writers, I won't list them here, could think about time. First, we look at what positing, the positing of two aons as a major way of understanding Jewish apocalyptic thought has meant for several influential Pauline interpreters. I've dealt with a bunch, I'm boiling them down to three. Ernst Keisemann, J. Louis Martin, thank you Jamie and James Dunn. Be nice if you were here. Acknowledging the risk of oversimplifying the differences between and nuanced arguments of each of these scholars that they brought to their readings of Paul, I think it is possible to identify a common thread amongst them in relation to the apocalyptic undercurrent that has shaped their work. In sketching this, I'm less concerned with what Jewish traditions influenced these New Testament scholars than with the assumptions they have made regarding what these traditions could not have included. To get a foil is to say things are not there, which in fact might be there if we look just a little bit further. Keisemann, maybe I don't need to say anything about Keisemann, but I'm going to here. His views on the righteousness of God in Paul as the invading power of God and his claim that the apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology are well known. Lying in the background to these claims is the apocalyptic ideal of two aeons, which Paul presupposed. Exegetically, Paul's adaptation of this scheme is vividly illustrated in Romans 5 in which Adam and Christ are antithetically juxtaposed. Whereas Jewish apocalyptic consigned salvation to the future, the advent of Christ and in particular Christ's death makes it possible for this to be realized in the present. In the present obedience of those who are waiting for this moment, who here I'm quoting him and accept the prophetic proclamation of the standards of the last judgment and pass it on to the whole world end of quote. What in Jewish apocalyptic is remote has already begun. Paul's reception of the aeons schema involves a serious modification of the dominant Jewish view, resulting in a new form of apocalyptic in which we have to do with a distinctive worldview capable of speaking about eschatological salvation and life in the present. Instead of a Jewish scheme which contrasted between primordial time and the end time, the present age of death is in Paul's view confronted by Christ, who is the author and representative of the new aeon. In other words, for Paul the end time has already begun. For Kazemann it is appropriate to speak about Jewish apocalyptic in relation to Paul's theology in two ways. It is a perspective that remains nourished by eschatology and second, views the cosmos as a place in which divine power, the power not anticipated by Jews until the eschaton as having broken into the world. The present then is one of conflict between the power that comes from the gospel and death that is shared by humanity. Kazemann did not allow the logic of an antithetical typology of Adam and Christ to be determinative for Paul. The advent of Christ did not do away with the ongoing power of death in this world. Against what Kazemann refers to as the Hellenistic enthusiasts of Corinth Paul's thought retained an eschatological edge. Christ inaugurated the end time but the ultimate conclusion of things remains outstanding. A reality that could be placed in service of primitive Christian Paranesis and would do so for Paul. The universal realization of the advent of life through Christ is now a summons for Christians to confirm in their personal life the change of aeons has already been effected. Kazemann acknowledges in principle the complexity of Jewish apocalyptic thought. However Paul's language draws from the eschaton into the present the conflict between death and life in a way presumably in a way that did not have any real precedent in existing Jewish paradigms. Kazemann did not explicitly claim that Paul's adaptation of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology was not anticipated perhaps because it is precisely this aspect of Paul's indebtedness to Jewish tradition that shaped the distinctive of his theology. However in as much as Paul worked out the significance of Christ in relation to his Jewish heritage what distinguishes Kazemann's Paul from Jewish apocalyptic thought is nothing less than radical and indeed innovative in terms of the history of religions. J. Louis Martin Kazemann's understanding of apocalyptic in Paul while drawing heavily on its eschatological component nevertheless reflects a use of the term which when used casually begins to take on a life of its own. Apocalyptic in Kazemann could thus refer to a world view in which powers are in conflict while for others it denoted a view of the world in which hope has a key role to play especially since the complexities of suffering sin and death are neither being vanquished nor necessarily find any tangible reckoning. J. Louis Martin's understanding of apocalyptic takes the matter one step further for him it operates as a key to epistemology and I don't even think today he would back off from that very sympathetic to what he is doing with Paul but not with Judaism. Rather than allowing the term simply to denote the eschatological future Martin draws on the fundamental meaning between the word to reveal or to uncover to emphasize the recognition of a divine disclosure that pertains to both the present age and the age to come. The perception of the one really involves the perception of the other in Christian tradition. If history as Paul knew it is to be brought to end by God it is because the present world order is being comprehended as essentially evil Galatians 1.4. Apocalyptic is thus the conviction that God has now given to the true perception of both present developments the real world and of a wondrous transformation it involves a new way of knowing both present and future. It follows for Martin that the revelatory solution in Paul's thought if it is to be a solution at all does not lie in the future as with Jewish apocalyptic but rather in the present therefore it is possible for the death of Jesus to be regarded as a moment of divine unveiling that confronts and in turn unmasks the world as it now exists this frame of understanding provided Martin with the way to present Paul's thought as a whole and explains also why he could read a letter like Galatians with its Christocentric orientation as no less fundamentally apocalyptic than the other writings of the apostle. Thus even less so than for Caseman Martin's approach to apocalyptic does not obligate the interpreter to find any essential continuity with comparable or contrasting Jewish paradigms. Once things have shifted there is no need to turn back the clock as it were. The essential point has happened and everything that happens subsequent to this is more a comparison that illustrates contrast than anything else. Once God has disclosed God's self and the Christ of it is a new way of knowing all else before becomes functionally irrelevant not only for Paul but also for Paul's interpreters. Such an epistemology a way of knowing that involves divine disclosure within the bounds of the created order as we know it may arguably be a way of considering the thinking of Paul but does this also have to mean that Jewish writers did not think about divine disclosure in any analogous way. James Dunn is the interpreter of Paul to whom we draw attention. Perhaps more than those whose readings of Paul described above he has attempted to bring Jewish tradition into direct conversation with what he says or maintains about Paul. This is true in particular when it comes to Dunn's view of the works of the laws most of us know here which in several publications he regards as regarded as an expression that had currency amongst Jews in relation to the practices that set them apart from Gentiles. What however of the function of Jewish apocalyptic thought in the way Dunn reads Paul. Of the several areas he covers in his sixth chapter in his theology of Paul the Apostle entitled The Process of Salvation is we have his discussion of the two ages in Judaism and Paul's thought here it becomes explicit. The chapter opens with a sub chapter the title of the eschatological tension sums up the particular emphasis in Paul's modification of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. So before we address what Dunn identifies as Jewish tradition behind Paul it is helpful first to observe that it is the context of Pauline scholarship that more immediately determines the position Dunn articulates rather than his engagement with the second temple Jewish literature itself. Over against readers for whom Pauline justification by faith translates into God's gracious unmerited pronouncement of righteousness upon individuals namely Stuhlmacher and company and others Dunn stresses that soteriology rather than being given denotes a lifetime process in which persons of faith negotiate between the power of the spirit in their lives and the inevitable failures and sufferings will always accompany them. This eschatological tension is known not just by anyone but is emblazoned upon the consciousness of believers whose participation in the power of the gospel exposes the problems that beset the human being in this age. Now Dunn presupposes along with most interpreters of Paul a Jewish schema of two ages in relation to which the particularity of the apostle's thought can be understood. Dunn takes for granted the view that Paul has modified this scheme by noting a provisional transition from the present age to the age to come in a parisia of Christ. Being in Christ is language that describes the position of believers who participate in this transition. This existence in a new state of being is not however what makes Paul different. The realism of Paul's view of life did not permit him to indulge in the already of the Christ event in contrast for example to the strong and Corinth and neither could Paul retain an eschatology that he had espoused before his apostolic call and so here I quote Dunn again. The distinctive feature of Paul's theology is not the eschatology but the tension which his revised eschatology sets up revised from Judaism. Eschatological hope was a common feature of Paul's religious heritage but an eschatology split in this way between a decisive already and a still not yet was a new departure. Paul's gospel was eschatological not because of what he still hoped would happen as Jews do but because of what he believed had already happened. The old and new ages overlapped the old present aeon extends from Adam until the age to come and during this time death sin and suffering remain undeniable realities. The new future aeon is no longer entirely consigned to the future but has had its beginning in Christ in such a definitive way that the future reality of judgment is guaranteed. The resulting overlap is the time in between that is it defines life in Christ and extends from Christ the Christ event until the eschatological judgment that inaugurates the creation of a new cosmos. Dunn's understanding of the way Jewish apocalyptic influenced and was modified by Paul exemplifies what for all their emphases, different emphases is true for other interpreters we can consider here. Taken as the point of departure his conviction about God's defining act in the death and resurrection of Jesus the apostle is considered to have radically modified the notion of two successive ages. This modification represents not only Paul's particular contribution to early theologies that were emerging amongst followers of Jesus but is also an innovation that is specifically Christian and by implication is unimaginable for second temple Jewish apocalyptic tradition. The point to evaluate here is not to determine which of the construals be it Kazimans, Martins or even Dunn's is the more probable way to take Paul's thought into account. Instead what I'm thinking here and this has implications for how we work through the question of evil is to reflect on whether or not a myopic focus on Pauline theology to the exclusion of other theological traditions related traditions in the Jewish matrix has resulted in a reductionistic reading of what some Jewish writers could articulate about the impact of God's past activity in creation on space and time of the present age as well as on the imminent yet essentially different age to come. If we recognize the obvious specificity surrounding claims amount about the significance of the Christ event would one be correct to infer that Jewish tradition could not have envisaged definitive activity by God against evil in the past on the part of Israel's yeah on that at the same time functions as a guarantee of divine triumph in the future. So models of eschatology in Second Temple apocalyptic thought so thus far I've indulged in using the term apocalyptic really casually. It is in part largely due to the frequently in precise application of the word by New Testament scholars that we've reviewed and I fall into that trap and I think any one of us who struggle with this honestly probably fall into the trap too and but we need to be aware that we're doing that and much of our task is a struggle for language is it not. It is impossible within the space here then to sketch in detail how problematic this expression has been for those attempting to offer a definition not only in relation to the purported literary genre called apocalypse but also with regard to the adjective apocalyptic itself and you notice I've also used that as a noun mostly because of the German background a very brief overview though can help us locate just where the problem lies with simplistic paradigms such as the two ages scheme mentioned attributed Jewish traditions that were both antecedent and contemporary to the first century so I think some of the scholars who hold a default position that we must work with a doctrine of two ages or of successive ages I don't need to mention them but I think I should probably throw out a few more names D'Bor is a very good example of that though he has represented the Martin School rather well and I think has emerged as one of the more influential voices from that perspective Douglas Campbell in a very different way we might want to discuss that at some point we don't have the luxury of doing that here and someone like Beverly Gaventa in yet a very different way and I think these positions suffer they suffer less for what they're trying to do with Paul oddly there are certainly big nuances there in the reading of Paul but they suffer for what they imply about what they imply about Jewish tradition reductionistically perceived so scholarship though has of course shortcomings of a one-dimensional future orientation of Jewish apocalyptic thought especially since the earliest recoverable apocalypses seem just as interested in a spatial understanding of the world made possible through revealed knowledge and in the disclosure of esoteric wisdom as in the anticipated transformation of the present into a future cosmos along the lines of esoteric revelation the advent of Jesus including the death his death could make certain sense for Paul while the sapiential and we've had a reference to that by Dr. Wold earlier this afternoon and cosmological dimensions of apocalyptic thought have enriched the way some have reflected theologically on the significance and impact of the Christ event but the temporal framework within Jewish tradition has not received adequate attention it has been we all know that this is the way they thought eschatology that's where it's at that's where God is going to finally do something now what do we do with that now that we have reified it as something to contrast what we find in New Testament writings with but it needs more attention in the context of Paul in relation to what Paul and theologies have assumed about it beyond contrasting present and future reality some writers of apocalyptic texts demonstrated a concern with divine activity as a constant that shaped the unfolding story of Israel as a way of understanding and posing questions about the present furthermore an influential way of understanding the temporal situation of apocalyptic thought has been the correspondence and we all know this found in some of the writings between Udzite and Endzite a framework construed as a means to reinforce eschatology here various moments out of the primordial past preserved as a repository of images, symbols and motifs that helped apocalyptic writers to imagine the future paradisical existence once lost and will be restored a messianic white bull concludes a story that began with an Adamic white bull so the animal apocalypse one Enoch eschatological judgment draws on imagery from the great flood number of texts and Noah's rescue prefigures the salvation of God's people at the end of history a basis for reconfiguring for a reconfiguring of primordial images however all that the sacred past has to offer and here is where I go into new space and so within the framework of temporality there is another emphasis that has been neglected not only by New Testament scholars but also by specialists in ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature so when I talk about this with our Jewish colleagues they recognize that this is the case but also defaulted into a rabbinic paradigm of a doctrine of the two ages that is then overlaid onto their reading of second temple texts in addition to helping to describe deteriorating conditions in the world and how the God of Israel will inaugurate a new age language about the utsait also functioned to provide a basis for being confident about such an outcome God's definitive activity is not only a matter for the future rather it is God's invasive presence to defeat evil in the past that is for example at the time of the great flood it may sound remote but to talk about the flood in some of these texts is also in the same breath to think about the present and that's the point of it defeat of evil in the past but that guarantees its annihilation in the future so I'm not talking about realized eschatology it's a kind of inaugurated eschatology to borrow Grant's term that guarantees that the future that is a hope is already at work as is well known the Nephilim and mighty men Genesis 6.4 were interpreted in several influential Jewish apocalyptic works as giant sized offspring of disobedient angels and daughters of humanity whose destructive activities led to a crisis in which God intervened to destroy their bodies, punish the angels and ensure the survival of humans who are integral, not the giants but the humans who are integral to the created order those texts were not simply the sacred past they conveyed to Jews from the third century until the beginning of the common era an assurance that evil however rampant and overwhelming it may be in the present age is but a defeated power whose time is marked divine victory in the sacred past could even be understood as an expression of God's royal power so in 1 Enoch 84 Book of Giants 2 the angels address of God as the king of kings in 1 Enoch 9 the curious lament that functions as a petition since God's rule has asserted itself in the cosmos on a global scale the present era is represented as a time when those who are pious can proceed with some confidence in dealing with the effects of demonic power knowing that although it cannot be rid of altogether before the ultimate end of things it is nevertheless possible to address to curtail or to manage its effects this understanding of sacred past and imminent future was not simply a matter of charting how time works it was a way of defining what it meant to be God's people in the present and it could manifest itself in terms of a theological anthropology that negotiated the relentless uncertainties of life with the certainty of victory under the covenant in its influential retelling of the story from the creation until the Israelites freedom from their slavery time of slavery in Egypt the book of Jubilees composed during the middle of the second century BCE describes the condition of humankind after their rescue from the great flood here so Jubilees chapter 5 verse 12 God is said to have given human beings a new and righteous nature interesting God created for them a new and righteous nature in order that with their whole being they will never sin again and be able to live righteously the remaining narrative of the book confirms time and again that sinning amongst Jews does take place after this new nature because of evil continue to be effective amongst God's people isn't that just the way it is how different is it from Paul this great Christ event but what happens evil persists however both this new nature and the defeated condition of demonic powers so Jubilees chapter 10 continue to be manifest in the story they anticipate the final result the destruction of all evil and with it the fulfillment of God's original design for those who are amongst the elect the already of evil's defeat and not yet of its manifest destruction was an existing framework that Paul could take for granted though the overlap between the present and future age is occasioned for Paul by a recent breakthrough in history we would not be mistaken to think that there were pious Jews who understood themselves as living in an eschatological tension inspired by confidence of concrete moments of divine activity in the sacred past some of it in the recent past even the war scroll we had a nice lecture about that addressed the war scroll even there column 14 refers to the getting rid of spirits in the more recent past of the community they don't have to go simply to the remote past and then work from there to imagine that God will win this eschatological battle in the future there is something in the present that their look to the past does for them that establishes a confidence in such an outcome it is simply misleading if not wrong to infer with several Paulian scholars the curiosity is merely the domain of early adherence of Jesus not least Paul one storyline that guaranteed the establishment of God's eschatological rule in the cosmos where near the end is discernible of course is traceable to the time of the great flood as I have already said and in references we see this to the bastard spirits in the Dead Sea Materials these Mumsarine spirits that were thought to have emanated from the giants whose physical bodies have been destroyed during the time or before the time of the flood are powers of the present age that are described in the songs of the masquile Ben you worked on these the text that is significant here is as follows a time of the dominion of wickedness and in the eras of humiliation of the sons of light in the guilt of the times of those plagued by iniquities not for an eternal destruction but for the era of humiliation of transgression this era of the humiliation of transgression and this dominion of wickedness stand in tension with one another they're overlapping it isn't as though one is expected to follow the other this defeat of them and yet their persistence stand together in the document it is by declaring the splendor of God's radiance and in the acclamation of God's power that the activities of a catalogue of malevolent forces can be curbed the masquile's decoration about God told in the third person are presumed to be sufficiently potent to diminish or counteract demonic powers that are at work in the present order of things although the text does not furnish a prayer for divine protection against these demons it does work within a framework that holds these two concurrent things in tension first the existence of a community of those who are unambiguously righteous and upright and second the characterization of the present age as a time of dominion of wickedness it's not far from Galatians 1 and 4 perhaps the masquile's song about God addressed to those whom the writer considers to be righteous functions as an expedient an expedient measure that neutralizes threats associated with demonic powers until the present age of wickedness is brought to an end this is of course not the only way powers in the present age can be dealt with and here we come back to Yuta's lecture in some of the more explicitly community orientated and yahad texts curses are pronounced again against a chief angel against Belia'al in other words the chief power is cursed not exercised the pronouncements against Belia'al and his lot bring together and merge several evolving features that in their specificity are partly lost yet whose conceptual framework is preserved within a new form the eschatological framework found in earlier inocic pronouncements of doom against the fallen angels and hymns of protection is retained in the community's treatment of a chief figure at the top in this serah yahad curses against Belia'al adapt language from the ironic blessing as we heard and should be understood in relation to the larger context of covenant blessings and curses found in Deuteronomy if we may read the liturgy near the beginning of 1QS in tandem with the hymn at the end the way of dealing with Belia'al in the community's present communion in the presence with the sons of heaven already in the council of the flesh God has granted them a participation in an internal possession traditions that are pivotal in receiving inoc tradition and paving the way for the yahad way of dealing with Belia'al may be seen not only in the songs of the maskeel but also in jubilees the book of jubilees presents demonic activity under the leadership of Mastema as an inevitable characteristic of this age until the final judgment thus in jubilees not only do angels reveal remedies to Noah for the warding off for neutralizing of effects of evil spirits but also the patriarchs Moses, Noah and Abraham are made to utter prayers of deliverance against them there is no formal denunciation or curse against any of these malevolent powers that frames and takes its place amongst these means of guiding Jewish communities along the paths of faithful obedience in anticipation of the end whose outcome is already known the present is shaped by both an eschatological past and a future that loops back as an inclusio to bring God's activity in history to its proper end the thing to get from these Jewish texts is that there is no flight attempt to escape the reality of suffering at all absolutely no and when we look to even what is presented about Jesus in the gospels and even to Paul there really is no escape either from from suffering it's not really that Christology does it better it's that Christology provides a a different way of dealing with and negotiating with the same kinds of persistent problems that can be more fruitfully compared with the ways Jewish tradition proposes in a number of texts that these same problems can be dealt with as well evil is never destroyed not even when Jesus exercises demons it is simply relocated in sketching briefly the eschatological tension discernible amongst some dead sea and related literature as they have to do with malevolent powers we've not only come upon traditions that I think can be simplistically said to have influenced Paul directly I don't think we're talking about influence here we're talking more constructively about what it means for a conversation between these texts to take place to say did it influence Paul or Jesus or not is a convenient question that avoids perhaps the real issue however we do have to do with traditions that run counter to the impression that a number of New Testament theologians and all their enthusiasm to recover the singularity of early Christian tradition leave us to infer about the inadequacy of Jewish apocalyptic in perspective significantly demonic powers however conceived are not thought to be destroyed so much as they can be managed by pious Jews who already could understand themselves as living in a time between God's proleptic establishment of control over evil and the effective defeat of it at the end to be sure the Christ event and perhaps even claims made by Jesus were as any claims that arose in particular context a novum but they were a novum that in terms of religious history but were they a novum in terms of religious history that broke through to an understanding of time that had not previously existed in Jewish tradition or had no real continuity with it so what I've attempted to describe here suggests that the notion of God's control into the present world order whether as a message of Jesus himself if one understands Jesus in this way or one by Paul in relation to Jesus significance was not a flight from Jewish apocalyptic tradition it was rooted less in an attempt to correct a Jewish apocalyptic idea of a Jew of the two ages for Paul then it was indebted to the theological known to and experienced by pious Jews as they negotiated convictions about the past with their expectations of the future the corollary to this is the conviction that evil will certainly be destroyed and that in light of such a hope means are given to negotiate curtail or to put its effects into perspective thank you that's all thank you so much I can only look at the Bay of Weathering works from solution to flight or flight to solution and so if you ask this question regarding the Christ of them which is in the background of what you're discussing do we describe from a scholarly perspective is Jesus a Jewish answer to a Jewish question a Christian answer to a Jewish question a Christian answer to a Christian question the reason I ask this is because if it is if Paul works from solution to flight it is his confession of Christ that creates the problem so how so much is riding on getting the language on this right how would you say Jesus is a Jesus answer to a Jesus question how would you put that there that's such a wonderful question and a very very good way of putting it I think what the implication of my thoughts today is if I were to slot in to one of those I would want to say that in terms of perspective it is a Jewish answer to a Jewish question in terms of content it is a Jewish Christian answer to a Jewish question and anachronistically thinking back it very easily slides over into being a Christian solution that is better than any solution that Jewish tradition could come up with so there are I think I'm more interested I'm less interested in the obvious that okay we have to do with a man, a Jew who in recent times so Paul and so forth was crucified and raised from the dead and that this is different we all know that's different and my colleagues who are Jewish I'm sorry who are appalling Christology and so forth my interest here is really in function what do the texts of the New Testament actually do for those who for whom they are written and for those who are writing them based as they are on convictions about Christology in relation to Jesus and to what extent for their audiences differ or can be comparable to what other texts in non-Christian Jewish tradition did for those who presumably received them and here there are probably differences but I wouldn't want to be and I wouldn't want to just meld it all together into one but here I think a level of comparability emerges that has largely been neglected very Jewish but it is and Judaism has all these qualifications of its diversity and it still has to be fixed and these kind of forms to save Paul just something radical in relation to Judaism you could say this in a forest or a forest or something radical in Judaism I'm wondering we might start trying to frame this question differently sometimes not simply to have to make Christianity energy data why not think about as you were touching it I think how these texts negotiate with the human nature like death, suffering, evil it doesn't have to be constructed in terms of this effect of all of the same as these are the texts dealing with these texts called racial you're right you're absolutely right here and I think that much of the language I adopt in the second half that talk about Judaism and even about Christianity is potentially misleading precisely because of the focus here on function and I think that's right on thank you for that comment Chris or I'm sorry yes that's seen as a guarantee that God will do it again yes that is important I do not there are in let's say the Passover Haggadah there are certainly illusions to what is ultimately hoped will be I'm looking more specifically for language that will twin what happened in the past as at that point guaranteeing what is to come not for the narrative to go from the past and eventually end up in the future you know because I'm interested maybe others are too in what that particular event signifies and implicitly certainly the celebration of these the festivals are a way of inculcating and I mean ritualizing in a very positive sense this and embodying these events in the present what we should not do is think okay there are the Jewish apocalyptus or whatever you know they are and then there are those who observe the festivals these are blended together and if we think of Jubilees in particular in a way where to imagine a world in which the celebration of God's redemptive acts in history goes hand in glove with the defeat of evil and all that entails without pretending that evil is going to disappear I think largely yes I think largely yes and you know a lot of these categories and distinctions and whatever dissipate they shouldn't dissipate all together I'm not trying to relativize any of these categories they have meaning but they dissipate when our point of departure is not Christian versus Jewish tradition but the human condition and that is scary because then we're starting to think about people outside these religions as well but if this is the point of departure then we have a basis on which to talk and to ask how do our respective religious traditions help us put the problems that we all face despite whatever it is that we believe in the perspective yes and relocate this confusion within your zone to be the same fate going into the sea just like often but so I'm with you on that but then part of my reason we got the market that the kingdom of God is at hand and it's already not yet but it's like it must be because it starts slowly and civically and then because it's all for basic purpose and so I'm wondering if part of Marx's agenda in Hellenistic religious is that it does start with sort of a relocation of evil but then ultimately Mark wishes that the cross yeah it's an interesting question how does the ministry of Jesus as it is presented in relation to evil recast itself or is it taken up in relation to let's say the gospel about Jesus and really I see very little difference in the pattern in the death and resurrection of Jesus okay right you know there we have something but does it get rid of evil no it doesn't it defeats it so the claim but it doesn't go away just a quick footnote on Mark 5 and Matthew we read Mark 5 closely in the Greek as I see it anyway I think the spirits are not destroyed in the water but if we compare it to Matthew the spirits are destroyed in the waters which is interesting Mark I mean sorry Matthew's if he's using Mark he's wanting to up it I don't think there is any other tradition in the gospels that would have the spirits actually destroyed Dieter the function of the perception of those true thought on the extent to which the spoken perception of function what I mean by that is placed so centrally everything's going out the focus is so explicitly there and you're comparing the function of something that's so focused with the function of texts that have maybe a much broader bigger background to creation to various things that just that focus is part of this perception that something different from you is happening because in that way focus is a perfecting perception yes so let's just use these terms glibly in Christian tradition the focus on this one particular event as coming out is that therefore raises the stakes on what is it is expected to do whereas the recitation the presentation of prayers of patriarchs not simply for themselves but for their progeny we at Moses Noah and Abraham audiences knew that they were prayed for by these patriarchs that's what those texts actually do for them they're not just praying for themselves they're more dissipated I think that's what I'm hearing you're saying and yes but we shouldn't I mean yes that's very true but we shouldn't maybe one way of explaining why there's so much hype in the early Christian tradition that seems to return time and again to this one big event but obviously in Jewish tradition in many of these texts it's about storyline and it's about what people do in the context of being God's people and what people do is to see themselves in continuity with a story but it is much more open-ended in a sense but there are aspects of this that need to be worked out more and actually more carefully that's very helpful good question I don't know that I can really address that here adequately I think one thing I do want to say is that some texts actually perform a function are meant to are intended to do something for their readers while others on the basis of the storylines while others are they refer to storylines in order to find paradigms that can be emulated at a later period now they do something for the readers and audiences but they do so in a different way so the watchers for instance very often are looked at as oh, don't be like them you can see what happened to them look at 2nd Peter and so forth and Jubilees does it halfway also but there are other traditions about the watchers that not only simply say don't be like them but you know it happened to them and it happened to them because God has already defeated evil and the world you live in is one in which you know, these powers are already somehow under God's control which is saying something a little bit further Daniel I think works in both these ways I'm not sure about 4th Maccabees but that's really helpful to mention 4th Maccabees at this stage, thank you good, thank you