Isn’t the Gospel According to Matthew the one that spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate that this _is_ your fathers’ Kingdom of God? It’s the gospel that has all the references to the Old Testament showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecies.
Indeed it has. The distinction I’m making is between what many hearers and their forebears had anticipated — the heavenly army marching in, Messiah wielding his divine Excalibur and cleaving the power of Rome into fragments, Israel lording it over everyone — and what was really happening. I’m convinced there is a future for a national Israel (Abraham’s physical descendants), but what the first-century Israelis were expecting didn’t have anything to do with “poor in spirit,” mourning, or persecution. The Hebrew Scriptures’ kingdom of God, yes; that of the audience and its recent generations, no.
Isn’t the Gospel According to Matthew the one that spends a lot of time trying to demonstrate that this _is_ your fathers’ Kingdom of God? It’s the gospel that has all the references to the Old Testament showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecies.
Indeed it has. The distinction I’m making is between what many hearers and their forebears had anticipated — the heavenly army marching in, Messiah wielding his divine Excalibur and cleaving the power of Rome into fragments, Israel lording it over everyone — and what was really happening. I’m convinced there is a future for a national Israel (Abraham’s physical descendants), but what the first-century Israelis were expecting didn’t have anything to do with “poor in spirit,” mourning, or persecution. The Hebrew Scriptures’ kingdom of God, yes; that of the audience and its recent generations, no.