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The resurrection of the dead, the vindication of the righteous, the ingathering of the elect, the impending establishment of God’s kingdom: both Jesus and Paul, Schweitzer insisted, proclaimed that these end-time events would occur in their own day. But they did not. This fact has problematized Schweitzer’s intellectual legacy. Many New Testament scholars continue to deny, to redefine, or simply to ignore Second Temple apocalyptic eschatology as the generative context for and content of this first generation’s messianic convictions. In so doing, they produce ancient Jewish figures easily amenable to modern theologies. The historical interpretive plumb line for mid-first-century research runs through 1517.
Dale Allison, by contrast, has enhanced and refined Schweitzer’s insights. Their mutual insistence on apocalyptic eschatology, realistically conceived, places Jesus and Paul on a coherent continuum of prophetic conviction. It singularly explains how and why the early post-Easter movement sought, in various ways, to include ex-pagan gentiles within their spirit-filled assemblies. And finally, Christianity’s originary apocalyptic eschatology helps us as scholars to distinguish, as Allison has forthrightly done, between doing theology and doing history. Theology summons sacred texts to current faith communities: it thereby constructs sameness. History embeds sacred texts in their ancient past: it thereby respects difference. The goals of theology and of history are different; their ethical imperative, the same.