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The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity
Presents what is known about the actual life of Jesus, and traces the progress of the Church's interpretation of his life and work
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 21, 2014
I took Heidegger courses from Tom Sheehan and another, more internationally famous, professor at Loyola University Chicago back in the eighties. Heidegger seems complicated. The famous European professor made him, if anything, more obscure. Sheehan confirmed my suspicion that behind the translations and Heidegger's own neologistic excesses was some sense--though not very original except in its means of expression--and some meaningful reference to Western tradition.
The First Coming is a recapitulation of some important commonplaces of biblical scholarship and of Church history. "Commonplaces" to anyone schooled in either academic discipline, but, sadly, not common knowledge to the average Christian.
I found nothing new here, but did find the effort of reading it a good review of the things I'd learned as a Religious Studies major in college and a seminarian later on. Sheehan writes well, covers the field concisely and competently. Someone unschooled in the history of Christianity might find this book a startling revelation. Indeed, when published while Sheehan still taught at Loyola University, the Jesuit "University of the Midwest", some were, amazingly, scandalized.
Sheehan's at Stanford now. Loyola's loss . . .
The First Coming is a recapitulation of some important commonplaces of biblical scholarship and of Church history. "Commonplaces" to anyone schooled in either academic discipline, but, sadly, not common knowledge to the average Christian.
I found nothing new here, but did find the effort of reading it a good review of the things I'd learned as a Religious Studies major in college and a seminarian later on. Sheehan writes well, covers the field concisely and competently. Someone unschooled in the history of Christianity might find this book a startling revelation. Indeed, when published while Sheehan still taught at Loyola University, the Jesuit "University of the Midwest", some were, amazingly, scandalized.
Sheehan's at Stanford now. Loyola's loss . . .
April 4, 2012
An excellent re-examination of Jesus separating the actual words and intent of his preaching from the supernatural myths, the things falsely atttibuted to him, and the misguided ideology of the religion that took his name. Sheehan makes clear that Yeshua (his actual name) was an actual person who had a conventional birth, brothers and sisters, preached a message of mercy and forgiveness and was executed on a cross for that. If one can read other parts of the Bible as metaphorical myths (such as a man living inside a whale) then why not apply that same standard to Jesus? If one reads the accounts of his life in the actual order they were written, starting with Paul's letters about 20 years after his death and ending with John 50 years later, one can see the embellishments and hype being added to the story. More importantly, perhaps, is that while Jesus delivered a message of God's domain being already present through justice and mercy, the Church sought to push all of that back into the future in the afterlife and second coming through the myth of a physical, rather than metaphoric, resurrection. Jesus stressed that his message, and living it in the present, was the most important thing and that is what required resurrection. By demanding that his physical body came back to Earth, and will again in an apocalyptic moment, his supposed followers have entirely missed the point.
January 7, 2012
Sheehan has summarized the development of Christianity from the life and death of Jesus, through the visions of Peter and the early disciples and the revisions of the church as it grew from Aramaic speaking Jewishh Christians to Greek speaking Jewish Christians to Hellenistic Gentile converts to Christianity. He has shown how the church began with a concept of Jesus as the Son of Man who would judge the world at the end of time. The delay of the Second Coming forced Greek speaking Jewish Christians to give the a current role to Jesus as Lord and Christ, beginning at the resurrection for Paul. Twenty years later, Mark moved the identification of Jesus as the Son of God back to the time of his baptism. Fifteen years later, Matthew and Luke proclaimed that Jesus was the Son of God from the time of conception. Greek speaking gentile converts concluded that Jesus was pre-existent before creation as described in the Gospel of John and Paul's letter to the Philippians. All of these interpretations of Jesus miss the point of his message (according to Sheehan), that God is with us and grace has always been everywhere. The required response to the presence of God is mercy towards one's neighbors.
May 22, 2015
"The First Coming – How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity", is a very disturbing book.When I first read it,over 25 years ago, my impression was that the author put in doubt the foundations of Christianity. Even nowadays, I believe many Christians will feel confused and maybe even a little outraged with reading this book, specially those who adopt a literal interpretation of the Bible. I think a single phrase can summarize Sheehans main idea: what we know today as Christianity is just one of the possible interpretations of Jesus teachings (and not even the best). Interesting and thought-provoking if you are open minded about religion.
July 20, 2012
I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, but found this book very interesting and enlightening. It is written by a Stanford theology professor, but is very accessible.
August 8, 2024
A PROPOSAL FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD “WITHOUT CHRIST OR JESUS”
Thomas Sheehan (born 1941) is an American philosopher who is current professor Stanford University and Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago. He wrote in the Introduction to this 1986 book, “The gap that contemporary exegetes have confirmed between the historical evidence about Jesus and the claims of faith about him … offers believers and nonbelievers alike an opportunity to reevaluate Christianity at its roots… in order to discover what Christianity intends to be about… and to ask what kind of future lies ahead for it. The present book is that kind of investigation… I adopt the viewpoint of the historian, not that of the believer… My purpose is to bring the findings of modern historical and biblical research to bear on three questions… PART ONE: What Jesus preached about the kingdom of God. PART TWO: How belief in his resurrection evolved. PART THREE: How the earliest christologies developed in the first half century after Jesus’ death.” (Pg. 8-9)
Later, he adds, “my purpose is to surpass rather than to repeat the mainline Christian interpretation of Jesus, both in its traditional and in its more modern ‘liberal form. In appropriating and Expropriating the best of modern liberal exegesis of the New Testament, my goal is to contribute to the shaping of a postmodern and postliberal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus.” (Pg. 26-27)
He outlines, “in Jesus’ message the offer was the presence of the Father, and the required response was mercy toward one’s neighbor. These phrases may sound like tired slogans, and perhaps they are. But they contain the revolution that Jesus unleashed within Judaism: a radically different personal eschatology that was fulfilled in a new interpersonal ethic… The hear of Jesus’ message is summarized in the strikingly simple name with which he addressed the divine: ‘Abba,’ the Aramaic word for ‘papa’… This familial usage… was a shock to the then current idea of God… Jesus signaled that God was immediately and intimately present, not as a harsh judge but as a loving and generous father. His presence was a pure and unearned gift, and one could relate to him without fear.” (Pg. 59)
Later, he adds, “This mutuality---eschatology as the ground of ethics, and ethics as the realization of eschatology---is what made Jesus’ moral demands so radical. Those who accepted God’s kingdom by doing God’s will in the world already had as a gift what pious believers tried to earn through observance of the Law. Charity fulfills the Law---not because it MAKES God become present, but because it IS his presence. And when God arrives on the scene, Jesus seemed to say, all go-betweens, including religion itself, are shattered. Who needs them? The Father is here!” (Pg. 63) He continues, “His role was simply to end religion---the temporary governess who had turned into a tyrant---and restore the sense of immediacy of God.” (Pg. 68)
He suggests, “before he died, Jesus may have had intimations of being the long-awaited ‘eschatological prophet,’ God’s definitive mouthpiece who was to arrive just before the coming of God himself… [Jesus] certainly conceived his ministry in eschatological terms. But never did he actually declare himself to be the eschatological prophet. Nonetheless… given the authority with which he acted and taught, it is very likely that even during Jesus’ lifetime his disciples thought he was the final prophet. Jesus enhanced that expectation when… he triumphantly entered the city to the acclaim of the people and… drove the sellers and money changers from the Temple precinct.” (Pg. 82)
He explains, “The gospel stories about Easter are not historical accounts but religious myths. I say this not out of disrespect for Christian faith … Rather, I mean to indicate the general literary form of the Easter accounts. They are myths and legends; and it is absurd to take them literally and to create a chronology of preternatural events that supposedly occurred… during the weeks after Jesus had died. My purpose here is not to undo the meaning of Easter but precisely to reconstruct it by interpreting the myths that have been used to express that meaning.” (Pg. 97-98)
He comments on 1 Corinthians 15, “The text… does not tell us how Jesus manifested himself after his death… The text does not assert that Jesus appeared in any kind of body… that the disciples could see and touch, nor does it say that Jesus spoke to the disciples. In fact... it would be more accurate to speak not of ‘appearances’ of Jesus but more neutrally of eschatological ‘manifestations’ or ‘revelations.’” (Pg. 117)
He asserts, “This first step toward founding Christianity was a retreat from Jesus’ original message. It reinserted his TRANS-apocalyptic preaching into the apocalyptic expectations of the age… After Jesus’ death Simon… reified the future, sent it up ahead again in time, and identified that future with the Jesus who he believed was soon to return. The prophet’s message of urgency and immediacy… fell back into an apocalyptic eschatology, the awaiting of a future kingdom. Christianity is built on that mistake.” (Pg. 126)
He suggests, “However, even though all the gospel accounts of the first Easter morning are legends, some recalcitrant historical factors still push through the surface of those narratives. First, the women… Could this fact reflect an accurate historical recollection of at least one person who came to the tomb on the first Easter morning? Second, the tomb. The existence of the pre-Marcan account… would seem to argue that the Jerusalem community claimed to know the location of Jesus’ tomb… Finally, the date. It was the custom in Palestinian Judaism to visit the graves of relative … for some time after burial … Some scholars believe this mourning reached its height on the third day… A visit to the tomb … would correspond to contemporary custom and thus may reflect a historical fact. It is possible, therefore, that the Easter story preserves a historical memory of at least the ‘who,’ the ‘where,’ and the ‘when’ of an original event.” (Pg. 148-149)
He summarizes, “I take the gospel TEXT seriously---but AS a text, a work of religious literature and not a document of history… I recognize that Christian faith… is based on something that is independent of an individual’s subjective psychological states. I maintain, however, that this ‘something’ is not that Jesus is alive with God… the resurrection texts are… about the end---the fulfillment … of both Jesus and Christianity… the Easter legends are not about the ‘resurrection’… they proclaim the fundamental datum of faith to be the absolute absence of Jesus; and … they show the futility of searching for Jesus at all.” (Pg. 165-166)
Later, he adds, “after the crucifixion the disciples came to believe that, by God’s initiative, the kingdom Jesus had preached … was still dawning and in fact was soon to arrive in its fulness… the disciples were convinced that the Father had ratified the ‘word’ of his prophet… first and above all HOW JESUS HAD LIVED.” (Pg. 189) He concludes, “Within a few short decades of his death, the man who had heralded the end of all religion had been transformed into the divine guarantor of the one, true, and universal religion.” (Pg. 218)
He proposes, “even the traditionally orthodox interpretation … which we call Christianity, is a much a heresy as is any ‘heretical’ interpretation, including the one in this book… The reinterpretation that I propose---recovering the kingdom without Christ or Jesus---entails taking the prophet AT his word and AS his word. (1) To hear Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God ‘without Christ’… faith---that is, living the present-future---means maintaining the undecidability of what is human and what is divine… (2) … Taking Jesus AS his word means understanding that he is what everyone else is: a finite, fallible, mortal act of interpretation… Recovering the kingdom ‘without Jesus’… would mean getting to what Jesus WAS: a hermeneut, a heretic, that is, a human being. The point … is to recover oneself as the place of the mystery of the present-future, and thus as one called to enact liberation.” (Pg. 223-226)
This book will be of keen interest to those looking for contemporary/progressive interpretations of Jesus and Christianity.
Thomas Sheehan (born 1941) is an American philosopher who is current professor Stanford University and Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago. He wrote in the Introduction to this 1986 book, “The gap that contemporary exegetes have confirmed between the historical evidence about Jesus and the claims of faith about him … offers believers and nonbelievers alike an opportunity to reevaluate Christianity at its roots… in order to discover what Christianity intends to be about… and to ask what kind of future lies ahead for it. The present book is that kind of investigation… I adopt the viewpoint of the historian, not that of the believer… My purpose is to bring the findings of modern historical and biblical research to bear on three questions… PART ONE: What Jesus preached about the kingdom of God. PART TWO: How belief in his resurrection evolved. PART THREE: How the earliest christologies developed in the first half century after Jesus’ death.” (Pg. 8-9)
Later, he adds, “my purpose is to surpass rather than to repeat the mainline Christian interpretation of Jesus, both in its traditional and in its more modern ‘liberal form. In appropriating and Expropriating the best of modern liberal exegesis of the New Testament, my goal is to contribute to the shaping of a postmodern and postliberal interpretation of the meaning of Jesus.” (Pg. 26-27)
He outlines, “in Jesus’ message the offer was the presence of the Father, and the required response was mercy toward one’s neighbor. These phrases may sound like tired slogans, and perhaps they are. But they contain the revolution that Jesus unleashed within Judaism: a radically different personal eschatology that was fulfilled in a new interpersonal ethic… The hear of Jesus’ message is summarized in the strikingly simple name with which he addressed the divine: ‘Abba,’ the Aramaic word for ‘papa’… This familial usage… was a shock to the then current idea of God… Jesus signaled that God was immediately and intimately present, not as a harsh judge but as a loving and generous father. His presence was a pure and unearned gift, and one could relate to him without fear.” (Pg. 59)
Later, he adds, “This mutuality---eschatology as the ground of ethics, and ethics as the realization of eschatology---is what made Jesus’ moral demands so radical. Those who accepted God’s kingdom by doing God’s will in the world already had as a gift what pious believers tried to earn through observance of the Law. Charity fulfills the Law---not because it MAKES God become present, but because it IS his presence. And when God arrives on the scene, Jesus seemed to say, all go-betweens, including religion itself, are shattered. Who needs them? The Father is here!” (Pg. 63) He continues, “His role was simply to end religion---the temporary governess who had turned into a tyrant---and restore the sense of immediacy of God.” (Pg. 68)
He suggests, “before he died, Jesus may have had intimations of being the long-awaited ‘eschatological prophet,’ God’s definitive mouthpiece who was to arrive just before the coming of God himself… [Jesus] certainly conceived his ministry in eschatological terms. But never did he actually declare himself to be the eschatological prophet. Nonetheless… given the authority with which he acted and taught, it is very likely that even during Jesus’ lifetime his disciples thought he was the final prophet. Jesus enhanced that expectation when… he triumphantly entered the city to the acclaim of the people and… drove the sellers and money changers from the Temple precinct.” (Pg. 82)
He explains, “The gospel stories about Easter are not historical accounts but religious myths. I say this not out of disrespect for Christian faith … Rather, I mean to indicate the general literary form of the Easter accounts. They are myths and legends; and it is absurd to take them literally and to create a chronology of preternatural events that supposedly occurred… during the weeks after Jesus had died. My purpose here is not to undo the meaning of Easter but precisely to reconstruct it by interpreting the myths that have been used to express that meaning.” (Pg. 97-98)
He comments on 1 Corinthians 15, “The text… does not tell us how Jesus manifested himself after his death… The text does not assert that Jesus appeared in any kind of body… that the disciples could see and touch, nor does it say that Jesus spoke to the disciples. In fact... it would be more accurate to speak not of ‘appearances’ of Jesus but more neutrally of eschatological ‘manifestations’ or ‘revelations.’” (Pg. 117)
He asserts, “This first step toward founding Christianity was a retreat from Jesus’ original message. It reinserted his TRANS-apocalyptic preaching into the apocalyptic expectations of the age… After Jesus’ death Simon… reified the future, sent it up ahead again in time, and identified that future with the Jesus who he believed was soon to return. The prophet’s message of urgency and immediacy… fell back into an apocalyptic eschatology, the awaiting of a future kingdom. Christianity is built on that mistake.” (Pg. 126)
He suggests, “However, even though all the gospel accounts of the first Easter morning are legends, some recalcitrant historical factors still push through the surface of those narratives. First, the women… Could this fact reflect an accurate historical recollection of at least one person who came to the tomb on the first Easter morning? Second, the tomb. The existence of the pre-Marcan account… would seem to argue that the Jerusalem community claimed to know the location of Jesus’ tomb… Finally, the date. It was the custom in Palestinian Judaism to visit the graves of relative … for some time after burial … Some scholars believe this mourning reached its height on the third day… A visit to the tomb … would correspond to contemporary custom and thus may reflect a historical fact. It is possible, therefore, that the Easter story preserves a historical memory of at least the ‘who,’ the ‘where,’ and the ‘when’ of an original event.” (Pg. 148-149)
He summarizes, “I take the gospel TEXT seriously---but AS a text, a work of religious literature and not a document of history… I recognize that Christian faith… is based on something that is independent of an individual’s subjective psychological states. I maintain, however, that this ‘something’ is not that Jesus is alive with God… the resurrection texts are… about the end---the fulfillment … of both Jesus and Christianity… the Easter legends are not about the ‘resurrection’… they proclaim the fundamental datum of faith to be the absolute absence of Jesus; and … they show the futility of searching for Jesus at all.” (Pg. 165-166)
Later, he adds, “after the crucifixion the disciples came to believe that, by God’s initiative, the kingdom Jesus had preached … was still dawning and in fact was soon to arrive in its fulness… the disciples were convinced that the Father had ratified the ‘word’ of his prophet… first and above all HOW JESUS HAD LIVED.” (Pg. 189) He concludes, “Within a few short decades of his death, the man who had heralded the end of all religion had been transformed into the divine guarantor of the one, true, and universal religion.” (Pg. 218)
He proposes, “even the traditionally orthodox interpretation … which we call Christianity, is a much a heresy as is any ‘heretical’ interpretation, including the one in this book… The reinterpretation that I propose---recovering the kingdom without Christ or Jesus---entails taking the prophet AT his word and AS his word. (1) To hear Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God ‘without Christ’… faith---that is, living the present-future---means maintaining the undecidability of what is human and what is divine… (2) … Taking Jesus AS his word means understanding that he is what everyone else is: a finite, fallible, mortal act of interpretation… Recovering the kingdom ‘without Jesus’… would mean getting to what Jesus WAS: a hermeneut, a heretic, that is, a human being. The point … is to recover oneself as the place of the mystery of the present-future, and thus as one called to enact liberation.” (Pg. 223-226)
This book will be of keen interest to those looking for contemporary/progressive interpretations of Jesus and Christianity.
November 21, 2017
A transformation read that altered my perception of Christianity and religion as a whole. I read this book more than twenty years ago, and I intend to pick it up again.
August 2, 2012
An examination of historic theologian's thinking about what transpired from the life of Jesus to the Christian movement. A good summary of traditional thinking, easily read and presented in a good academic context. Excellent notes enhance and broaden understanding.
February 19, 2013
This is an Excellent book! Shows how Jesus's teachings were misinterpreted soon after he was gone. The gospels and the Christian religion are completely different than what Jesus taught! The Romans got hold of the message and twisted it around completely backwards from where it began.
April 30, 2009
This was the book that finally shattered my faith as a Christian :-) Suddenly I realized that I was living in a godless universe.
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January 3, 2010Religion
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