Over the past three days I have attempted to show that Jesus’ kingdom announcement, when grasped in historical context, leads to certain radical political conclusions. The New Testament witness, I have argued, is in fact highly subversive of political authority

Centuries before Jesus’ birth, Jewish apocalyptic writers, struggling to understand the theological meaning of Israel’s exile in Babylon, concluded with paradoxical audacity that pagan oppression was the result not of YHWH’s weakness but of his actual justice and strength: Israel was being punished by the Creator God for its failure to keep the covenant. Things would grow progressively worse, Jewish eschatology predicted, until a final, decisive moment when God would at last send a warrior-prince to restore his Chosen People to their rightful place among the nations.

In his novel The Last Temptation of Christ , Nikos Kazantzakis imagines a Jesus whose greatest temptation is to get married

Many Christians throughout history have tried to separate the Gospel as a matter of spiritual truth from the realm of earthly politics, yet there is little in what Christ said and did that does not have profound political implications for his followers. The more we understand about the world of first-century Judaism and the brutal realities of Roman imperialism, the more clear it becomes, in fact, that the New Testament was written as a subversive alternative political grammar for God’s people.