Coming Again

A Christography in Four Faces, Pars Octava

Continuatum a parte septima.

In his lifetime and immediately thereafter, Jesus stirred a variety of Jewish expectations about the eschaton. Those Jews who followed Jesus believed that he would bring the central subject of his preaching—the Kingdom of God—to pass during his lifetime; Jesus himself may also have believed so, at least at first, though he perhaps moderated his viewpoint as time continued in his ministry. He initially, for instance, says that the Son of Man will come while his ministry is still ongoing (Matt 10:23); it is only after the Petrine confession that Jesus begins to teach the disciples that the Son of Man (now more clearly himself) will have to be rejected, suffer, die, and be vindicated by resurrection (e.g., 16:21-23). In the aftermath of his death, his disciples minimally believed that they experienced him alive again from the dead (and maximally really did experience that, though history as a discipline is, again, insufficient to decide this), and proclaimed his resurrection as evidence of his messianic identity and lordship—all three of which ideas, resurrection, messiah, and lordship, communicated to their fellow Jews the idea that the eschaton was dawning. The Kingdom had not come during Jesus’ ministry, but it would now come quite soon, in the lifetime of his immediate followers, before at least the last of them saw death, in the aftermath of the Son of Man’s suffering and exaltation (16:28). Paul, our earliest writer of the Jesus Movement, clearly, actively, and repeatedly proclaims that Jesus is coming again quite soon to act as cosmic savior, judge, and eschatological king. The Synoptic Gospels of Mark and Matthew both make the suggestion that the Kingdom’s arrival is imminently tied to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, whether because Jesus had prophesied as much or, as many scholars now contend, because they inserted the prediction of the Temple’s destruction back into the mouth of Jesus as a vaticinium ex eventu. (Lector iudicet.) But towards the end of the first century, this imminent eschatology did not prove true, and the authors of the New Testament who spanned the last decades of the first century (and possibly the first two of the second) showcase a revision of their expectations. The Deutero-Paulines, as covered previously, embrace a realized eschaton, in which Christ’s ascension and session at the Father’s right hand has already accomplished the cosmic reconciliation and made possible the deification of Christ-followers, where such things await the future in the undisputed Paul (e.g., Col 1:15-20 and Eph 1:3-14 vs. 1 Cor 15:20-28). Luke-Acts delays the eschaton indefinitely, through a period of indeterminate “trampling” of Jerusalem by gentiles (Lk 21:24), until the gentile mission and the confession of Israel have taken place, unto “times and seasons” (chronoi kai kairoi) of currently unclear provenance, which the Lukan Jesus seeks to distract his disciples from focus on (Acts 1:11; 3:17-21). In John, while there is a mention or two of the Parousia (Jn 14:1-3; 21:22), but it is unclear exactly what Christ’s coming accomplishes that is not already available in Christ presently, in the eternal life Christ offers to the faithful. John seems to collapse the major apocalyptic moments into the life, ministry, and pascha of Christ.

From the late first century onward, then, imminent eschatologies coexisted with delayed or realized ones in the Jesus Movement. Expectations of intrahistorical divine activity, therefore, also coexisted with cosmicized visions of divine ascent. The Pauline and Johannine schools trended more in the direction of a Kingdom of God reached by postmortem cosmic ascent than one that would violently irrupt into the world in the manner of Paul, the Synoptics, or the Johannine Apocalypse (perhaps lending credence to the idea that the Apocalypse was written first and the Gospel later); second and third century Christian thinkers like Irenaeus and Origen increasingly opted for a Kingdom of God in heaven and heaven as the final destination of the faithful. True, Irenaeus retains a chiliastic expectation which Origen derides; but both espouse a gradualist eschatology in which the ultimate point is cosmic ascent from earth to heaven (see Adv. Haer. V.32.1; 33.1-2; 36.1-3 vs. De Princ. II.11).

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For Irenaeus, the terrestrial messianic kingdom promised by Jewish Scripture, the Apocalypse of John, and other first century apocalyptic texts like 2 Baruch is a form of cosmic pedagogy, preparing the saints for what life in the eternal state will be like. For Origen, death admits the saints to the school of Paradise, which is located on earth, but from which they ascend through the celestial spheres until, having encompassed total knowledge of the universe, they come face to face with God and are perfected in his knowledge and love through Christ the Teacher, enjoying the divine pleroma in the true heaven and earth that is either beyond the universe or at its pinnacle. Both of these eschatologies ultimately take the emphasis off of worldly fulfillment of biblical prophecies; Origen’s simply removes what seems to him awkward and vestigial about the kind of popular chiliasm represented by Irenaeus. And it is Origen who influenced subsequent eschatological schemes in, for example, Euesebius and Augustine, the former of whom conflates the earthly messianic kingdom with the Christianized Rome of Constantine, the latter of whom dispenses with a temporal messianic kingdom in favor of the present reign of Christ and the saints in heaven and through the Church on earth, paired with a future return of Christ which brings to a close the present spacetime world and opens on a new and eternal one.

Closely connected to these debates among early Christian thinkers were debates also about the timing of the resurrection and the character of its body. Those invested in an intrahistorically futuristic eschaton were typically also those more likely to embrace an interval of the soul’s disembodied existence between life and the resurrection of one’s actual flesh (sarx; caro) in the temporal future. Those, by contrast, looking forward to a cosmic ascent at or after death, held to a more originally Pauline and Johannine vision of resurrection as the metamorphosis of reconstituted, reanimated flesh into pure spirit (pneuma), capable of dwelling in the celestial regions with, alongside, among, and indeed as the angels.

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Where the historical Paul thought that this pneumatic resurrection was temporally future, coming at the parousia, increasingly the heirs of this sort of eschatology felt that there was no reason one could not progress towards this “eternal dwelling in the heavens” or the “mansions” in the Father’s house set aside for one immediately at death. In the theologies of the early martyr stories, the resurrection is even more immanent and imminent: the martyrs, in their very lives and deaths, are already resurrected and/or can ascend immediately to heaven as their resurrection. Broadly speaking, Irenaeus embraces the first sort of resurrection, Origen the second. Gregory Nyssen, in his De Anima et Resurrectione, splits the difference by returning to a more Pauline pneumatic, ethereal resurrection body, but one that awaits the temporally future consummation; yet like in both Irenaeus and Origen, the purpose of such a body is ceaseless cosmic ascent into the divine mystery, the epektasis. Ancient Christians never fully resolved these ambiguities and conflicts, even after the popularity of baptismal formulae like the Apostles’ Creed which confessed that Jesus is “coming again to judge the living and the dead” and that there will be a “resurrection of the flesh”; the Nicene Creed doubled down on the first idea, by adding in that Christ would reign forever with a Lukan reference, but softened the second, by instead speaking of the “resurrection of the dead.” This is how one both has a cult venerating the relics of saints, including their bones, and also another one venerating the saints as already alive and reigning with Christ in heaven in their human forms, capable of intervening in such on earth at present, in classical Christian traditions. Nor were Christians alone in puzzling through these issues. Rabbinic-era Jews cooled their messianic and eschatological beliefs and debated the character of the resurrected body along similar lines. Muslims, whose movement probably originated as a pan-Abrahamic prophetic revival focused on an imminent return of a messianic Jesus to inaugurate the End of Days, had to gradually adjust their eschatology (which is not uniform within or across various sectarian communities) and what they meant by resurrection (literal reconstitution of flesh? Spiritual or astral body? etc.).

As Christian history progressed, too, the context of what was expected in a future eschaton changed drastically. Originally, Jesus was a Jewish prophet leading a Jewish revival movement hoping for a pan-Jewish, pan-Israelite restoration in line with the Jewish Scriptures. Some of Jesus’ Jewish followers, like Paul and the authors of Mark, Matthew, and the Johannine Apocalypse, assumed that he would return in the later history of the first century to bring about their respective visions of the Kingdom. By the end of the second century, most of the people interested in Jesus and his prophecies were non-Jews, but many still understood the literal referents of Jesus’ prophecies—the land of Israel, the city of Jerusalem—as their promised inheritance (often, sadly, to the rhetorical exclusion of Jews). By the fourth century, many Christians were convinced that the converted empire was the kingdom they had awaited, and that the Christian Holy Land was indeed the land of Promise centered on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the heart of a New Jerusalem on earth. (This is, in fact, literally how fourth century and following Christians in Byzantine Palestine thought and spoke about the Christianized city.) Late antique apocalypticism, Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian, all commonly assumed that the end of the world would follow the successful unification of all the earth beneath a single ruler; this precedent is where early Islam took its ambitions. It was largely for this reason that chinks in the armor of Christendom so often suggested the imminence of the eschaton to Christian minds of the medieval period. When Islam appeared and conquered Byzantine Palestine, even so otherworldly an eschatological thinker as Maximos the Confessor used the language of Antichristic cataclysm signaling the Final Judgment in his private correspondence to Sophronios of Jerusalem, his friend, the first patriarch to meet the Muslims. Many Christians commonly assumed, too, that specific numerological dates could be discerned from Scripture about when the earthly messianic kingdom of the Christian Romans would be swept up by judgment into the eternal Kingdom of God. Late medieval and early modern Christians in East and West assumed that the main reasons the eschaton had not yet come were to do with the continuing existence of successors to Christian Rome and the as yet unfulfilled contours of the gentile mission and the universal reception of Jesus by all Israel; more contemporary Christians, of both premillennial (historic and Dispensationalist) and amillennial varieties, often comb the news for the possibility of prophetic goings-on in the affairs of modern nation-states, especially the reconstituted, modern, Zionist State of Israel. They, too, are not alone; modern Jews, even of very secular bent, often attribute profound messianic significance to the Israeli State and the Zionist project; more fundamentalist Jews in Israel and elsewhere meticulously plan for the coming of King Messiah and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on what is currently the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa (and not necessarily in that order).

Apocalypticism and eschatology are, then, fundamental aspects of Abrahamic religiosity historically, in various forms, and they are still very much alive and well today, still as influential on politics, economics, and society as they ever were. The question for modern Christians is how to make sense of this succession of eschatologies in premodern and modern Judaism and Christianity in a way that can rationally preserve some kind of meaning for the belief that Jesus is coming again as judge and king, as the Creed obliges them to believe.

It will help for that mission to get a lay of the land for the possible options: four terms, and four relevant theories in modern scholarship and theology. The four terms are familiar standbys for anyone that has attempted to grapple with the issues I have here described: preterism, whether full or partial; historicism; futurism; and symbolic readings. Preterism in its complete form holds that all biblical prophecies have been fulfilled, in its partial form, that some or most have while others or few have not; historicism, that biblical prophecy is fulfilled in the postbiblical lifetime of the Church (and the Jewish people); futurism, that all things predicted in biblical literature are still talking about the future from our historical position; symbolic reading, that biblical prophecy is best understood as allegory.

A brief word about these positions, which have been covered so thoroughly in the history of 20th and 21st century theology that I feel little need to add much: they are visibly not incompatible. It is perfectly possible to be a partial preterist, in which case it is also logically necessary to be a historicist, that is, to see the history of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and human societies beyond the first century as significant of a progressive revelation; and unless one wants to seriously hold that what we see before us is indeed the fulfillment of the age to come (which should cause even the most fideistic among us to scoff), this will require one also to hold some form of futurism. And it is also undeniable that prophecy and apocalypticism are, from their origins, closely tied to sapiential tradition, to philosophy, and that they have great import for psychology, where the fundamental images of the great apocalypses preexist as mythic archetypes, the imaginal stuff of visions, dreams, and waking fantasy that apocalypses are composed from. In this sense, these positions do not help us answer the fundamental question at hand, which is how a contemporary Christian ought to make sense of the succession of eschatologies not merely some decades after the lifetime of Jesus but over the course of two millennia. Can Christians today still hold on to hope that Jesus, in his personal, human form, is coming back? To do what, at this point?

Here I will name four theories for the scholars that posit them.

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The first I would name for Albert Schweitzer, Bart Ehrman, and Dale Allison, whose scholarship on the historical Jesus has clearly delineated him as an apocalyptic prophet and millenarian of the first century, and has, across the spectrum of faith and no-faith, also honestly and earnestly faced the fact that at least at the literal level of his prophecy Jesus was wrong. (The brilliant work of other scholars in this field, like Paula Fredriksen, tends to present original expansions of this basic thesis about Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.) The virtue of this position is that it does not require those who hold it to attempt to square the circle of why Jesus can say things like the Son of Man is coming during his lifetime and the Kingdom will come before his disciples are dead from a perspective some two thousand years later where history has not only progressed much the way it did before but in fact grown quite worse in some respects (as, for example, the nuclear crisis surrounding Ukraine evidences; our great-grandparents were the first people in history for whom “wars and rumors of wars” included the threat of nuclear annihilation). The problem of it is something that has sparked much of the wrestling of this series: how to continue to believe in Jesus as more than a sympathetic figure of history, a tragic hero or a loveable martyr for a first-century Jewish cause, however wrong he was and disappointed his hopes? Is it possible to do so? It is for this reason that I include Allison on this position, for as a person of faith—honest faith, wrestled with admirable intellectual sobriety—he demonstrates someone who at one and the same time has both squarely faced the problem with honest admission of its contours without abandoning Christianity (as Ehrman did, for reasons of theodicy, which are not far away from apocalypticism).

The next position—something of a response to the Schweitzer-Ehrman-Allison consensus—would be the Jesus of the “New Perspective” folks, at the dawn of the third quest for the historical Jesus: people like E.P. Sanders, James D.G. Dunn, and most famously N.T. Wright. The response of these scholars goes something like this: Jesus was not looking for a millenarian restoration of Israel; he used apocalyptic language to forecast his own glorification and the destruction of the Temple, both of which happened, meaning that there is no fundamental challenge to Christian faith to be had in the historical Jesus or in the delay of the parousia. There are numerous problems with this answer, but I will identify one strength: Sanders, Dunn, and Wright are correct that Jesus, like other apocalyptic prophets through history, made use of apocalyptic language at least in part to talk about the circumstances of his own political, economic, social, cultural, and religious world. Jesus did see himself in conflict, probably, with the priestly aristocracy that was the complicit partner of the Roman occupation in Judea, frequently at the expense of the common people. But where the “New Perspective” crowd fails, both in their reading of Jesus and in their reading of Paul, is the fundamental assumption which one can find throughout their work that Jesus (and Paul) intended to begin a new religion—Christianity—whose appearance constitutes the success of their prophetic efforts. This is, as most scholars recognize, apologetics disguising itself as history. Neither Jesus nor Paul self-present as anything other than Jews speaking to Jews and gentiles about Judaism, invested in Jewish hopes about the fate of the Jewish nation and how that fate will affect the rest of the world. And while the historical Jesus may have predicted the Temple’s destruction, and the authors of the Gospels may well have understood the Temple’s destruction as a major event in the prophetic viewpoint of Jesus, it is not the case that one can simply collapse their apocalyptic language into the event itself: they clearly think that this event is a catalyst for something cosmic and final, not the birth of a new religion.

A more respectable third position than the Sanders-Dunn-Wright eschatology would be that of Richard Horsley, who has challenged the idea that the historical Jesus primarily identified as an apocalyptic prophet or that apocalypticism existed for Jesus in the abstract from the politics of Judea in his lifetime. Horsley argues that Jesus utilized the language of apocalyptic prophecy to respond to very specific problems of political and economic exploitation that were afoot in Roman-ruled Judea during his lifetime and which stood at the heart of the increasing tensions between Jews, other Jews, and Romans throughout the first century. In this sense, Jesus would not for Horsley be a failed prophet: he will have used prophecy to do exactly what prophecy is meant to do, which is to be a language for representing God to the powerful on behalf of the oppressed. Horsley’s view is helpful in precisely the ways that the New Perspective’s synthesis is not: it places Jesus in his context rather than abstracts him from it. But it still has felt to most scholars a bit too neat and tidy to think that when, for example, Jesus speaks of the Son of Man coming with glory in the Gospels, he does not really mean that this will happen; we simply know too much about early Jewish apocalypticism to not read Jesus in that context as well.

What to do then? It seems unavoidable that Jesus, as a first-century Jew who (as Horsley argues) was in fact seeking to respond to specific developments in his society with (as Schweitzer, Ehrman, and Allison correctly argue) millenarian hopes for imminent eschatological renewal, predicted things that did not come to pass or at least did not come to pass in full, that his early followers repeatedly revised their expectations in light of the parousia’s delay, and that contemporary Christians stand therefore at the far end of a long chain of disappointed prophecy. There is a fourth option here, which I will call the Hays et al. hypothesis, represented in a relatively recent monograph edited by Christopher Hays, When the Son of Man Didn’t Come, and embracing specialists from numerous subfields in biblical studies and patristic theology. The argument of that volume goes something like this: a.) it is unavoidably the case that the historical Jesus and his earliest followers predicted things that did not come true: attempts to deny that are wrong-headed; b.) on one reading of ancient prophecy, overly influenced by Deuteronomy, this would indeed be problematic; but when one considers that c.) most ancient people took prophecy to be dynamic as well as prognosticative, d.) that the “Deuteronomic” model of prophecy applied to Jesus would also, when consistently applied to the Hebrew Prophets, undermine virtually all of the Latter Prophets for exactly the same reason of predicting things that have not yet come to pass, that e.) some things that Jesus or at least his early followers said would happen did happen (i.e., his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the Temple’s destruction, etc.), and that f.) an open, dynamic, non-deterministic future is compatible with a God who is eternal (beyond time) and simple (and therefore immutable), it becomes more plausible to assert that g.) the parousia’s delay is in fact divinely intended and perhaps in some way conditional either on human behavior or on whatever God sees as conducive to the best possible eschaton.

Of every attempt to deal with this problem that I have seen, the Hays argument strikes me as the most honest and useful. These authors acknowledge the findings of biblical studies about the historical Jesus and his eschatology as legitimate; they attempt to deal with that from a variety of methodological standpoints that at no point undermine the fundamental concession, and that touch on the philosophical dimension of God rather than remaining purely at the biblical level. It is also a good argument not least because an important corollary can be added to it: as Hays and his authors argue, following Early Christian writers, God delays the eschaton to ensure that the greatest number of people is saved, that everyone can repent as much as possible to ensure the best possible eschaton; but logically, the best possible eschaton is one where everyone is saved, such that God will not bring about the consummation until all creation consents. But the Hays hypothesis has, I think, two primary issues. The first is that it is unclear from Hays et al. why the Christian reading of Jesus, even as qualified by this argument, is still more fundamentally credible than other receptions of Jesus. Is it credible to hold that the Jews of Jesus’ day, the decades after, his followers, and the like really just had not merited the Kingdom? Or that generations of Jews, Christians, Muslims and others since have not? And why hold, with so many partial fulfillments, the Christian reading as better than its alternatives? The witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection were few and private, and history alone cannot determine the veracity of their experience; neither is the descent of the Spirit something that is easily quantified in terms that, in a situation of evangelism or apologetics, would be immune to critique. The idea that the historical Jesus predicted the Temple’s destruction is also, itself, disputed by scholars, and in any event, if the historical Jesus did predict this, what the Temple’s destruction means is a separate question: given that Jesus was not a Christian and did not intend to found a new, separate Christian religion, there is a case to be made that the historic Christian interpretation of the events of 70 is an aberration from what Jesus’ own would have been. Jewish receptions of Jesus, negative and positive, from the Bavli to Lapide, have at least as much immediate credibility as the proleptic Christian argument for a perennially delayed parousia.

The second problem with the Hays argument is that it presumes a singular eschatological expectation from Jesus through Christian history, continually delayed but not fundamentally transformed. As we saw above, and as I have had the chance to write about before, this is obviously not true: Christians, like Jews and Muslims, have modified their eschatology in response to history’s continuity despite their expectations otherwise. What Jesus longed to see and what Irenaeus, Origen, or Nyssen, following Jesus, longed to see, were different, all the more so at those points of overlap or inspiration. God apparently does not just have infinite possibilities for realizing the eschaton: he also seemingly has infinite possibilities for what kind of eschaton he might like to realize.

Do I have a better answer? Not necessarily. To speak plainly, I find the delay of the parousia the most serious challenge to my own Christian Faith. It is not at this point just that Jesus has missed the original deadlines he himself prescribed; it is that generations of his disciples have come and gone, while ages of world history have emerged and remerged just as always before. To proclaim Jesus as Davidic messiah (“Christ”) in 2022 is to proclaim him the heir of a throne that has been defunct for 2608 years, that has at this point been an idea far longer than it ever was a historical reality, that is not now pined for by most of his own people or most of his followers. And if Jesus were to return to judge and rule at some historically future point, just as first century Christians expected, what protects this event from the status of a cosmic banality? Why the year 2034 or 10,005 and not 30 CE? Why modern Israel, where avocados are grown in Megiddo (as Good Omens humorously pointed out), and not first century Judea? Or why Cleveland and not Jerusalem? Will Jesus wait out the destruction of the planet? The solar system? The galaxy? The observable universe? At what point is the messianic advent definitively no longer credible in the form we speak of it—and is it not the case that two millennia already, at least, problematizes the literal, original sense of that hope?

To be clear, when I say the Creed, I mean it: so I do confess to believe that Jesus is “coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” And I will not rule out that perhaps the intrahistorical, Pauline, Irenaean vision of the eschaton remains true in a way that simply resists some kind of rational proof or ultimate defensibility unless or until it happens. Perhaps God intends, to invoke the cliche, a test of faith. But I will offer three possible alternatives that, the older I get, continue to strike me as more likely eschatologies if my Christian believing is in fact rooted in truth: one traditional, one fairly radical, one more moderate.

The first is Origen’s eschatology discussed above. In many ways, Origen successfully sidesteps the problem of the parousia’s delay by taking Pauline and Johannine models of vertical apocalypticism to their logical conclusion. This world down here is not hurtling towards some kind of climax: it is one of an endless temporal succession and will be replaced by another just as it replaced one before it. Christ’s ascension both enables our own ascent but also renders superfluous his own personal return in bodily form to earth; the parousia of a fully deified and cosmicized Christ to rule a temporal kingdom would be a demotion. Serendipitously, Origen’s view also seems to anticipate the relativity we perceive between space and time: cosmic movement implies temporal movement, which may be linear (horizontally or vertically) but also which may transcend our ordinary experience of time’s flow. Origen’s view also seems to be the distant patristic ancestor of, say, Lewis’ eschatology in The Last Battle: Christ has already ascended to the true heaven and earth where the Kingdom of God is realized, of which the present heaven and earth are shadows; the eternal Kingdom cannot be realized in so mutable a medium as the spatiotemporal cosmos, the plasis which pallidly imitates the divine poiesis and is not yet the true ktisis.

Origen’s view does not, however, rule out the possibility of a new golden age. This leads me to a second, more radical possibility beyond the Irenaean eschatology: that the second coming of Christ would indeed be realized in the form of whatever leader would arise to bring such an age about. Consider with me for a moment the Maimonidean and Hasidic portraits of messianism which still exercise great influence on Orthodox Jewish messianic ideologies. For Maimonides, the King Messiah will be a normal human being of Davidic descent who will at some point in the future arise to bring about a golden age for Israel and the world; he will live, marry, have children, die, and found the dynasty that will carry on his golden age in perpetuity. The “supernatural” elements of traditional eschatology will come later, at the conclusion of this universe, its death and resurrection as God’s Kingdom. The kabbalistic and Hasidic expansion of this idea is that this individual is potentially born in every generation: the Soul of the Messiah is the Ideal, Heavenly Man, in fact, simply awaiting descent into a worthy generation’s vessel. Indeed, Hasidic Jews often speak of the messiah not unlike a divine incarnation himself.

It should be admitted that the idea that the return of Jesus Christ could be meaningfully accomplished by another individual fulfilling traditionally hoped for messianic credentials stretches traditional Christian eschatology nearly to its breaking point; but I think it is a worthwhile enterprise to explore the idea’s intellectual grounds and architecture, to consider if Christianity could ever come to the conclusion that such a thing were possible. Some observations to that end: first, some Ancient Jews, like their Greek and Roman counterparts, seem to have sometimes admitted the possibility of some kind of metempsychosis. Philo teaches it, and it is arguable that the New Testament features at least one prominent individual who is suggested to be the return to the world of a historic individual: John the Baptizer, said to be the Prophet Elijah. Christian apologists from antiquity onward resisted this conclusion, but it is in some ways the most direct way to read what the texts themselves say. In Matthew, Jesus plainly says that John “is Elijah who is to come” (Matt 11:14); following Elijah’s personal appearance at the Transfiguration (17:3-4), Jesus explains that Elijah has already come, as the martyred John (17:12; cf. Mk 9:4, 12-13). In Luke’s infancy narrative, John is prophesied to act “in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Lk 1:17). It is only in John’s Gospel that John (the Baptizer) is straightforwardly asked and straightforwardly denies being Elijah (Jn 1:21). But there are a few important notes here: first, that the question was asked at all implies both the strength of Jewish belief in the return of Elijah and the intelligible possibility of Elijah’s return as a new individual. Second, though, John’s answer can be read as a simple denial; it can also be read, though, as a distinction between the particularity of his identity and the Elianic spirit he incarnates. Perhaps John the Evangelist’s goal is to disabuse of a popular notion that John was literally Elijah, of course; but, of course, John’s Jesus also plays coy with his identity to others in the Gospel, saving the revelation of his identity for the book’s climax. Just because John says no, does it mean that the answer is really no? It is interesting that the language of this pericope changes from John’s denial of being the messiah, which is described as “confession,” to the comparably less emphatic “said” and “replied.” In a Gospel like John’s, where the specificity of the Greek is often overlooked in the casual conflation of our English to our exegetical peril, this may subtly imply that we cannot take the text here at face value. (The argument requires further demonstration; I here offer a brief glimpse of the tantalizing character of the ambiguity.)

Are there other examples? It is worth pointing out that Jesus’ “Son of Man” language, when one understands its literary history, might have implied to some ears a similar backstory for him. Many modern scholars of the Gospels accept that their authors probably knew the Parables of Enoch, and that their understanding of Jesus as Son of Man is conditioned by the Son of Man of that text (1 En 37-71). But the Son of Man of that text is straightforwardly said in Parables’ epilogue to be the Patriarch Enoch himself, just as John Collins has persuasively argued that the original “Son of Man” of Daniel 7:9-14 was the Archangel Michael. Did the Evangelists implicitly change the referent of the texts to Jesus, or did they even need to do so—that is, is it impossible that they simply thought of Michael and Enoch as somehow descended or returned in the person of Jesus? If the historical Jesus thought of himself as the Son of Man, could he have thought similarly?

While Christians have traditionally resisted the notion of the Son of God’s incarnation prior to the lifetime of Jesus (with the exception of Origen, who held that Jesus logically had to descend through each sphere and its respective angelic embodiment before becoming human), it should be noted that in principle the idea that the human being Jesus of Nazareth is in some way the return of previous human individuals or the humanization of an angelic being is actually a less grandiose claim than the idea that Jesus is the incarnation of God himself. The latter exceeds the credibility required for the former, and does not logically preclude the former, just as the former does not logically preclude the latter though it is insufficient on its own to demonstrate its truthfulness. Both of these—Jesus and John—are attempts to find precedent for the notion of a divine or human being returning to the world, but not necessarily in such a way as to lose previously gained exalted status: Elijah both appears alongside Jesus and is said to have been John; similarly, Jesus as a returned or descended being need not imply the cessation of past existences (after all, Chalcedonian Christology insists that he underwent no change or diminution of his divine nature in the kenosis; why should previous existences pass away?). Bur neither is fully sufficient to justify the view that the resurrected and glorified Jesus will return in the form of another individual. To fully justify that view would require demonstrating the ultimate logical compatibility of resurrection and reincarnation, which I lack the space to do here (but do affirm, whether either is ultimately real or not). I will simply make three further related observations that serve as necessary conditions of the view I describe here—one that is implicit in Christian belief, two that are explicit. First, Christians do not, as I have argued before, affirm the existence of an ontologically stable creaturely self. Logically, the metaphysics they affirm require that the creaturely self be fluid and empty, capable of mutation and metamorphosis across a long continuity, susceptible finally to the epektasis of divine ascent into the infinite God. And indeed, it would stretch credibility to hold that the resurrected and glorified Christ is in every way identifiably the same individual as the historical Jesus, Christologically speaking. When the risen Jesus appears in the Gospels, he has a variety of powers he did not have before—including the ability to appear “in another form” (!) and to appear and disappear at will (Mk 16:12, summarizing Lk 24:13-32). Paul says that we “no longer know Christ according to the flesh,” but according to the spirit into which he has been metamorphosed (2 Cor 5:16, read with 1 Cor 15:45). There is continuity but difference between the Jesus of history, whom we perceive in the historical Jesus, and the glorified Christ, whom we perceive in the kerygmatic and dogmatic Jesus. Likewise, Jesus’ followers expect eschatological metamorphosis into his likeness; they will receive new names (Rev 2:17); much of what we now perceive ourselves to be shall not endure and much that we do not presently imagine will come to be revealed as our true nature (1 Jn 3:2). In principle, then, the notion that the possibility of a Jesus who returns as a different historical entity cannot offend against Christian anthropology, at least if we admit the self’s fluidity within timespace. But there are two further beliefs Christians explicitly hold that would seem to further underline the possibility. Second, then, Christians already admit that the mystery of the Incarnation continues in the world after the historical Incarnation of the Son in and as Jesus. There are different options for how: many Christian theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, have gone so far as to say that it is perfectly possible for the Son to become incarnate multiple times; others, like Athanasios in his Life of Antony, hold the Incarnation to repeat in the lives of the saints; and others, like Maximos the Confessor, hold the Incarnation to be a continuous act with the creation itself. Each of these is already a qualification of the importance of Jesus’ historical uniqueness as Incarnation (but not necessarily a rejection of it). Third, following on this, Christians already hold that the totus Christus is not reducible to Jesus himself: it is, minimally, the whole of the Christian Church (on the Augustinian reading) and, maximally, the entire cosmos (on Maximos/Bulgakov’s). Is it then impossible to hold that Jesus would be personally present in some future individual of Maimonidean description? If, indeed, traditional Jews and Christians hold as they do that there shall be final messianic reconciliation between them, then it may well be necessary for some such individual to be able to claim some metaphysical or spiritual continuity with Jesus not dissimilar to this, in which neither Jews nor Christians would have to relinquish their faith and distinctives to find such reconciliation.

Of course, the Jesus of the Gospels seems to disapprove the notion of messiahs after him—at least in conjunction with the events described in the Olivet Discourse, having to do with the destruction of the Temple in 70 (Matt 24:5); whether Jesus’ words could here be stretched to accommodate another historical individual presents its own difficulties. (The New Testament language about an or the Antichrist, however, is irrelevant, as that individual is obviously a pagan oppressor in the texts where he appears, inspired by figures like Antiochos Epiphanes, Caligula, and Nero, not a Jewish liberator.) It is worth saying that the option I describe here has the advantage of allowing Christians tremendous versatility in a possible future where some messianic individual more obviously suited to the role than the historical Jesus were to arise; it also puts Christians in dialogue with other traditions that look forward likewise to future avatars, messiahs, or buddhas, like the Mahdi, Kalki, or Maitreya. It also avoids the awkward problem of a risen, ascended, and fully deified Jesus who, filling all reality with himself, then somewhat arbitrarily returns to a diminished estate to oversee a fairly parochial eschaton. But it should be reiterated that the vast majority of modern Jews, who are Reform, Conservative, or secular, do not believe in a future messianic individual who will come to rule the world. Moreover, biblical literature and modern sentiment discourages us from looking to imperial strongmen for our salvation: Jesus’ own messianic role is qualified, if not entirely modified, by his martyric suffering and death in Christianity, and similar reinterpretations of messianism in postbiblical Judaism also place a question mark over the hope for a singular savior figure. There are multiple avenues to the uncomfortable realization that a messiah who comes or returns to rule as an absolute monarch might be an unwelcome reality for most people, even those who claim to want one: those who have lived under genuine tyrannies, attempted ones (from Catiline to Trump), and who are well-versed in literature on the subject both non-fictional (the work of David Graeber comes to mind) and fictional (I was watching Villeneuve’s Dune as I typed this) know that entrusting worldly supremacy to a single person rarely works out well. If the Christian argument is that Jesus will be different because he is simultaneously God, it must be admitted that God is clearly neither a determinist nor a fascist, tolerating and enabling the freedom of his creatures human and not, and not ruling in any immediately sensible (and sometimes not even intelligible) way.

This leads me to the third, median option between Origen and Maimonides: that the coming again of Jesus Christ will not be in the form of a single individual, but in the spiritual maturation of his assembly, which I would broadly identify not only with the Christian Churches but also the qahal Yisrael, the Islamic umma, humanity, and the cosmos at large, each in their spheres. That is to say, the coming of Christ to judge and rule will occur when humanity at large—however wide the application of that term, perhaps wildly beyond our present ken—will be capable of truly ruling the world in God’s image and likeness. Three advantages of this perspective: first, its democratic import absolves the threat to Jesus’ uniqueness, for Christians, of another messianic individual; second, it has a direct precedent in the eschatological teachings of Origen, Nyssen, and Bulgakov; third, it comports well with modern Judaism’s use of messianic language as a metaphor for progressive labor in mitzvot for tikkun olam, physical and metaphysical “repair of the world,” and the hope that some future generation will indeed realize God’s justice and mercy in God’s world. It also has the singular distinction of being the only view mentioned here that encourages us to cultivate divine love for the highest purposes: not to avoid cataclysm and punishment, nor simply for the mercenary reward of worldly or otherworldly beatitude, but because it is “meet and right so to do,” to become what God has always called us to be, and to live as though there is a genuinely urgent moral imperative to the way we live in and shape the world.

I can see syntheses between each and all of these options; I do not here pretend to solve the problem they potentially answer, but merely to sketch responses that attempt intellectual honesty and fidelity to Christian faith in the historical, kerygmatic, and dogmatic faces of Jesus, and with appreciation for the varieties of his cosmopolitan visage. And the most honest thing any Christian can do is to admit both that the ultimate meaning of Jesus’ identity, the final affirmation or qualification of Christian Faith and Hope in him, is to be found in the future, until which time he remains a Mystery.

Continuandum in parte nona.

1. For the reception of Pauline eschatology in particular, see Adela Yarbro Collins, Paul Transformed: Reception of the Person and Letters of Paul in Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 12-33.

2. See Outi Lehtipuu, Debates Over the Resurrection of the Dead: Constructing Early Christian Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 109-202; Collins, Paul Transformed, 34-50.

3. Due to constricted space on this post, look to the concluding bibliography for sources.