This article is a follow-up to a recent episode of the Mount Hermeneutics podcast in which we tackled the question of “What Did Jesus Teach?”

On the show, we frequently critique and correct what we regard to be the many errors of the mainstream Church, such as the persistent misconception that the objective of Jesus’ teachings is to get us into heaven as disembodied spirits when we die, and that he plainly taught, “I’m God; believe in me in order to get there.”

Our longstanding contrarianism naturally invites questions like, “Well, then, what did he teach?”, hence the subject of our episode.

The Kingdom of God Has Come Near

To prepare for the discussion, I reviewed each of the four Gospels with attention to that specific question.

Jesus’ teachings can be summed up as:

“The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

Of course, all of those terms require definition, because modern readers tend to approach the text with the aforementioned confirmation bias that “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” refers to the afterlife.

It’s important to bear in mind that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, teaching Judaism to Jews, and all of these terms and concepts were already well defined and firmly established within Judaism centuries before Jesus was born.

When Jesus (and John the Baptist before him) spoke of “the kingdom of God,” his listeners would have understood that to mean the concept as it is defined throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e., the Old Testament.

If you open the Psalms at random, you’re likely to land on a passage like Psalm 98, in which the songwriter calls on nature itself to cry out for joy and praise of God, “for He comes to judge the earth; He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.”

The Psalms were the musical catalogue sung in the temple, and throughout these songs, there is an almost constant view to this expected future in which the God of this one tiny Mediterranean nation called “Israel” will rule visibly on earth as King, with all the Gentile nations abandoning their false gods and basking in the light of His glory, shining from Jerusalem as the capital city of the world. When He assumes His throne, He will recompense the righteous and the wicked, cast down the proud and exalt the meek and humble, fulfill all of His promises to Abraham and vindicate His faithful. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and there will be peace between all nations, and God’s glory will fill the earth as the water covers the seas, and death itself will be defeated.

In some psalms, this future kingdom is the explicit focus, but in others, it’s in the background to provide perspective and hope amid suffering and affliction and national calamity. Sometimes it is pictured as a present reality, with God’s ongoing faithfulness and justice understood as a preview to the age to come – or, at least, the promise of the age to come is a sufficient compensation for the suffering of their time. The concept itself is almost always there, at some level of attention, in most of the Psalms.

We tend to miss most of this, though, because we read the Psalms (and the rest of the Bible) with that aforementioned confirmation bias, so we gloss these passages over as abstractions or as references to some vague, pie-in-the-sky afterlife in another world. But, no – their focus is squarely on this world, when God Himself reigns visibly.

As time went on and the prophets wrote and taught and added to the corpus of Scripture, the revelation of this coming kingdom progressed and the figure of the promised Messiah – God’s Chosen One who would be His agent to bring all this about – came into clearer and clearer focus.

In the second book of 1 Enoch, the “Book of the Parables” (chs. 37-71), many of the various features and elements of the Messiah and his reign that had been revealed in the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings were compiled in one place and synthesized into a composite vision of what the Jewish people collectively understood would be the ultimate fulfillment of all of God’s promises to Israel: the figure envisioned by the prophet Daniel, the “One Like a Son of Man,” would appear at the end of the age, coming in the glory of God on the clouds of heaven, with all of God’s angels at his command, and he would sit on a throne of glory in Jerusalem to judge the nations, raise the dead and rule over a renewed and restored creation.

So, when John the Baptist arrived on the scene, and Jesus after him, declaring, “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand,” this is how the Jewish people to whom they preached would have understood it.

As in, when it reads that Jesus “taught them about the kingdom of God,” he was not introducing them to the concept, and he certainly wasn’t overturning the concept they had in mind in favor of another concept — that of an afterlife in another world as disembodied spirits, which was totally alien to anything found in the Scriptures, but totally consistent with the pagan beliefs constantly condemned in those Scriptures. Everything he taught presupposed the truth of that concept of “the kingdom of God” as they understood it from the Old Testament, and built upon that understanding.

The Messianic Secret

The same is true of all of Jesus’ mentions of “the Son of Man.”  

Before Jesus was born, and as we can see from the aforementioned portions of 1 Enoch, the phrase “Son of Man” simply meant “the Messiah” in the hearing of any 1st-century Jew.

We tend to read the Gospels with the omniscience of hindsight (because we know that he is “Jesus Christ,” i.e., “Jesus the Messiah”) and so we suppose that he was speaking of himself directly in the third person every time he mentioned “the Son of Man,” never stopping to reflect on how bizarre that would have been, regardless of the culture.

For example, consider the episode (Mark 2) when the paralytic was brought to him to be healed and he scandalized the scribes by telling him, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” They accused him of blasphemy, and so he said, “So that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.”

He didn’t intend that as, “So that you may know that I have authority to forgive sins …”

The point of his teachings, and of his miracles, was to demonstrate the rule of God on earth. The premise of his healings and miracles was that he was acting on the authority of God and of the Son of Man – an authority he delegated to his disciples, sending them out in pairs, giving them the same “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” (Luke 9:1-2).

As in, he did not send them out to proclaim, “Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah!” nor even explicitly, “The Messiah is here!”

Rather than declaring himself to be the Son of Man, Jesus actively prevented people from announcing that he was the Messiah.

For instance, in Mark’s Gospel, it reads that when he drove out demons, he silenced them, “because they knew him.” (2:21-22) When his disciples privately acknowledged him as the Son of God at Caesarea Philippi, he “sternly ordered them not to tell anyone he was the Messiah.” (Matthew 16:20)

His message, first and foremost, was that the kingdom of God was at hand. And, he demonstrated that God’s rule was in effect by driving out demons, healing the sick and raising the dead.

“What about you? Who do you say that I am?”

Of course, he never denied that he was the Messiah, nor that he was God incarnate.

He just didn’t lead with that.

The point of his teachings was not to get people to put their faith in him, per se, nor to embrace him as the Messiah.

Rather, he wanted people to put their faith in God, through him.

He knew that the term “Messiah” was so charged, and people brought so many of their own expectations and prejudices to that term that he didn’t want to just say, “I’m the Messiah” and then have people measure him by their naïve and superficial conceptions of what that meant. He wanted people to understand why he was the Messiah, and what it meant that he was. So, he demonstrated it, and invited them to draw their own conclusions.

That’s why, when John the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the One who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”, Jesus didn’t simply answer, “Yep. You bet I am.”

Instead, he told them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” (Luke 7:22-23)

Conversely, when he fed the 5,000 with the five loaves and two fish, and they declared him to be the Messiah and tried to make him king, he rejected their accolades: “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.” (John 6) They were, of course, correct about him being the rightful King and the promised Prophet, but he wanted them to understand why that was true. It wasn’t because of the free lunches.

Likewise, when the rich young man said to him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life,” when he answered, “Why do you call me ‘good’? No one is good but God alone,” it was not a denial of his divinity (Mark 10:17-18). It was a denial that he was a mere teacher and an invitation for the young man to consider more deeply the goodness he recognized in Jesus and to follow it to its inevitable conclusion.

Sometimes, the secrets of the kingdom of God come in packages we’re inclined to overlook, and I hope you’ll consider that before you’re put off by this apparently dorky illustration, but the best analogy for the Messianic Secret is to think of the Son of Man as Superman, Jesus as Clark Kent, and the Jews as the staffers of the Daily Planet – Lois in particular.

People often ridicule the Clark Kent disguise with remarks like, “What? Are they stupid!? How does a brilliant journalist like Lois Lane miss that Superman is in the cubicle next to her every day at work? Can’t she just look at Clark and see that he’s Superman with glasses on?!”

But that’s the whole point: She doesn’t look at Clark.

She’s too infatuated with Superman to bother looking at Clark. If she ever did actually look at him, and really see him, she’d know immediately who he is, and that the man of her dreams has been in the cubicle right next to her all along. But she won’t. She’s too blinded by her infatuation with Superman to ever look down.  

And Clark is in love with her, too. But he wants to be loved by her as a man, on human terms, for who he really is, and so he can’t pursue her as Superman, because Superman is just a symbol – a public persona he invented so he could use his powers in public and still maintain a personal life. To be with her, he has to divest himself of everything super about himself and come to her on her level, and win her love as a man, not as a superman.

That’s what Jesus did with the Jewish people. He wanted them to acknowledge him as the One they’ve been hoping for, but it has to be him that they acknowledge – God’s holiness and righteousness and goodness in him – rather than their culturally-ingrained prejudices and presuppositions about God and the Messiah. Those who truly knew God, and understood God’s grace on display in Jesus’ teachings and works, recognized God’s character in the person of Jesus, and followed him as the Messiah. Those who sought only the validation of their prejudices and personal ambitions rejected him and killed him when he finally openly announced himself as the Messiah when he entered Jerusalem on a donkey, in keeping with the prophecy of Zechariah 9.

OK, So What Did He Teach … ?

Of course, the actual substance of Jesus’ teachings goes far beyond what I’ve written here, but with that background established and the usual misbegotten tropes about the afterlife out of the way, most of it speaks for itself, without much need for commentary, if we just read it.

There is, however, no shortage of questions that arise, in light of that background we just discussed. For instance:

If the time was fulfilled 2,000 years ago, why isn’t the kingdom of God visible now? Why isn’t Jesus ruling from Jerusalem?

Who’s in the kingdom and who’s out? What’s the criterion?

But, all of these questions and more are answered in the Gospels themselves, and to begin to find the answers, we had to establish those basic ideas about what the conversation was even about.

As we also discussed during the podcast, I went through each of the Gospels and jotted down some basic notes about their content and respective structures to serve as a general (not at all comprehensive) guide to Jesus’ teachings.

The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) were written in the genre of ancient biography and so focus predominantly on Jesus’ public ministry (with some caveats, which I’ll explain). John’s Gospel stands alone because it’s written in a different genre – it’s more in the vein of the Socratic dialogues of Plato, turning the focus from Jesus’ public ministry to some of his one-on-one dialectics with opponents and questioners. But, while the method of delivery is different, John’s Gospel conveys the same essential message as the Synoptics, as we discussed on the show and as I’ll review in what follows.

The Gospel According to Matthew

Matthew’s Gospel is the most teaching-centric of the four. It was written primarily for a Jewish audience, and so it is arranged around five distinct discourses, meant to evoke the Five Books of the Torah.

Also, probably owing to the Jewish convention of avoiding direct mention of “God” in order to avoid violations of the fourth commandment, Matthew is unique among all the biblical writers for his use of the phrase “kingdom of heaven” in place of the phrase “kingdom of God” as it appears in the other Gospels.

The five discourses are as follow:

The Sermon on the Mount

Chapters 5-7 are all about the kingdom of heaven and the role of Torah observance as a criterion for inclusion, and what Torah observance actually looks like. Here, he is speaking primarily to a Jewish audience to communicate true Judaism, and speaks of the Jews themselves as the light of the world, a microcosm and preview of the kingdom to come.

From his explanation of the Law of Moses, by inference we get the concept of justification by faith. Christians often erroneously take Paul’s teachings to be setting faith and obedience in opposition, and this in opposition to Jesus himself, who called for obedience to the Law. This is based on a superficial reading of both men, though.

Paul spoke only about the criterion for justification, setting “the works of the law” in opposition to faith, but spoke also of “the obedience of faith.” “Do we nullify the law by this faith? By no means! Rather, we uphold the law.”

Likewise, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus repeatedly contrasted obedience to the mere letter of the law in pursuit of social rewards against sincere obedience to the principle and spirit of the law, done out of genuine devotion: those who abstain from adultery but gaze lustfully; those who take the swearing of oaths to mean they are otherwise at liberty to lie; those who stop short of murder but treat people with contempt and anger, showing that they don’t cherish the life or honor God’s image in others. The contrasts continued on that same track: the broad path versus the narrow, false prophets versus true, self-deluded followers and true believers, building on rock or on sand, etc.  

It boils down to why a person obeys – Is it to virtue-signal? To feel entitled to something before God and man? Or is it out of love and trust of the One who gave the commandment, knowing that He did so for our benefit? How does one’s righteousness exceed that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who were renowned for their strict and meticulous observance of the Torah?

Also, Jesus set forth the Law as an impossible standard no one could truly keep, showing that it was never given as a set of instructions for how to justify ourselves before God by our own righteousness. Rather, it is to reveal our inadequacy and our desperate need for a new nature. How are we to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect?

The sermon itself doesn’t answer those questions, but provides the setup for them to be answered by the rest of his teachings and, ultimately, by his death, resurrection and ascension, and the descent of the Spirit.

The Missionary/Apostolic Discourse

Chapters 10-12 expound on the premise that “the Son of Man/Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” by his instructions to the disciples to go out and exercise the authority of God over disease, death and demons. He explicitly tells them to go only to Israelites, emphasizing that this is about restoring true Judaism to Jews; yet, this is a war of God’s kingdom against the kingdoms of darkness, and it transcends mere national, ethnic or even family allegiances. Their first loyalty is to the kingdom of heaven, to its King, over and against any competing loyalty to family and tribe and nation.

The Parabolic Discourse

In chapters 13-17, “the secrets of the kingdom of heaven” are encoded in parables for the public, who are blinded by man-made traditions and institutional loyalties, while he explains the meaning to his disciples in private. A recurring theme is Jesus demonstrating his identity as the Son of Man by his miracles, while the religious leaders demand exactly what he’s providing, but failing to see what’s in front of them.

Of particular curiosity to modern readers, given the aforementioned popular misconceptions — none of the “secrets of the kingdom of heaven” have anything to do with any otherworldly afterlife. Jesus is not explaining to them “what heaven will be like.” All of his parables concern what happens here, in this world, as the kingdom advances on earth: the wheat exists alongside the weeds.

The ultimate revelation of the kingdom occurs when, first, his disciples demonstrate that the secrets have penetrated by acknowledging him as the Messiah, and then when their declaration is validated in the transfiguration, when they see the Son of Man come in his kingdom.  

Discourse of the Church

Chapters 18-20 are about how to operate as and within the Church. The Church is the Kingdom of Heaven. His teachings address such questions as: Who belongs in the kingdom? Who doesn’t? On what terms? Who are the greatest and the least in the kingdom?

The Olivet Discourse

Chapters 23-25 are about how the kingdom of heaven will be taken from the Jewish people and given to a people who will bear its fruit. Contrary to popular misconception, this is not, predominantly, about the “end times.” This is about the fall of the Jewish people. Jesus is explicitly contrasting the fall of Jerusalem and the events leading up to it with his advent/Parousia. The point of it is not to tell them how to predict the revelation of the Son of Man before he begins his rule. It’s impossible. It will happen suddenly and without warning, and the whole world will see it. In sharp contrast, the fall of Jerusalem will be presaged by obvious signs. (And, not insignificantly, this happened 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.)

This completes the circle back to the Sermon on the Mount. There, he called the Jews the light of the world, the salt of the earth. Here, he laments their rejection and loss of light and saltiness.

The Gospel According to Mark

Mark’s Gospel is understood to be Simon Peter’s testimony. Mark, as Peter’s translator/interpreter during his decades as an itinerant missionary, had it memorized from uncounted retellings.

It is more of an aretology – an account of Jesus’ deeds, and so it’s oriented more to action than to expounding upon the content of Jesus’ teachings.

Or, it would be more accurate to say that Jesus’ teachings are conveyed through his actions and miracles, demonstrating against opposition that the kingdom of God is present through him. The main theme of Mark’s Gospel is the “Messianic Secret.” His signs engender faith in some, but hostility in others, depending on the prejudices and expectations and defects of character that they bring to the question.

There is an arc (seen in Matthew’s Gospel as well, but more in focus here) in which he tells parables early in the Gospel as a way of encoding the secrets of the kingdom in the hearing of the public, to be revealed privately to his disciples, when he is still keeping his identity as the Messiah secret. After he announces himself as the Messiah by his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, he now tells parables to reveal – that the Jews’ rejection of him as the Messiah means God’s rejection of them as the bearers of His kingdom.

The Gospel According to Luke

Luke’s Gospel includes much of the action of Mark and the teachings in Matthew, but it’s not arranged in any particular way, other than loosely chronologically. His intent is more historiographical than doctrinal or theological, and so he’s more descriptive of circumstances and detail-oriented.

For instance, he expands on Jesus’ declaration that “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is at hand” by reporting precisely how Jesus announced this – his reading from the scroll of Isaiah and declaring it fulfilled.

The Gospel According to John

This Gospel was written last, and John was reportedly aware of the other Gospels. Clement of Alexandria, in explaining the composition of the Gospels, wrote, “But John, the last of all, seeing that what was corporeal was set forth in the Gospels, on the entreaty of his intimate friends, and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel.”

Clement didn’t explain what he meant by “spiritual” as opposed to “corporeal,” but from what I can observe, I infer it to mean that it was more philosophical, more personal. Instead of reporting on Jesus’ public sermons or retelling a birth narrative, John spoke of Jesus’ origin as the preexistent Logos, the Word made flesh.

The same themes and teachings of the Synoptics are found in John’s Gospel, but where these were implied and hinted at in the Synoptics, with Jesus leaving out breadcrumbs for people to follow in order to come to the realization that he is the Messiah, in John’s Gospel, these are stated more explicitly. Jesus himself isn’t necessarily more explicit to his public audiences, but the writer deliberately narrates to bring these ideas to light.  

It is arranged around a series of “signs.”

Conventional wisdom has it that there are seven such signs, but there isn’t unanimous agreement on which signs make up the seven, nor is there anything in the text itself that specifically numbers them at seven. There are six signs that everybody agrees upon, but four other possibilities for what the seventh could be (assuming that’s the count).

Each of them is a “sign” in that it connects Jesus back to the prophecies and types found in the Hebrew Scriptures, and so constituted God the Father’s “testimony” to Jesus as His Son.

The six undisputed signs are as follow:

1) Turning water into wine connects Jesus back to the prophecy of Jacob about the Lion of Judah in Genesis 49.

2) The healing of the official’s son and

3) the healing at the pool both prefigure resurrection – the prophecy of Daniel 12, and represent the Son’s authority over life and death, given by the Father, because he is the Son of Man (also connecting him back to Daniel 7).

4) Feeding the 5,000 with the five loaves and two fish connects Jesus back to the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites, in which they ate manna. The motif of the Israelites’ “grumbling” against God is repeated here as they reject Jesus as the true Bread of Life.

5) He healed the man born blind, validating his claim that he is the Light of the World, spoken during the Festival of Tabernacles, in which the Israelites’ wilderness wandering was commemorated, in which God led them as a pillar of fire. Jesus was illustrating that, what that pillar of fire was to the Israelites, he would be to the world.

6) Raising Lazarus from the dead connected Jesus back to every Old Testament prophecy about the resurrection.

The other four contenders for “signs” are as follow:

1) Cleansing the temple connects Jesus back to the prophecy of Malachi about the messenger of the covenant who would cleanse the temple, as well as to Psalm 69, which is quoted by John. It also begins the overall narrative arc that goes through chapter 2b, chapter 3 and chapter 4 in which Jesus explains how he, and by extension, his followers, are the New Temple in whom God’s Presence would dwell.

Cleansing the temple wasn’t a miracle, though, so it is arguable if it qualifies as a “sign.”

2) Jesus walked on water, which was definitely miraculous, but if this connects him back to the Old Testament in some particular way, I am not aware of how.

3) Jesus’ own resurrection is the sign of all signs – the sign of Jonah, which in the Synoptic Gospels, he declares as the only sign that would be given to the world.

4) The miraculous catch of 153 fish might be a sign. I haven’t been able to verify this, nor have I been able to figure out where other people are supposedly getting this, but some commentators have remarked that there were believed to be 153 Gentile nations in existence at the time, which would be a sign connecting the Church (as the New Temple in whom the Spirit of Christ would dwell) back to Deuteronomy 32:7-9, which reports that the nations were divided according to the number of the sons of God, when God disinherited them at the Tower of Babel and put them under the control of the Watchers/Divine Council, but are now being reclaimed by the Messiah. At any rate, whatever meaning there might be to the count of 153, at the very least, the catch of fish was regarded as miraculous, and signified Peter and his colleagues’ role as “fishers of men.” So, this constitutes a sort of parabolic illustration of the Great Commission.   

There are also seven “I am” statements made by Jesus in John’s Gospel, but they are somewhat self-explanatory

The main thrust of Jesus’ teaching in John’s Gospel is found in that aforementioned discussion of the temple, and how God’s Spirit would dwell within believers, making us the New Temple.