Excerpt from Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) by Ehrman

Jesus' Teaching in Mark

In many ways the teaching of Jesus in Mark is summarized in the first words he speaks: "The time has been fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15).

Anyone familiar with ancient Judaism can recognize the apocalyptic nature of this message. Jewish apocalypticism was a worldview that came into existence about a century and a half before Jesus' birth and was widely held among Jews in his day. The Greek word apocalypsis means a "revealing" or an "unveiling." Scholars have called this view apocalyptic because its proponents believed that God had revealed or unveiled to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of the realities they were experiencing - many of them nasty and ugly - here on earth. One of the questions apocalypticists were intent on answering was why there was so much pain and suffering in the world, especially among the people of God. It might make sense that wicked people suffer: they are simply getting their due. But why do the righteous suffer? In fact, why do the righteous suffer more than the wicked, at the hands of the wicked? Why does God allow that?

Jewish apocalypticists believed that God had revealed to them the secrets that made sense of it all. There are cosmic forces in the world aligned against God and his people, powers like the Devil and his demons. These forces are in control of the world and the political powers that run it. For some mysterious reason God has allowed these forces to thrive in the present evil age. But a new age is coming in which God would overthrow the forces of evil and bring in a good kingdom, a kingdom of God, in which there will be no more pain, misery, or suffering. God will rule supreme, and the Devil and his demons, along with all the other nasty powers causing such suffering (hurricanes, earthquakes, famine, disease, war), will be done away with.

Jesus' teaching in Mark is apocalyptic: "The time has been fulfilled" implies that this current evil age, seen on a time line, is almost over. The end is almost within sight. "The Kingdom of God is near" means that God will soon intervene in this age and overthrow its wicked powers and the kingdoms they support, such as Rome, and establish his own kingdom, a kingdom of truth, peace, and justice. "Repent and believe the good news" means that people need to prepare for this coming kingdom by changing their lives, beginning to align themselves with the forces of good instead of the forces of evil, and by accepting Jesus' teaching that it was soon to happen.

For Mark's Jesus, this kingdom is soon to come. As he tells his disciples at one point, "Truly I tell you, some of those standing here will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God having come in power" (Mark 9:1); later he tells them, after describing the cosmic upheavals that would transpire at the end of the age, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place" (Mark 13:30).

[Personal note: I am omitting some text.]

But since Jesus is the one who will bring the kingdom, for Mark the kingdom is already being manifest in the earthly life and ministry of Jesus in an anticipatory way. In the kingdom there will be no demons, so Jesus casts out demons; in the kingdom there will be no disease, and so Jesus heals the sick; in the kingdom there will be no more death, and so Jesus raises the dead. The kingdom of God could already be seen in Jesus' own ministry and that of his followers (6:7 - 13). That is the point of many of Jesus' parables in Mark: the kingdom has a small, even hidden, appearance in the activities of Jesus, but it will appear in a big way at the end. It is like a small mustard seed that when put in the ground becomes an enormous shrub (4:30 - 32). Most of Jesus' listeners rejected his message, but a judgement day was coming, and God's kingdom would arrive in power, and then this world will be remade (Mark 13).

[Personal note: I am omitting more text.]

Jesus' Teaching in John

Things are quite different in the Gospel of John. In Mark, Jesus teaches principally about God and the coming kingdom, hardly ever talking directly about himself, except to say that he must go to Jerusalem to be executed, whereas in John, that is practically all that Jesus talks about: who he is, where he has come from, where he is going, and how he is the one who can provide eternal life.

Jesus does not preach about the future kingdom of God in John. The emphasis is on his own identity, as seen in the "I am" sayings. He is the one who can bring life-giving sustenance ("I am the bread of life" 6:35); he is the one who brings enlightenment ("I am the light of the world" 9:5); he is the only way to God ("I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me" 14:6). Belief in Jesus is the way to have eternal salvation: "whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (3:36). He in fact is equal with God: "I and the Father are one" (10:30). His Jewish listeners appear to have known full well what he was saying: they immediately pick up stones to execute him for blasphemy.

In one place in John, Jesus claims the name of God for himself, saying to his Jewish interlocutors, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). Abraham, who lived 1,800 years earlier, was the father of the Jews, and Jesus is claiming to have existed before him. But he is claiming more than that. He is referring to a passage in the Hebrew scriptures where God appears to Moses at the burning bush and commissions him to go to Pharoah and seek the release of his people. Moses asks God what God's name is, so that he can inform his fellow Israelites which divinity has sent him. God replies, "I Am Who I Am...say to the Israelites, 'I am has sent me to you' (Exodus 3:14). So when Jesus says "I Am," in John 8:58, he is claiming the divine name for himself. Here again his Jewish hearers had no trouble understanding his meaning. Once more, out come the stones.

The difference between Mark and John is not only that Jesus speaks about himself in John and identifies himself as divine but also that Jesus does not teach what he teaches in Mark, about the coming kingdom of God. The idea that there would be a future kingdom on earth in which God would rule supreme and all the forces of evil would be destroyed is no part of Jesus' proclamation in John. Instead he teaches that people need to have eternal life, in heaven above, by achieving a heavenly birth (3:3 - 5). That's what the "kingdom of God" means to John, the very few times it occurs: it means life in heaven, above, with God - not a new heaven and new earth down here below. Faith in Jesus is what gives eternal life. Those who believe in Jesus will live with God forever; those who do not will be condemned (3:36).

For many historical critics it makes sense that John, the Gospel that was written last, no longer speaks about the imminent appearance on earth of the Son of Man to sit in judgement on the earth, to usher in the utopian kingdom. In Mark, Jesus predicts that the end will come right away, during his own generation, while his disciples are still alive (Mark 9:1; 13:30). By the time John was written, probably from 90 to 95 CE, that earlier generation had died out and most if not all the disciples were already dead. That is, they died before the coming of the kingdom. What does one do with a teaching about an eternal kingdom here on earth if it never comes? One reinterprets the teaching. The way John reinterprets it is by altering the basic conceptualization.

An apocalyptic worldview like that found in Mark involves a kind of historical dualism in which there is the present evil age and the future kingdom of God. This age, and the age to come: they can be drawn almost like a time line, horizontally across the page. The Gospel of John rotates the horizontal dualism of apocalyptic thinking so that it becomes a vertical dualism. It is no longer a dualism of this age on earth and the one that has yet to come, also on earth; instead, it is dualism of life down here and the life above. We are down here, God is above. Jesus as God's Word comes down from above, precisely so we can ourselves experience a birth "from above" (the literal meaning of John 3:3 - not that "you must be born a second time," but that "you must be born from above"). When we experience this new birth by believing in Christ, the one who comes from above, then we, too, will have eternal life (John 3:16). And when we die, we will then ascend to the heavenly realm to live with God (John 14:1 - 6).

No longer is the kingdom coming to earth. The kingdom is in heaven. And we can get there by believing in the one who came from there to teach us the way. This is a very different teaching from what you find in Mark.

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My own personal point of view, as most people who know me would easily guess, is that both John and Mark have it wrong. Indeed, the Jewish apocalyptic tradition (according to the gospels, believed by Jesus and John the Babtist), the Christian apocalyptic tradition (continued by a good number of Christian sects), the Muslim apocalyptic tradition (none more so than the Shia traditions still believed by the Iranian government), and any other 'end of the world' prophecies and storytelling, in my point of view, is nothing but a delusion created by an ignorant, mentally troubled mind. John is only trying to reconcile the fact that Jesus did not come as he had promised. At root, as described by Bart D. Ehrman in Jesus Interrupted, these beliefs are derived from an inherent inability to explain away the suffering that exists in the world.

Many alternate reasons could easily exist - such as God is not all powerful or that God is not entirely benevolent. The simplest and, in my point of view, the most likely reason is that God simply does not exist. What evil we perceive in the world exists due to natural forces (such as disease, earthquakes and tornadoes) or due to the problems that occur in social relations with others (mostly a struggle to meet cultural expectations while gratifying one's needs and desires).]