This long and important book challenges one of contemporary scholarship’s most enduring silences. Through reception history, exegetical analysis and historical reconstruction, Ferda argues that Jesus himself expected to return after death – a claim systematically marginalised by historical critics despite its pervasive presence in early Christian sources. Ferda’s mentor, Dale Allison, not known for irresponsible exaggeration, finds this in the foreword to be ‘one of the best and most important books on Jesus in the last quarter century’ (p. xi), not least for its damning critique of the way previous scholarship has denied or underplayed this fundamental question.
Ferda’s bold central thesis exposes the mainstream New Testament guild’s tendency to accept critical consensus on some issues by force of assertion rather than argument, combining what he deems to be anti-Jewish professorial ‘elitism’ (p. 94 and passim) with overreliance on rationalist philosophical principles. His reception-historical investigation reveals how mid-twentieth-century scholars like T. F. Glasson and John A. T. Robinson successfully reframed discussion around the second coming, asserting its origin from post-Easter followers rather than from Jesus himself. As has also been the case for some other ‘assured results’ of Wissenschaft, an interesting and perfectly discussable suggestion soon gained traction through networks and echo chambers of citation and institutional influence rather than compelling evidence.
Ferda’s methodological framework prioritises understanding sources within their narrative contexts before attempting historical reconstruction. Among other things, this challenges the sorts of atomistic approaches that once dominated form criticism. On his account, theological concerns and cultural assumptions shaped the scholarly dynamics of the interpretation of this question.
Part Two provides perhaps the volume’s most innovative contribution through a sustained analysis of quite how the second coming of Christ turned into a ‘painful thorn’ (pp. 75–93) in Christian intellectual history. Ferda demonstrates a profound transformation, from the parousia’s general acceptance to its systematic problematisation in modernity.
In early Christian exegesis, from patristic writers to the Reformation, Christ’s return was a largely unquestioned core belief. The Nicene Creed’s declaration that Christ ‘will come again with glory’ reflected what Brian Daley calls a ‘common doctrine’, characterised by its ‘realism’ (quoted at p. 64n11) – expecting concrete, undeniable historical change. Crucially, Jesus and his disciples were seen as united in their eschatological outlook, with any apparent misunderstandings attributed to pre-Pentecost confusion rather than fundamental error.
This consensus fractured during the Enlightenment, when deists like Charles Blount pioneered arguments that second-coming expectations misrepresented Jesus’s message. Enlightenment critics systematically discounted eschatological hopes as due to retrograde Jewish messianic expectation, while they wished instead to promote Jesus as an exemplary ethical teacher.
This agenda conveniently served as a ‘two-level drama’, simultaneously critiquing ancient disciples and contemporary Christian eschatological enthusiasm. Academic discussions of the parousia became inseparable from fraught social connotations of religious location and identity, not least in the aftermath of Lutheran preoccupations with ‘enthusiasts’ and ‘fanatics’ – terms that naturally denoted not just theological positions but social types. Religious revivalism and millenarian movements had become socially unpalatable to educated elites, as exemplified in David Friedrich Strauss’s assertion that if Jesus really predicted his return, ‘he is for us nothing but a fanatic (Schwärmer)’ (quoted at p. 95n1).
An even more troubling insight for the discipline’s notion of progress in research is the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment as a factor in shaping the reception of parousia expectations. As Ferda shows, the characterisation of such hopes as distinctively ‘Jewish’ – code for carnal, violent, political and nationalistic – drew on centuries of Christian adversus Judaeos literature contrasting supposed base Jewish materialism with lofty Christian spirituality. Mediaeval Christian attempts to defend orthodoxy against Jewish critique actually created categories that Reformational and later critics used to deconstruct traditional eschatological scenarios.
Following this analysis of reception history, Ferda turns to his own careful exegetical analysis, beginning with Paul’s letters and proceeding through each Gospel. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul’s instruction about Christ’s return already appears underwritten ‘by a word of the Lord’ (4:15), as a statement not of innovation but of established and accepted teaching. The Gospels present Jesus predicting his return through multiple passages, consistently linking this to Daniel 7’s ‘son of man’ imagery and ‘day of the Lord’ traditions.
For purposes of historical reconstruction, Ferda proposes to understand Jesus within a ‘process eschatology’ framework, which expected God’s kingdom to arrive in stages rather than by instantaneous transformation. This interpretation, grounded in Second Temple Jewish precedents, allows Jesus to anticipate both potential death and subsequent vindication through return.
Tucker Ferda’s integrative methodology represents an impressive and significant advance over atomistic or philosophically prejudicial approaches of the past. His formidable argument to return the Parousia to its place within the Jesus tradition is a remarkable achievement. Three mostly minor issues might nevertheless warrant further debate.
First, Ferda relies on the hypothetical ‘Q’ source behind Matthew and Luke (another case, incidentally, of a theory now often thought to have long prevailed more by re-assertion than argument). That hypothesis, of course, remains in principle perfectly respectable. But it looks in this connection a little problematic in light of emphatic claims (popularised by members of the soi-disant Jesus Seminar, 1985-2006) that apocalyptic motifs invariably represent secondary accretions to Q. Prima facie, this may seem compatible with Ferda’s perceptive observation that the sources only ever transform non-parousia sayings into parousia sayings, never the reverse. But might not Q scholarship prove a literary-critical fly in the ointment of his core thesis that the parousia is pervasively affirmed in the early Christian sources and derives from the historical Jesus?
Secondly, given Ferda’s surprising denial of an early doctrine of two advents of Christ, it seems noteworthy that his study omits more sustained engagement with writers like Justin Martyr, for whom the appeal to a scriptural promise of the Messiah’s two comings serves a load-bearing function in his Dialogue with Trypho. Neither Justin nor even, for that matter, Augustine can be accused of reducing the Parousia to a ‘spiritualising’ significance.
Finally, this reviewer was left with a more fundamental query about the book’s implied hermeneutical camera. Ferda’s preface avows his interests to be truly and earnestly ‘historical and not theological’ (p. xv, emphasis added) – before, on the very next page, effusively acknowledging his personal and institutional debt to colleagues and employers at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where the innocent reader might have assumed a different ordering or symbiosis of interests to prevail. Self-subversive, modernist throat-clearing of this kind still paradoxically persists as de rigueur in the shrinking halls of American biblical learning: Ferda is hardly alone in this. Nevertheless, to the outsider, it suggests a critically unreflective stance regarding, say, the inevitably historical setting of all theology – let alone the quasi-theologising aspects of any non-trivial historical judgement.
Ferda later goes on to dismiss ‘conservative’ arguments against nineteenth-century radical historical critics as ‘predictable in light of the theological assumptions’ (p. 90). Who among fellow scholars would deny at least occasional sympathy with such a sentiment! And yet, ironically, in this context, such a judgement seems just as notable for its (Archimedean, bird’s-eye-view, hence quasi-theologising) confidence as for its whiff of just the sort of patronising elitism that the author quite rightly excoriates elsewhere.
Despite and also because of such stimuli for discussion, Tucker Ferda’s work makes a crucial contribution to the place of eschatology in historical Jesus research and early Christian studies. His challenge to entrenched scholarly assumptions illuminates complex and problematic processes of intellectual history while modelling rigorous, perceptive analysis in both exegesis and reception. Ferda successfully demonstrates that the expectation of Jesus’s return deserves renewed scholarly attention as an authentic element of his teaching rather than a post-Easter counsel of apologetic convenience.
