Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

he himself had a unifiedconception of it. The phrase, along with its Matthaean equivalent “Kingdom of Heaven,”
     hardly appears in the New Testament outside of the gospels. Although numerous passages
     in the Hebrew Scriptures describe God as king and sole sovereign, the exact phrase
     “Kingdom of God” appears only in the apocryphal text
The Wisdom of Solomon
(10:10), in which God’s kingdom is envisioned as physically situated in heaven, the
     place where God’s throne sits, where the angelic court sees to his every demand, and
     where his will is done always and without fail.
    Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on
     a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage
     in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of
     this world” (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus
     makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase
ouk estin ek tou kosmou
is perhaps better translated as “not part of this order/system [of government].”
     Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus
     was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike
     any kingdom or government on earth.
    Neither did Jesus present the Kingdom of God as some distant future kingdom to be
     established at the end of time. When Jesus said, “the Kingdom of God has drawn near”
     (Mark 1:15) or “the Kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:21), he was pointing
     to God’s saving action in his present age, at his present time. True, Jesus spoke
     of wars and uprisings, earthquakes and famine, false messiahs and prophets who would
     presage the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth (Mark 13:5–37). But far from
     auguring some future apocalypse, Jesus’s words were in reality a perfectly apt description
     of the era in which he lived: an era of wars, famines, and false messiahs. In fact,
     Jesus seemed to expect the Kingdom of God to be established at any moment: “I tell
     you, there are those here who will not taste death until they have seen the Kingdom
     of God come with power” (Mark 9:1).
    If the Kingdom of God is neither purely celestial nor wholly eschatological, then
     what Jesus was proposing must have been a physical and present kingdom: a
real
kingdom, with an
actual
king that was about to be established on earth. That is certainly how the Jews would
     have understood it. Jesus’s particular conception of the Kingdom of God may have been
     distinctive and somewhat unique, but its connotations would not have been unfamiliar
     to his audience. Jesus was merely reiterating what the zealots had been preaching
     for years. Simply put, the Kingdom of God was shorthand for the idea of God as the
     sole sovereign, the one and only king, not just over Israel, but over all the world.
     “Everything in heaven and earth belongs to you,” the Bible states of God. “Yours is
     the kingdom … You rule over everything” (1 Chronicles 29:11–12; see also Numbers 23:21;
     Deuteronomy 33:5). In fact, the concept of the sole sovereignty of God lay behind
     the message of all the great prophets of old. Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Amos, Isaiah,
     Jeremiah—these men vowed that God would deliver the Jews from bondage and liberate
     Israel from foreign rule if only they refused to serve any earthly master or bow to
     any king save the one and only king of the universe. That same belief formed the foundation
     of nearly every Jewish resistance movement, from the Maccabees who threw off the yoke
     of Seleucid rule in 164 B.C.E ., after the mad Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes demanded that the Jews worship him
     like a god, to the radicals and revolutionaries who resisted the Roman occupation—the
     bandits, the Sicarii, the zealots, and the martyrs at Masada—all the way to the last
     of the great failed messiahs, Simon son of Kochba, whose rebellion in 132 C.E . invoked the exact phrase “Kingdom of God” as a call for freedom from foreign rule.
    Jesus’s view of the sole sovereignty of God was not all that different from the view
     of the prophets, bandits, zealots, and messiahs who came before and after him, as
     evidenced by his answer to the question about paying tribute to Caesar. Actually,
     his view of God’s reign was not so different from that of his master, John the