RT Article
T1 Jesus and the Pathetic Wicked
JF Journal for the study of the historical Jesus
VO 13
IS 2/3
SP 188
OP 208
A1 Powell, Mark Allan
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2015
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1552222217
AB The proposal of E. P. Sanders that Jesus promised the kingdom to sinners without requiring them to repent has been rejected by most scholars but is here revived in a modified form. Sanders’s essential proposal may be outlined as a series of ten propositions, only one of which seems completely preposterous. This last point, however, may also appear quite reasonable if we remember that many of the persons regarded as sinners in Jesus’s context would have been slaves or, at least, people who lived in such dire straits that they were not able to do the things that would have qualified as repentance in the minds of most religious people of the day (including Jesus). Two examples of such people are considered: tax collectors and prostitutes. The article concludes that Jesus probably did promise the kingdom to some tax collectors and prostitutes who due to their social situation were unable to amend their lives in the manner he would otherwise have required.
K1 Jesus : repentance : Sanders : sinners : tax collectors : prostitutes
DO 10.1163/17455197-01302009