Sanders’s work on Jesus is flawed by an odd adherence to conclusions the premises of which he rejects. In Jesus and Judaism he concludes that Jesus expected some kind of cataclysmic intervention by God in the future, yet also insists that he is suspending judgment about the form of intervention and its sequel (1985: 154). In the next paragraph, however, he says that scholars emphasize the present aspect of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom in order to mute the “problem of his mistake about the immediate future.”
If he is suspending judgment about the kind of future Jesus expected, how can he know that Jesus was wrong? Rather than suspending judgment, he has already determined that, whatever Jesus might have predicted, He was not predicting what actually happened, namely, the catastrophic Roman attack on Jerusalem and Israel.
Borg may be criticized for trying to fit Jesus into cross-cultural “religious personality types,” while refusing to accept the designation “Messiah” (Wright 1996: 77), and it is more than a little anachronistic to paint Jesus as a leader of a first-century peace movement. Borg also presents Jesus’ contrast to Judaism (and to forms of Christianity) as a difference between a religion that “depended upon” external observance and one that focuses on internal transformation, suggests that Jesus “spiritualized” religion. Along similar lines, he claims that Jesus called His disciples to die to the world of “culture,” which indicates a pervasive dualism of “spirit” and “culture,” though the whole thrust of Borg’s book suggests that Jesus intended to inaugurate, through the Spirit, a new cultural form of life (1993: 109-110, 113, 139-141).
To be sure, Borg makes it impossible to see the “Jesus movement” as in any simple way a “spiritualization” of Israel, but when he concludes that the kingdom means “the end of the world of ordinary experience, as well as the end of the world as one’s center and security” (1984: 255), he vitiates the historicism of his thesis and taken us back, by a circuitous route, to Bultmann (cf. Wright 1996: 77).
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