For my blog post today about Bart Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture,
I have two items, both of which feature in Ehrman's discussion about
Luke 23:42-43. The setting for Luke 23:42-43 is Jesus' crucifixion. It
reads (in the KJV): "And [the thief on the cross] said unto Jesus,
Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said
unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in
paradise."
1. When I look at two Greek texts on my BibleWorks, I
see two readings of Luke 23:42. In the BGT, the thief asks Jesus to
remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom. In the Byzantine text, however, the thief asks Jesus to remember him when Jesus comes in
his kingdom. According to Ehrman, the former reading is earlier,
whereas the latter reading reflects an alteration that was made for a
theological purpose, namely, to emphasize (against so-called heretics)
that Jesus will come back bodily in the future. The former reading has
more of a feel of a realized eschatology: Jesus will come into
his kingdom after he dies, meaning the kingdom already exists. The
latter reading, however, has more of a futuristic eschatology: Jesus
will one day come in his kingdom. Ehrman states that there is
one codex Bezae that takes this futuristic eschatology even further, as
it presents the thief saying, "Remember me in the day of your coming."
Ehrman believes that the reading in which Jesus comes into
his kingdom is earlier. It's attested in "the best of our Alexandrian
witnesses", and it is consistent with Luke's overall eschatology, in
which the kingdom is already present. Ehrman also points out that the
reading in which Jesus comes in his kingdom does not exactly
mesh well with its immediate context, for Jesus tells the thief that
"Today you will be with me in paradise", showing that the context was
about something more immediate, not something in the future. (That
verse is interpreted differently within Armstrongite and Seventh-Day
Adventist circles, which believe that the dead are unconscious between
the time of death and the resurrection of the last day. Essentially,
they believe the comma should be in a different place so that the verse
would read: "Verily I say to you today, you shall be with me in
paradise.)
2. On page 234, Ehrman describes Luke's eschatology, as he understands it:
""Indeed, for Luke the disciples do
see the Kingdom of God, but not its having come in power. In the
mission of the seventy, the kingdom of God has 'come near' (10:9, 11);
in Jesus' own mission, it is said to have 'arrived' (11:20) and thus
already to be 'in your midst' (17:21). Even in Luke, though, these
experiences of the kingdom are proleptic of the final denouement in
which the kingdom is to come in a decisive act of history at the end of
the age (Luke 21:7-32). The tragic experiences of the world prior to
that coming of the kingdom are mirrored in the experiences of Luke's
Jesus, whose own tragedy comes in his martyrdom. Moreover, just as the
world experiences a proleptic vision of God's kingdom (in Jesus'
ministry) prior to the eschatological woes that will finally usher it
in, so too Jesus experiences and manifests this kingdom before suffering
and 'entering into his glory' (24:26)."
The Kingdom of God may
have come at Jesus' first advent in the sense that Jesus was the king of
the kingdom, and that Jesus was giving people a foretaste of what the
kingdom at his second coming would be like: a time when demons are
subordinated and people are healed. I wonder, though, why Jesus would
come and give people a foretaste of a future kingdom that would come
millennia in the future (maybe even beyond that). What would be the
point? Maybe Jesus in Luke thought that the future kingdom was
imminent. That has been debated. See here.