Indiana Jones, John Lennon and Jesus’ Second Coming

Is Jesus coming back, and if so, when?

This is a question that followers of Jesus and those who study those followers have asked since the early days of the Jesus movement. But when did these questions start and by whom? Such is the preoccupation of Dr. Tucker S. Ferda in his latest book, which was published last September by Eerdmans Publishing.

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Last week, Ferda presented an overview of “Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins” as part of a series of book talks hosted by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s Barbour Library. The library has posted a recording of the talk, a reading guide and a bibliography on its website for those interested in uncovering the secrets of Christianity’s greatest eschatological mystery and in finding perhaps not when Jesus will return but why it’s thought that he will.

“We can't understand modern views on the Second Coming if we don't see how they've been shaped by social and cultural forces in reception history,” Ferda told a crowd in person and online last Thursday. Ferda said he was parsing through the rare books collection at the Barbour Library when he came upon an argument about the Second Coming by rationalists and deists of the Enlightenment from the 1600s and 1700s.

“I remember I had these white gloves on, and you know, it’s probably the closest to Indiana Jones I’m ever going to be,” Ferda said as he traced the Enlightenment philosophers’ reasoning away from Jesus’ promise to come again and the implications that such an eschatological hope might have on cultural reformers and marginalized classes in their time. In those texts, he recognized a familiar move in biblical scholarship that continues to gain momentum even in contemporary interpretations of Christianity, which is to assume that Jesus is perfect but that his followers misunderstood, misinterpreted or misrepresented what he said out of their misguided motivations.

Ferda summed up the stance that has been popularized and passed down particularly through Protestantism as people have engaged and interpreted the Bible for themselves and their times by quoting John Lennon: “Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

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As Ferda traced how Lennon came to this opinion, he discussed the idea of how the Bible has been received and attitudes passed down over time. This concept of reception history is central to Ferda’s book and where his research begins.

“It’s easy to think it’s just, ‘I'm reading the Bible. It’s right there in front of me. It's me and the text, right?’ But between me and the Bible, there’s 2,000 years of translation, history and cultural exchange and theological debate and all kinds of things that really impact and influence the way I make meaning of the text,” Ferda explained.

In order to discover where the idea of the Second Coming comes from, Ferda worked backward, starting with reception history before exegeting primary texts in their own context and conducting historical Jesus research. He began his research with the most recent modern New Testament scholarship and described a more than 60-year silence on the topic of the Second Coming. Ferda described how an unquestioned consensus that the concept of the Second Coming was a fascination by those who followed Jesus, not by the sage himself, developed over the past half-century. He remembered hearing in various lecture halls professors answering questions about the Second Coming, not with researched arguments but by reference to “what scholars agree” as the origins of this theological concept.

Ferda set out to break what he considered a “sustained kind of silence on the question.” He told the crowd, “Nobody's writing about this.” However, Ferda also was clear his work was historical and not theological. “If you came thinking I was going to predict the day and time of the return of Christ, you’re going to be very disappointed,” he said.

“This is a work of history, so my fundamental question is asking, ‘Where did this belief in the Second Coming of Jesus come from?’ That might seem really straightforward, but it’s actually a very complicated question,” he said.

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What complicates the question is the “habit of reading” that shapes each generation of Christians from the inherited arguments and interpretations of the past. The first habit is shown in the opinion of Lennon and how his ideas were influenced by the Enlightenment. Ferda described this habit as being largely traced throughout Protestantism and marked by a presumption “where the good stuff in Christianity we identify with Jesus and all the stuff we don’t like, we identify with his followers.”

Another habit is to foil Jesus against the thinkers of his time so that if Jesus is for something, other teachers or traditions were probably against it. Ferda explained how for many Christian scholars and preachers, it wasn’t enough to say Jesus stood up for women, outcasts and sinners without emphasizing that the Jews of his time did not. Therefore, when the gospels depict Jesus as understanding himself to be the messiah, it has to be in contrast to Jewish messianism.

But Ferda could not find evidence that Jesus himself was silent on the subject of his return, nor that he cast this kind of oppositional view of his messianic turn. Ferda cited what he described as the earliest document in the New Testament, Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. In First Thessalonians, Paul comforts those who are grieving the dead and tells them to have confidence in a general resurrection when Christ returns. Ferda depicted Paul’s eschatological preaching as formed through summary, not direct quotations of Jesus. “The claim in Paul’s letters is Jesus said something about this from our earliest text to be preserved around 50 C.E., or 20 years removed from the ministry of Jesus,” said Ferda.

Later depictions of Jesus through the Gospels, particularly of Matthew, Mark and Thomas, put the promise of return in the mouth of Jesus himself. In working with these early Christian texts through the lens of the historical figure of Jesus, Ferda argued that the “eschatological imminence” that is captured through the belief traditions of the Second Coming, the coming Day of the Lord, and the final judgment is present in the teaching of Jesus and that there is a sense that this is happening soon.

“My argument is going to be that this Second Coming hope does indeed go back to Jesus, and it’s not something that was invented in the post-Easter period,” Ferda told the audience. This was news he didn’t want to share at first when he realized his research would contradict the general scholarly consensus and the views of Lennon, perhaps even suggesting that Jesus did not 100% know of what and when he was speaking when he made claims and promises to his followers.

“There's this idea, I think, especially in Protestantism, that the further back we go, the more perfect things get,” said Ferda, describing a deeply entrenched nostalgia in certain Christian habits of reading. “At the beginning of the movement, everything was kind of there that we needed, and all of the mistakes and all of the errors crept in later, and they crept in from the outside, right?” Ferda said as heads nodded.

As a historian looking at the historical Jesus, the New Testament, Enlightenment exegesis and contemporary theological readings of Scripture, Ferda doesn’t need to trace the theological implications of Jesus making mistaken predictions of the coming kingdom of God. But as a Christian and a member of Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Ferda struggled to make sense of his findings. According to Ferda, eschatology births radical ethical visions, many of which have value in countercultural Christian movements.

Ferda urged humility as people engage with this version of Jesus embodying the faithful uncertainty of his own tumultuous time, suggesting that even a messy hope can still be a messianic one. “I do think we lose something if we just think that in history, there is no victory of God and that future impacts how we live,” said Ferda.

“The hope of what God will do to change things is what makes us want to live differently,” Ferda said, pointing to the link between eschatology and ethics in early Christianity. “I think that is what happens in the Jesus movement.”

The lively discussion that followed Ferda’s book talk revealed that whatever the reception of the Second Coming of Jesus has been, throughout history, eschatology has influenced ethical action, suggesting that when it comes to believing in Jesus’ return, eschatology is not merely a habit of reading and receiving promises but also a habit of being and doing what manifests such promises in God’s Creation as it unfolds.