An established tradition in studies of the historical Jesus (Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer) sees Jesus first and foremost as an apocalypticist prophet who, like his probable first mentor John the Baptist, focused primarily on the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. But Jesus died, and the early generations of followers realised that the Kingdom of God was not going to appear imminently on Earth, at which point Jesus’s apocalypticism started gradually to be softened or, to put it another way, censored. In semiotic terms this “censorship” took place through the attenuation of a number of space-time marks: Jesus’s immediate apocalypticism was softened by having an (indefinite) future perspective grafted onto it; with the result that the concrete political spatiality of the Kingdom of God was reconfigured into a spatiality that was more religious and spiritual. In this way a number of opposites came to coexist and overall there is a strategically willed effect of indeterminacy, where the Kingdom of God oscillates between present and future, between the concreteness of a political space (Palestine) and the spirituality of a religious space (interiority or Heaven), that is in the hands of God (theocentric) but at the same time entrusted to a Jesus who is in the process of becoming divine, the Son of Man who will return to Earth for the Last Judgement.

Jesus censored. Semiotic aspects of Jesus’s sayings about the Kingdom of God

TRAINI, STEFANO
2015-01-01

Abstract

An established tradition in studies of the historical Jesus (Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer) sees Jesus first and foremost as an apocalypticist prophet who, like his probable first mentor John the Baptist, focused primarily on the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God. But Jesus died, and the early generations of followers realised that the Kingdom of God was not going to appear imminently on Earth, at which point Jesus’s apocalypticism started gradually to be softened or, to put it another way, censored. In semiotic terms this “censorship” took place through the attenuation of a number of space-time marks: Jesus’s immediate apocalypticism was softened by having an (indefinite) future perspective grafted onto it; with the result that the concrete political spatiality of the Kingdom of God was reconfigured into a spatiality that was more religious and spiritual. In this way a number of opposites came to coexist and overall there is a strategically willed effect of indeterminacy, where the Kingdom of God oscillates between present and future, between the concreteness of a political space (Palestine) and the spirituality of a religious space (interiority or Heaven), that is in the hands of God (theocentric) but at the same time entrusted to a Jesus who is in the process of becoming divine, the Son of Man who will return to Earth for the Last Judgement.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11575/93053
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