pre-existence in heaven of all the good things belonging to the Kingdom of God was at all generally current in the Late-Jewish world of ideas, and thinks that the occasional references [1] to a pre-existing Jerusalem, which shall finally be brought down to the earth, do not suffice to establish the theory. Similarly, he thinks it doubtful whether Jesus used the terms "this world (age)," "the world (age) to come" in the eschatological sense which is generally attached to them, and doubts, on linguistic grounds, whether they can have been used at all. Even the use of [Hebrew] or [Hebrew] for "world" cannot be proved. In the pre-Christian period there is much reason to doubt its occurrence, though in later Jewish literature it is frequent. The expression en th paliggenesia in Matt. xix. 28, is specifically Greek and cannot be reproduced in either Hebrew or Aramaic. It is very strange that the use which Jesus makes of Amen is unknown in the whole of Jewish literature. According to the proper idiom of the language "[Hebrew] is never used to emphasise one's own speech, but always with reference to the speech, prayer, benediction, oath, or curse of another." Jesus, therefore, if He used the expression in this sense, must have given it a new meaning as a formula of asseveration, in place of the oath which He forbade.
All these acute observations are marked by the general tendency which was observable in the interpretation of the term Son of Man, that is, by the endeavour so to weaken down the eschatological conceptions of the Kingdom and the Messiah, that the hypothesis of a making-present and spiritualising of these conceptions in the teaching of Jesus might appear inherently and linguistically possible and natural. The polemic against the pre-existent realities of the Kingdom of God is intended to show that for Jesus the Reign of God is a present benefit, which can be sought after, given, possessed, and taken. Even before the time of Jesus, according to Dalman, a tendency had shown itself to lay less emphasis, in connexion with the hope of the future, upon the national Jewish element. Jesus forced this element still farther into the background, and gave a more decided prominence to the purely religious element. "For Him the reign of God was the Divine power which from this time onward was steadily to carry forward the renewal of the world, and also the renewed world, into which men shall one day enter, which even now offers itself, and therefore can be grasped and received as a present good." The supernatural coming of the Kingdom is only the final stage of the coming which is now being inwardly spiritually brought about by the preaching of Jesus. Though He may perhaps have spoken of "this" world and the "world to come," these expressions had in His use of them no very special importance. It is for Him less a question of an antithesis between "then" and "
- ↑ See the Apocalypse of Baruch, and Fourth Ezra.
