The Kingdom of God on Earth: The Vision of Daniel 7

The Kingdom of God on Earth: The Vision of Daniel 7

On this Website, I’ve touched on the Apocalypse and apocalyptic impulses in our society many times. For instance, you can read my other research and ideas on this matter in the following essays:

• The American Apocalypse
• Robert Jewett’s The Captain America Complex
• The Beatitudes of Jesus
• A Vision of the End: An Exegesis of Revelations 12
• Hugh J. Schonfield’s “The Passover Plot”: Blaming the Victim

There’s no question that Daniel 7 had a powerful effect on early Christian apocalyptic thinking. But modern readers have a serious misconception about what the term “the kingdom of God on earth” meant to people in Biblical times. It wasn’t a dramatic ontological break in physical reality, like the heavens renting open magically and the Lord descending. It was the Revolution: a new social order that believers would create, based soundly on religious principles. The Essenes were the forefathers of Christianity—John the Baptist was an Essene, and he was Christ’s mentor—and by living out their apocalyptic faith, in anticipation of the coming war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, they were trying to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

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Daniel 7 (King James Version)

Daniel 7

1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.

2 Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.

3 And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.

4 The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it.

5 And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.

6 After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads; and dominion was given to it.

7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.

8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.

9 I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his wheels as burning fire.

10 A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.

11 I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the horn spake: I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame.

12 As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time.

13 I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.

14 And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

15 I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me.

16 I came near unto one of them that stood by, and asked him the truth of all this. So he told me, and made me know the interpretation of the things.

17 These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth.

18 But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.

19 Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron, and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with his feet;

20 And of the ten horns that were in his head, and of the other which came up, and before whom three fell; even of that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows.

21 I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them;

22 Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.

23 Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.

24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.

25 And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.

26 But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end.

27 And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

28 Hitherto is the end of the matter. As for me Daniel, my cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I kept the matter in my heart.

The Kingdom of God on Earth: The Vision of Daniel 7

Daniel 7 stands at the crux between Old and New Testament theology. As far as Old Testament theology is concerned, the sentiment expressed in Daniel 7 is the end of the road. With the gradual disintegration of the Mosaic and eventually the Davidic covenants, the later prophets, ranging from Hosea to Isaiah to Jeremiah, were forced to formulate a theology that grew progressively apocalyptic. After the surrender of the Hebrew faith to despair under prolonged foreign oppression, the spiritual needs of the Jews gave way at last to the full expression of their apocalyptic-messianic-eschatological longings, as expressed in Daniel 7.

As such, Daniel also served as a model for the visionary vehicle that (allegedly) John used in the book of Revelation to express the dire eschatological hunger of the first Christians. In fact, John explicitly adapts specific figures (i.e., the hydra-headed beast, the triumphant celestial white-haired figure on the throne) from Daniel in general and chapter 7 in particular. When you come to realize the profound extent of the widespread appearance of such apocalyptic images in the eschatological thinking that came to dominate the succeeding body of Christian theology, you appreciate the key significance of the book of Daniel and of chapter 7 in the main corpus of Judeo-Christian tradition.

Daniel formulated his vision (or it occurred to him) as a response to the gross humiliation the Hebrew people suffered under the Alexandrine empire following the revolt of the Maccabees. Among Biblical scholars, it is generally agreed that the four beasts of Daniel's vision represent the Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Greek empires respectively. (Certainly this interpretation is considerably strengthened by Daniel's use as a symbol of the griffin, which in ancient Mesopotamian iconography undoubtedly represents the Babylonian empire.) Taken thus, the vision stands as an overt prophecy of God's wrath unleashed on the four civilizations that subjugated Israel—a revenge effectuated through the agency of an apparently messianic being (the throned figure of verse 9).

There is little doubt that the last empire is regarded with the greatest terror and hatred. With its clearly leveling and culturally ameliorating intent ("it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet," v. 7), it is plainly identifiable as "Alexander's empire, with its policy of Hellenization" (2). In response to this threat of cultural assimilation and annihilation posed by the Greeks (and the monarch Antiochus Epiphanes in particular [3]), Daniel foresees the solution expressed by seemingly all religious minorities oppressed by an occupying force, a messiah. (4)

In Daniel's case, it is of special importance that the messianic "son of man" (v. 13) enacts the advent described in vs. 14 and 27, for it heralds what Jesus would call "the kingdom of God on earth." This importance stems not only from the fact that "the son of man" who serves "the Ancient of Days" (the Lord) is patently divine. As Arthur Jeffery notes, "In apocalyptic [,] men are symbolized by beasts, but celestial beings by the human form (cf. Enoch 89-90).” (5)

What is of superior significance concerning Daniel's vision of the advent is that it is explicitly the fulfillment of the covenant God made with Abraham, the contract of salvation through divine grace. Belief in this covenant fuelled the radical faith that inspired Jeremiah and the composition of the book of Job, when the Hebrew people failed to uphold the conditional covenants of Moses and David.

God's summons to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 entailed the promise of the homeland of Israel, a great historical destiny for his offspring, and sovereignty over the other nations of the world. In the same way, the mission of Daniel's "son of man" (quite possibly a messianic Davidic king acting as God's viceroy) is the fulfillment of God's bond, as vs. 14 and 27 clearly illustrate; the "son of man”’s anticipated works of glory correspond with the three major vows God swore unto Abraham.

In the moment of the deepest desperation Israel had yet known—the insidious campaign of religious/cultural eradication waged by Antiochus after the abortive Maccabean rebellion—the spiritual imagination of the Jewish people, as manifested in Daniel 7, turned to the foundation of their faith, Jehovah's covenant of grace with Abraham. In times of gravest crisis past—those of the authorship of the books of Jeremiah and Job, to be specific—Israel had reacted in a similar fashion with a return to the Abrahamic covenant combined with apocalyptic desires. (And be it not forgotten that Job, in Job 19:25-29, also hungered for a Redeemer.)

But never before had the thirst for an eschatological era been so overwhelming, or the need for a savior been so overpowering; it required a time of the sharpest emergency and desperation to bring into being the extraordinary longing of the character described in Daniel's vision. From subsequent historical evidence, it appears that the cultural tension intensified to the point that by the time of Jesus, it had reached the point where it could no longer be tolerated.

While some Hebrews continued to use visions similar to Daniel to express their crucial need for the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham, others ceased to. By the reign of Tiberius, at least one body of believers was prepared to see the eschatological justification of the radical source of Israel's faith in Yahweh—his original covenant with Abraham—incarnated in the ministry of the man who advertised himself as Jesus the Christ.

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NOTES

1. Arthur Jeffery, Exegesis, "The Book of Daniel," The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. VI. (New York, 1956), page 453.

2. Ibid., p. 455.

3. Ibid., p. 456.

4. Vittorio Lanternari analyzes this significant phenomenon of nationalistic fervor as it appears in modern messianic cults in his The Religions of the Oppressed (New York, 1963)

5. Jeffery, op. cit., p. 460.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jeffery, Arthur. Exegesis. "The Book of Daniel." The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. VI. New York, 1956.

Lanternari, Vittorio. The Religions of the Oppressed. New York, 1963.

Note: I originally wrote an earlier version of this academic paper in April 1977 for a Religion course while a senior at Princeton.

Hugh J. Schonfield’s "The Passover Plot": Blaming the Victim

The rock face of Golgotha, the hill of skulls where Christ was crucified. See the eyes? Isn't it creepy?

Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot: Blaming the Victim

Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield

Get set to be shocked. In the Sixties, Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield’s Bantam Books paperback edition of his bestseller The Passover Plot was, without question, the most famous book of popular Biblical scholarship at the time. As a teenager back then, I remember it was supposed to contain The Big Secret About Christianity that everyone was slavering for, and like everyone else, I was intensely curious about it.

The ossurary of Herod

As readers of my essay “The American Apocalypse” know, the two real Big Secrets about Christianity are that 1) John the Baptist, an Essene, was real founder of Christianity; he was Christ’s mentor, and therefore Christianity is really an Essene religion, and 2) St. Paul corrupted the young Jesus religion by injecting sexual guilt into it where none existed before, making the sins of the flesh more important than the sins of the spirit.

Imagine my surprise when I finally read The Passover Plot as a junior at Princeton in 1976—and learned that Schonfield was merely Mel Gibson in reverse. Read on and you’ll see.

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Hugh J. Schonfield’s The Passover Plot: Blaming the Victim

Albert Schweitzer remarked in The Quest for the Historical Jesus that nothing reveals a man so much as his interpretation of the life of Jesus. If it is true—and it probably is—then in his bestselling so-called "New Light on the History of Jesus," The Passover Plot, Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield certainly exposes the predilections of his personality, asserting that Jesus planned his own martyrdom deliberately with the help of his disciples.

Schonfield goes to great and unrealistic lengths to assert that a very few members of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem—the Pharisees priesthood, particularly Caiphas—had no role whatsoever in Christ’s death. While there’s no questions that the vicious Roman occupiers must bear the ultimate blame for Christ’s death, there’s also no question that certain members of the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem, terrified of their brutal occupiers, played some role in helping the Romans eliminate an innocent man that nearly everyone regarded as a dangerous heretic and a potential political revolutionary. You just didn’t go around saying, “I’m the King—yes, I’m more important than the Emperor—and by the way, I happen to be the Son of God too.” It would be like a radical today say, “Yeah, I’m the real President of the United States, so let's overthrow the government—and by the way, I’m God too.” From their points of view, both the Pharisees and the Romans were understandably shocked by Christ’s assertions. But that doesn’t excuse the murder of an innocent, peaceloving man.

Let me make it very clear: I am not endorsing the vicious medieval blood-libel canard of Mel Gilson and his ilk that “the Jews killed Jesus.” But it’s also an irrefutable historical fact that a tiny minority of the Jewish priesthood in Jerusalem played a minor administrative role in Christ’s death by handing him over to the Romans to placate the unforgiving foreign occupiers.

A contemporary depiction of Herod Agrippa

Herod, the ranting tyrant

No, the Jews most definitely didn't kill Jesus. But for God's sake, Mr. Schonfield, don't say Jesus had himself killed!

Schonfield declares, "We must never let theology entice us away from the historical circumstances, so that we lose contact with the factors which Jesus had to take into account." Yet through his avowed purpose, stated publicly before he deals with the facts, and through his selection of evidence, he quite clearly reveals his own prejudices. In the process he commits such grave errors of inobjectivity that he renders his own interpretation useless.

Giotto's Christ Before Caiaiphas (1304-6)

For one hundred and thirty pages, Schonfield hems and haws through the accumulation of evidence he attempts to build up to bolster his theory that Jesus, seized with a violent messianic complex, plotted his own martyrdom and carefully planned to insure his crucifixion in order to guarantee his place in history. Up until page 130, Schonfield maintains a veneer of reasonability; while much of his evidence is tangential, not to say circumstantial, and while much of his hypothesis is questionable, still, he does not rave like a zealot.

Then comes the bombshell. On page 130, he steps forward and exposes himself. What we see is a shock, and yet we must thank him for being so forthright. Otherwise we might mistake him for a serious Biblical scholar, if he did not unashamedly declare the rationale for his argument. His revelation is so astounding, and its implications so disturbing, that it deserves to be quoted in full here:

We have evidence that the chief priests at the time were arrogant and high-handed, loving wealth and power and position. This has been true of hierarchies of different lands at many periods. But in Palestine just now they were responsible in the difficult conditions of alien domination for the maintenance of public order, for assuring the continuity of national existence and the survival of the Temple as the world-centre of Jewish faith. Their present fears were by no means ill-founded, as Jewish history of the following decades abundantly confirmed. Better that one man should die than multitudes, including innocent women and children. The liquidation of individuals was commonplace in those days, and notorious during the closing years of the reign of Tiberius. It is still tolerated two thousand years later with all our vaunted concern for human rights. We must beware of judging what happened in light of what Christians believe about Jesus. We have to see him as he appeared to the Council in their grave predicament. From their point of view the decision they arrived at was fully justified, and Jesus, well knowing what he was doing, had quite deliberately forced them to take it by his skillfully planned and calculated activities. If he had not presented himself as a claimant of the throne of Israel and a menace to national security he would have been completely ignored by the Sanhedrin. He had himself made doubly sure that they would proceed to extremes against him by goading them with his words and behaviour, so that any possible mitigation of their severity would be offset by the personal animus he had intentionally created. The Council might imagine they were exercising their own free will in determining to destroy Jesus, and Judas Iscariot might believe the same in betraying him; but in fact the comprehensive engineer of the Passover Plot was Jesus himself. Their responses were governed by his ability to assess their reactions when he applied appropriate stimuli. Thus it was assured that the Scriptures would be fulfilled. (2) [Regarding spelling and punctuation, Schonfield is British.]

"I have frequently been urged by numerous readers to set down my convictions about Jesus," Schonfield informs us in his introduction. "They were persuaded that, in my unusual position as a Jew who has devoted a lifetime to the sympathetic elucidation of Christian Origins and is not connected with any section of the Church, I ought to have seen things which have escaped the observation of those more directly involved." (3) "Here Schonfield reveals the reason for his peculiar (to say the least) view of the Passion. It is understandable why he as a Jew would resent the blame Christians have placed on Jews for the Crucifixion as an excuse for anti-Semitism (when the scapegoating is only a transference of guilt felt by Christians for the death of Jesus). As Schonfield himself says:

The calumny that the Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus has all along been an antisemitic fraud perpetrated by the Church when it became paganised, and has been a direct cause of untold suffering and persecution inflicted on the Jews down the centuries. The present-day qualified second-thoughts of the Roman Church on the subject of Jewish 'deicide' has come very belatedly and is a totally inadequate retraction. (4)

Yet however understandable Schonfield's anger is, it is not excusable that he rationalize the murder of a being who, if nothing else, was a totally innocent man. What compounds Schonfield's crime is that he shows an awareness of the moral questions at stake and then he chooses to ignore them. He admits that "the liquidation of individuals" "is still tolerated two thousand years later with all our vaunted concern for human rights," and yet he refuses to apply that principle in the case of Jesus, because Jesus, as a holy man so obscure that our knowledge of him is almost totally limited to the adulatory writings of his disciples, posed a lethal threat to the integrity of the Jewish state.

A "battlefield Christ" scarecrow from the hellish trenches of World War One

Schonfield justifies Christ's execution in terms of his "menace to national security," through what even Schonfield admits was a kangaroo court. But by doing so, ironically enough, he is invoking the same brand of paranoid hysteria that drove George W. Bush to invade Iraq, murder a million innocent people, and torture countless others.

Critic Dwight MacDonald once wrote that a true liberal or a true conservative supports a cause that conforms to his principles even if it contradicts with his personal feelings. By seeking to rationalize the murder of an innocent man, Schonfield is revealing the lack of integrity of his principles. When he asserts of the Pharisees, "From their point of view the decision they arrived at was fully justified," he does not seem to realize that Hitler acted out of the same sincerity in slaughtering six million Jews; at the bottom of his heart he believed he was defending the West from a pernicious threat. The best Schonfield can do is parrot (unconsciously, I hope) Caiaphas: "Better that one man should die than multitudes, including innocent women and children." Or as Caiaphas said, "For the sake of the nation, Jesus must die."

To draw another contemporary example, it might be pleasant to shoot Osama Bin Laden in the head. I’m sure Bin Laden wouldn’t object, since he doesn’t seem to mind killing people very much. The only problem is, then you’re adopting the same principles as Bin Laden, that is, killing for peace, and then your action entirely justifies the suppositions of moral intellects like your homicidal murder victim. By acting in such a fashion, you cancel out your moral imperative. We only hope Schonfield will someday understand.

This is unfortunate, because he has some interesting things to say. Jesus is quoted as having made some remarks that are very much in keeping with Schonfield's theory, that he knew of his approaching martyrdom and death. The problem here is these remarks could have been added later by adherents who realized that if Jesus indeed had been omnipotent and all-knowing, then of course he must have foreseen his coming end.

Golgotha

In this matter, Schonfield is in a dilemma, although he doesn’t understand it, for he cannot bring himself to decide whether he accepts the veracity of the New Testament. He often contradicts himself, but here I will only provide two outstanding examples.

The tomb of Herod

Many times Schonfield relies heavily on the literal wording of the New Testament, taking them to recount the exact truth of what Jesus did, particularly when Jesus is making statements alluding to the coming end of his ministry; for instance, "My hour is not yet come," which Schonfield takes at face value. (6) Yet on the same page he lambasts two Biblical scholars who hold an orthodox view of the divinity of Jesus, because their view "transfers judgement to the New Testament, whose views reflecting subsequent Christian opinion we are invited to endorse as the truth." (7)

The ancient ossuary that was recently thought to be "the tomb of Jesus"

He readily admits that one must judge "allowing for the exaggeration in the Gospel tradition," (8) and of the Apostles he writes, "In their zeal they even amplified and supplemented the account of his experiences, as certain texts appeared to require additional incidents which could fulfill them." (9) Yet he never questions the incidents in the Gospels that support his convictions.

The garden tomb of Jesus

Why do the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, with their explicit message that Jesus had foreknowledge of his betrayal, death, and resurrection, necessarily have to be true, when the Synoptic Apostles even have difficulty agreeing on which night this incredibly important event in their lives took place? Who says Jesus rose from the tomb and talked to them? Considering the large number of religious experiences and visions experienced by the disciples, why could Jesus' ghost not have been a hallucination, a wish-fulfillment, if not an outright lie?

The supposed tomb of Jesus

Schonfield does not bother to ask these questions; he dare not doubt the hypothesis he has erected; and as a result of his lack of intellectual integrity, a serious reader cannot even begin to take his position seriously. The only regret I have is that his facile interpretation has reached an extraordinary audience, even for a popular religious work, and I fear that too many uncritical readers will accept his views without thinking. Such shoddy thinking, in a matter of such importance to the West as the life and death of Jesus, has no excuse.

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The brooding skull of Golgotha: notice how the eyes never leave you

NOTES

1. Dr. Hugh J. Schonfield, The Passover Plot (New York, 1966), p. 93.
2. Ibid., pp. 130-1.
3. Ibid., p. 2.
4. Ibid., p. 142.
5. Ibid., pp. 142-5.
6. Ibid., p. 37.
7. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Schonfield, Dr. Hugh J. The Passover Plot. Bantam Books, New York, 1966.

A fascinating Maori Christ

AFTERWORD

In 1976, at the same time I originally wrote this academic paper, fascinatingly enough, the Israeli film company Golan-Globus released a film version of The Passover Plot, directed by Michael Campus and starring Zalman King as Yeshua (Jesus), Donald Pleasence as Pontius Pilate, Harry Andrews, Scott Wilson, Dan Hedaya, and Hugh Griffith. Because of heretical nature of the film, it was allegedly suppressed (or deliberately ignored), and today it’s available by download from the Internet.

Zalman King as Jesus in the film The Passover Plot (1976)

Incidentally, I originally wrote this essay as an academic paper for a Princeton Religion course on “The Origins of Christianity” while a junior in May 1976 for the esteemed religious scholar Dr. Phillip Ashby. He praised the paper, commenting: “Very insightful critical analysis of Schonfield.”

A coin of the Knights Templar