In this introductory session, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg introduced the idea of the matrix of Jesus. The matrix can be viewed as the context of Jesus’ life and ministry and is crucial to understanding Jesus. Try to imagine Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. outside of the time and place of their lives. So it is with the gospel of Jesus.
The book of Daniel provides a lead-in to Jewish theology regarding the Kingdom of God in the first century CE. Daniel is primarily written during the time of the Maccabean revolt against the Greco-Syrian Empire in the 160’s BCE. The story tells of the coming kingdom which will usher in an age of divine rule and the end of evil and empire – eschaton. By the time of Jesus’ arrival, the Roman Empire is in ascendance. The Hebrew people have spent most of the last 600 years under the yoke of foreign powers. A yearning for the Kingdom of God is building.
It is the coming, inevitable clash of empire and eschaton that is the matrix of Jesus.
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