representative’—Israel itself being seen as God’s son in several biblical and post-biblical passages.37 It is historically probable, then, that Jesus not only proclaimed the judgment of God against Israel, but also, in summoning men and women to follow him and in his healing miracles and table-fellowship with outcasts, enacted the inauguration of the reconstituted Israel of the new age, an idea and an entity which only attains coherence if he in some sense represents or embodies Israel in himself.