Israel’s theological aspirations thus had an inescapably historical and political referent. If someone had offered a first-century Palestinian Jew the consolation of pie in the sky, it would have been refused, no matter how kosher the pie. One of the great myths of twentieth-century scholarship is that most first-century Jews expected the space—time universe to end immediately. They did not: they expected their God to act dramatically within history, with effects that they could only describe with