Did Jesus Preach the Apocalypse?

Was Jesus, as some modern scholars have proposed, a proto-Marxist revolutionary? A feminist? A gay magician?

None of the above, insists Bart D. Ehrman in “Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.” Rather, as the subtitle suggests, Ehrman argues that the historical Jesus was less a gentle moralist who taught a message of love than a white-hot visionary who warned his contemporaries that the end of the world was nigh.

“Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, that God would intervene in the affairs of this planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment and establish his utopian Kingdom on Earth,” explains Ehrman. “And this was to happen within Jesus’ own generation.”

A profoundly subversive idea is at work in Ehrman’s book, as the author suggests--if Jesus believed that the world was coming to an end in his own time, then he was manifestly wrong. And if we are inclined to regard Jesus as “a great moral teacher whose ethical views can help produce a better society,” as Ehrman puts it, then we are describing something very different from the faith that Jesus embraced and preached.

“He did not propound his ethical views to show us how to create a just society and make the world a happier place for the long haul,” writes Ehrman. “For him, there wasn’t going to be a long haul.”

To be sure, the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus are more numerous and more prominent than his warnings of an apocalypse. Ehrman suggests that the authors of the New Testament emphasized the kinder and gentler Jesus precisely because they were forced to contend with the fact that the world did not come to a cataclysmic end as Jesus predicted.

To explain how he reaches such a provocative conclusion, Ehrman invites us to join him on a stroll through 2,000 years of Christian history, pausing to sum up what modern scholars have concluded about what can and cannot be known about the historical Jesus. The Gospels, for example, are no longer regarded as eyewitness testimony: “We have evidence that the stories were changed [or invented],” Ehrman writes. The extra-biblical writings of the ancient world--the writings of Josephus, for example, or the Coptic Gospel of Thomas--add very little to the body of historical evidence. And so scholars are reduced to wringing whatever meaning they can out of the sparse sources.

“The past can never be empirically proved,” Ehrman observes, “it can only be reconstructed.” He proceeds to conjure up a vivid and illuminating vision of the world in which the historical Jesus lived and died, a place where theology and politics were largely one and the same thing. Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium was suffering under Roman occupation, and Jewish resistance expressed itself through parties and sects that were rooted in religion--Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and Zealots, among others. Jesus is best understood as a product of this time and place, Ehrman argues, as “a Jewish apocalypticist who responded to the political and social crises of his day, including the domination of his nation by a foreign power, by proclaiming that his generation was living at the end of the age.”

Intriguingly, Ehrman opens his book with a provocative survey of prophets and preachers who insisted that the world was coming to an end and were proved wrong, ranging from the Montanists of the second century A.D. to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” in the late 20th century--”And the End Keeps Comin’ ” is one of the lighthearted headings in Ehrman’s book. The not so subtle message is that Jesus was not the only doomsayer whose prophecies were proved wrong. And with this message, he has prepared us for his own argument about the contrast between the historical Jesus and what Christianity has made of him--the fiery prophet was turned into the prince of peace.

“If Jesus was the apocalyptic prophet that he appears to have been, then the Christianity that emerged after his death represents a somewhat different religion from that which he himself proclaimed,” Ehrman concludes. “Rather than trying to understand what a first-century Palestinian Jew might have meant in first-century Palestine . . . , Christians tend to interpret Jesus’ life from a dogmatic, rather than a historical, perspective.”

Ehrman is a respected expert in the study of the New Testament and early Christian writings. Here, however, he steps down from the lectern and addresses a lay readership in a clear, compelling and sometimes even chatty tone of voice. Indeed, “Jesus”--rather like Richard Elliot Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?”--is a superb example of how scholarship can be as full of suspense and surprise as a well-plotted mystery.

Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life.”