하나님 나라의 현재성? - 마태복음 12:28(누가복음 11:20) 새로 읽기

It is widely agreed among scholars that the Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels and Jesus is something both present and yet to come in the future. A crux interpretum is Matthew 12:28 (= Luke 11:20), a passage usually taken as the clearest statement of the presence of the Kingdom of God. There are, however, several exegetical considerations which put the consensus into question: 1) the whole context exclusively concerns the identity of Jesus rather than the Kingdom of God per se; 2) Jesus puts his own exorcism on a par with that of the Pharisees, and that renders it quite difficult to consider Jesus as the bringer of the eschatological Kingdom in contradistinction to his Pharisaic equivalents; 3) The Kingdom of God is announced as arriving ‘upon you’, namely, upon the Pharisees, a group of people explicitly declared as fit for the Gehenna (23:33); 4) The intriguing story about an unclean spirit which moves casually in and out of a person also renders the eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ exorcism rather unlikely. With all these difficulties into consideration, it seems best to take the verse as a christological rebuttal of the charges of the Pharisees concerning his identity rather than an express statement about the eschatological realization of the Kingdom of God.