But Jesus' mission would culminate with his death which he consciously saw in terms of sacrifice. The coming aspects of the kingdom were described as imminent though uncertain in timing. He did not see beyond the destruction of Jerusalem but connected both the final judgment and the final deliverance with that event. McKnight apparently buys into Wright's complete equation of Gospel parousia texts with the destruction of the temple without responding to Dale Allison's strong challenge to Wright. The ethics of the kingdom again occupy two chapters.
Personal repentance is important only as a prerequisite to national repentance.
Clearly this was a costly discipleship given the urgency of the mission. Not all disciples were called, like the rich young ruler, literally to abandon all their material possessions, but everyone had to be prepared to do so if the need arose. However one might quibble with exegetical details here or there, this is the best contribution yet to this fledgling series, which has been uniformly good already. It is an important contibution to the Third Quest more generally, not least because it synthesizes much recent scholarship without being either so creative as to be implausible or so traditional as to be redundant.