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Nineteenth-century scholarship often argued that Christianity succeeded through the Hellenization of its theology, replacing Jewish national and terrestrial eschatology with Platonic spiritual interpretation. Robert Wilken’s The Land Called Holy (1992) fundamentally disrupted this narrative for the patristic period, demonstrating that Christian engagement with Jerusalem and sacred geography intensified after the fourth century rather than disappearing. By contrast, New Testament scholarship’s consideration of eschatology long maintained the spiritualization thesis with a surprising consistency, arguing that earliest Christianity systematically reoriented Israel’s territorial hopes toward Christological and ecclesial categories. This lecture sets out to interrogate this assumption of a unilateral Christianization or spiritualization in the earliest texts. It will suggest instead that in Jesus and Paul, the Evangelists, and even Revelation, there are signs that concrete earthly and universal heavenly hopes for Jerusalem continue to coexist in Christianity’s canonical texts. If true, this would suggest a line of continuity not only with the later patristic reflection but also, conversely, with Jewish thought from Ezekiel via Philo to the rabbis.
