All of the kingdoms: Semitic idiom in the Synoptic Gospels and related Jewish literature

The kingdom of God/heaven is a basic concept of the New Testament and of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Generations of Christian scholarship and commentary have identified the "kingdom of God" in the Gospels of Luke and Mark with the "kingdom of Heaven" in the Gospel of Matthew. The assumption is that these terms are interchangeable. However, Jesus, his disciples and of the authors of the bulk of the New Testament all came from Jewish backgrounds. From the Jewish traditions of the first century there were clearly distinct understandings of these two idioms. It is conceivable that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels used both idioms with different meanings. The literary processes of Mishnah, Midrash and Targum explain the differences of the idioms, one that is used exclusively in Palestinian Jewish Hebrew and the other of which is found exclusively in Targumic Aramaic. This study assumes a Jewish milieu for the listeners of the original oral teachings of Jesus and for the audience of the Synoptic Gospels.;Since the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the modern study of the New Testament, and especially since Weiss, Schweitzer and the "First Quest for the Historical Jesus," the kingdom of God and kingdom of heaven have been studied as a unified concept. The purpose of this study is to test the unified concept hypothesis against an alternative hypothesis that "kingdom of God" was an Aramaic Jewish idiom for God's perfect eschatological world, and that "kingdom of heaven" was a different Hebrew idiom referring to the obligation to perform God's commandments. The "kingdom of God" as used in the Targum, the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, best explains the use of the kingdom of God in the gospels of Mark and Luke. Similarly the "kingdom of heaven" as used in the Hebrew literature of the Mishnah and halakhic Midrashim, best enhances the understanding of that idiom in the Gospel of Matthew.