Jesus' Meals with Sinners

To investigate Jesus' associations with 'tax collectors and sinners' within the Jewish apocalyptic framework, Serhii Smahlo identifies the essential features of the gospel accounts and examines their alignment with an eschatological vision found in Jewish tradition. The overall survey reveals a consistent motif: it is the presence of 'unexpected participants,' explained by Jesus in terms of reversal, that causes indignation among his opponents. Viewing this motif against the background of early Jewish eschatological expectations, Serhii Smahlo argues that Jesus' meals with 'unexpected participants' were a specific enactment of eschatological reversal, reflecting both a close connection to common apocalyptic expectations and a certain discrepancy from them, which might explain the conflict and rejection surrounding these events.1 Introduction
1.1 The Subject of the Study
1.2 The History of the Issue
1.3 Problem Statement
1.4 Research Hypothesis
1.5 Methodology
2 Jesus’s Meals with Tax Collectors and Sinners: Finding and Interpreting Key Features
2.1 A Survey of the Main Accounts
2.2 Interpreting the Key Motif
2.3 The Reversal with Unexpected Participants in the Context of a Meal
2.4 Other Accounts with Unexpected Participants
2.5 Eschatological Reversal as a Background
3 Meals and Reversal in the Jewish Tradition
3.1 YHWH’s Feast in Isaiah 25:6–8
3.2 Banquet with the Son of Man in 1 Enoch 62:14–16
3.3 Table Fellowship in the Yaḥad (1QS and 1QSa)
4 Jesus’s Meals with Sinners as a Performance of a Reversal
4.1 Outlining the Matching Features
4.2 Outlining the Mismatched Features
4.3 Jesus’s Reversal Within the Cultural Pattern
4.4 Jesus’s Reversal Within the Broader Context of Jesus’s Life
4.5 Jesus’s Reversal as an Apocalyptic Sign
4.6 Conclusion
4.7 Sketching the Theological Perspective