Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, second edition (Yale University Press, 2000), 100-101.
Jesus’ resurrection compelled Paul to profess the presentness of redemption; creation’s bondage to decay, its futurity (Rom 8). And the evolving evangelical emphasis on realized eschatology saved Christian tradition from the embarrassment of its apocalyptic past while enhancing the spiritual prestige and value of the church, whose establishment thereby became the object of Jesus’ mission. A realized eschatology, in other words, so explains away the difficulty of the continuing delay of the End that it fails the criterion of dissimilarity: the provenance of such a teaching, according to this reasoning, must be the post-resurrection church. Those scholars who want to argue that Jesus really did announce a present rather than future Kingdom somewhat compromise their case by relying, necessarily, on the later strata of gospel tradition. A Jesus preaching such a Kingdom would have been an excellent Christian theologian but a baffling early first-century Jew.
The Amateur Exegete 