Despite more than a century of contentious debate in the academy concerning Jesus’ understanding and proclamation of the kingdom of God, it is fairly clear what the majority of Jews at the time believed about it. No one questioned what Jesus or John the Baptist meant by the kingdom of God, because it was part of a commonly held “apocalyptic” narrative of history. 

In this way, the roiling disputes of modern New Testament studies seem far removed from actual pages of the New Testament. The simplest explanation for this lack of dispute (i.e., the law of parsimony) is that Jesus and the apostles simply assumed the various elements of their Jewish apocalyptic worldview (e.g., the day of the Lord, judgment of the wicked, resurrection of the dead, and messianic kingdom) to be a fact of reality. - John P. Harrigan