Well.
In my honest opinion - Jesus was a Cosmic Christ. He didn't just change God, he didn't change man, he changed everything; from the stars in the sky to those little squiggly jobbies that live in the sea and eat silt. Jesus promised he would return in glory, that many of his listeners would not taste death before he returned. He was right! He rose from the dead and walked about among us. We are living in a post-apocalyptic world. Everything God had promised - the death of death, and hell's destruction, happened through the resurrection of Jesus. The afterlife is no longer in our hands - it is in God's. We humans are now free to act in the way that is best and most moral with respects to our weak and flawed human nature - we are no longer bound to restrictive and impractical laws. We just have to make this world the nicest place for everyone to be in, and God will fix the rest. I'm sure Jesus will come again at some point, but I believe the "apocalypse" per se has already happened.
All the events in the Bible did happen as history - but in another world, another place. When Jesus died, history was changed. The world became older, and natural, with it's own laws and mechanisms, which we could predict and control, and take into our own hands the reins of power. The death of Jesus was the death of the old world - the world without rhyme or reason, of blind superstition and angry gods who vied for supremacy over a defeated human race. The resurrection marked the birth of a new world, a world where the divine and the spiritual permitted matter and flesh to have it's own rules and so to be controlled by humanity. A world where we, as a species, could grow up. A world of spiritual love that could, eventually, be victorious over the shadow. That old, black magic became new, white magic; dark eldritch rituals became events of loving praise; evil demons became kindly angels. All the events of the Old Testament passed into legend - replaced by less magical realities. That is why evidence cannot prove that the world was made in 6 days. Jesus changed the world, made it "real", so we could control our own lives and be agents of our own destiny, while still following God's plan. So six days became billions of years, Eden became Africa, and the miraculous receeded just a little to give us the space we needed.
I do believe the world will "end" some day. It has to. The sun is due to burn out in a-few billion years. After that, this galaxy will be gobbled up by the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. Perhaps the kingdom will survive all that time as those disasters? Maybe it will end. Maybe we will be resurrected physically, and another, new world to replace the old will be made. Maybe it won't. In my mind, one thing is for sure - the real apocalypse - the important bit, has already happened. And at the time, noone even noticed. Noone, except a small group of poor, disenfranchised men women and children, living in Palestine. And they changed the world.
Great isn't it?
