" critics in the modern period were unwilling even to contemplate the possibility that the evangelists might really have believed that God had become king through the work of Jesus. It may not have been objective historical analysis on the critics’ part. It could just as easily have been because their whole culture, that of eighteenth-to twentieth-century Europe and America, believed implicitly that some kind of utopia had now arrived—through the triumph of “Enlightenment” ideology. The fact of continuing intractable evil in today’s world has highlighted the necessity to think again. "

― N.T. Wright , How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels