At the centre of what the Gospels remember him teaching stands the kingdom of God, in Matthew, from Jewish reticence about the divine name, the kingdom of heaven. Most historians read the phrase as the announcement of God's decisive and imminent reign, a hope thoroughly at home in the apocalyptic Judaism of the age; a minority read it as a present moral and social order already breaking in. The Gospels have him proclaim it as both near and, in some sayings, already arriving.
His characteristic form was the parable, a short story drawn from farming, debt, and household life that turns on a reversal, the labourers all paid alike, the wayward son welcomed home, the despised Samaritan who stops on the road. The Sermon on the Mount, Matthew's great gathering of his teaching, sets the keynote: blessing on the poor and the mourning, love extended even to enemies, a righteousness that reaches past the deed to the heart.
The Gospels also portray a pattern that scandalised the pious. He ate with tax collectors and sinners, touched the unclean, and kept company with women in ways the culture did not expect. Historians treat this table fellowship as among the best-attested features of the ministry, an enacted sign of the welcome he preached.
He worked as an exorcist and healer, which supporters and opponents alike seem to have granted him; the Gospels present these acts as signs of the kingdom breaking in, while the historian records only that he was so remembered and leaves the cause disputed.