Christology in Mark's Gospel: Four Views

J. R. Daniel Kirk, Adam Winn, Sandra Huebenthal, L. W. Hurtado, Anthony Le Donne

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310538721
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

Gain Insights on Mark's Christology from Today's Leading Scholars

The Gospel of Mark, widely assumed to be the earliest narrative of Jesus's life and the least explicit in terms of Christology, has long served as a worktable for the discovery of Christian origins and developing theologies. The past ten years of scholarship have seen an unprecedented shift toward an early, high Christology, the notion that very early in the history of the Jesus movement his followers worshipped him as God. Other studies have challenged this view, arguing that Mark's story is incomplete, intentionally ambiguous, or presents Jesus in entirely human terms.

Christology in Mark's Gospel: Four Views brings together key voices in conversation in order to offer a clear entry point into early Christians' understanding of Jesus's identity: Sandra Huebenthal (Suspended Christology), Larry W. Hurtado (Mark's Presentation of Jesus; with rejoinder by Chris Keith), J. R. Daniel Kirk (Narrative Christology of a Suffering King), and Adam Winn (Jesus as the YHWH of Israel in the Gospel of Mark).

Each author offers a robust presentation of their position, followed by lively interaction with the other contributors and one "last-word" rejoinder. The significance of this discussion is contextualized by the general editor Anthony Le Donne's introduction and summarized in the conclusion.

The CriticalPoints Series offers rigorous and nuanced engagement between today's best scholars for advancing the scholarship of tomorrow. Like its older sibling, the CounterPoints Series, it provides a forum for comparison and critique of different positions, focusing on critical issues in today's Christian scholarship: in biblical studies, in theology, and in philosophy.

CHAPTER 1

Suspended Christology

SANDRA HUEBENTHAL

Introduction: A Gaze through the Keyholes of History

“Christology” is a theological latecomer. Reformed theologian Balthasar Meissner coined the technical term for the question about Jesus only in the seventeenth century in his book Christologia sacra, published in Wittenberg in 1624.¹ This is a long time not only after the New Testament was written but also a long time after the councils of the fourth and fifth century had defined the orthodox perspective on Jesus, that is, had determined who he would be for the Christian community, regardless as to whether they call themselves Anglican, Evangelical, Lutheran, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Reformed, or Roman Catholic today. Our common foundations are the New Testament texts and the ecumenical councils, and thus our notion of Christology comes with a long history, which only began after the New Testament was put to page. We must keep this in mind when we apply the concept to the New Testament and ask for a New Testament text’s “Christology.”

German New Testament scholar Reinhard von Bendemann is aware of this gap and proceeds with caution. Bendemann suggests that when it comes to the New Testament, the term “Christology” should only be used in quotation marks.² Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, a well-known scholar of Mark, does in fact do so in some of her publications, providing the same rationale.³ The awareness is that we are dealing with a late theological category applied to earlier texts that might even be at odds at times with the texts themselves. This is an important insight for any discussion of Markan Christology. What was defined by the council fathers and later dogmatized in the particular confessions is the result of a longer process of theological reflection and need not automatically be present in every biblical text. Or, put differently, there is not necessarily a direct line from Mark to the Nicene Creed, and the current debate about early, high Christology in Mark’s Gospel might say more about current than ancient theological issues.⁴ “To ask whether the Markan Jesus is ‘divine’ or not,” Markan scholar M. Eugene Boring warns, “is to impose an alien schema on Markan thought.”⁵

In his book Gospel Writing, Francis Watson makes what is at first glance a somewhat disturbing claim. He argues that had the early Christian discourses run just slightly different, we would not be reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as canonical Gospels today but possibly the Gospel according to Thomas or even the Gospel according to Peter instead.⁶ “The distinction between the canonical and the noncanonical,” Watson argues, “arises not from the differences between the texts but from their circulation and currency in wider or narrower spheres of the early Christian world.”⁷ In other words, canonical discussions are not unavoidable and remain contingent to a certain extent. Watson’s observations allow a glimpse into the processes that took place both on the way to biblical canon and christological dogma:

If Gaius of Rome had won the anti-Johannine argument, and if Serapion and others had aggressively promoted the cause of the Gospel of Peter, then that Gospel might have prevailed over both the Gospel of John and the only indirectly Petrine Gospel of Mark. John and Mark would then have disappeared from sight, their memory preserved only in disparaging remarks by Eusebius. At a later date, post-Enlightenment biblical scholarship would have initiated an intense debate over the genuineness of the canonical Gospel of Peter, conservative scholarship would have fiercely resisted critical arguments for its pseudonymity. If, later still, fragments of a noncanonical “Johannine” gospel emerged from the sands of Egypt, they would have been consigned without hesitation to the category of the apocryphal. Appeal would be made to gnosticizing tendencies in its opening and dependence on the canonical Peter in its conclusion; and such arguments would no doubt have carried the day, disputed only by a minority of willfully provocative critics.⁸

What seems to have the character of a “what if” game is at a second glance a depiction of typical patterns in social processes. Issues come up and are discussed, majorities are organized, and decisions are taken. There is no reason to believe that social negotiation in early Christianity was any different from what we experience today. German patristics scholar Christoph Markschies claims (for good reason) that the church, especially in the second century, seemed like a huge laboratory for trying different forms of theology, hierarchy, and ethics.⁹ In hindsight and with the distance of only a few decades, decision-making often looks much more harmonious than it actually was—a lesson that can also be learned from a comparison of Acts 15 and Galatians 2. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, his dispute with Cephas (Peter) is paramount. But the issue that was burning for Paul had cooled down by the time Acts was written. As the author of Acts, Luke presents a cordial and united Christian community in a mostly gentile-Roman environment. Luke does not, therefore, revisit the problems of an earlier generation. It is not by accident that he does not mention the incident at Antioch but describes the Jerusalem meeting as a unanimous decision taken under the guidance of the Spirit. His question was no longer how Jewish and gentile Jesus-followers could live, eat, and worship together but how Christian communities could make their living within Roman urban society without being considered a threat to social stability.

Similar negotiations can be observed in the ecumenical councils some hundred years later. They, too, are examples of social discourse and were influenced by their respective historical contexts. It is intriguing to consider for a moment the possibility Watson explores and apply it to the councils: What would our Creed look like if groups of Jesus-followers like the Adoptionists or Ebionites had prevailed in the discussion? The thought is particularly stimulating for reflections about Markan Christology because those groups based some of their arguments on Mark’s baptism scene (1:9–11).¹⁰

The crucial question discussed in Nicaea was what “Son of God” (ὑιὸς θεοῦ) means. Is Jesus the Son of God as Mark 1:11 implies? If so, how many gods exist? The idea of two gods, YHWH and Jesus, is not reconcilable with Jewish monotheism. Adoptionists solved the problem by assuming that God adopted Jesus as his son during or after the baptism. Ebionites, going down a slightly different route, defended the position that Jesus was God’s messenger. What Adoptionists, Ebionites, Cerinthus, Marcion, Paul of Samosata, Photinus, and others share is the denial of the divine nature and preexistence of Christ. For them, Jesus was just a human being, even though a special one, and Mark’s Gospel was their key witness. The Nicene Council, focusing more on John’s Gospel, which, as we have just seen was highly disputed in the third century, gave a different answer: Jesus Christ is begotten, not made, one being with the Father (γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί).

This brief glance at history also shows that in the beginning there was not only one idea about Jesus but a variety of different impressions, ideas, and concepts that were mediated and reconciled over time. As the ecumenical councils show, this was not always an easy process and very often included definitions and drawing boundaries between what was considered orthodox and what was not. Over time, the different ideas about who Jesus is and how he is best understood were narrowed down to a few concepts that were defined and dogmatized. The textualization of particular perspectives on Jesus as we find it in the canonical Gospels is an important step on the way from the first impressions of early Jesus-followers to the formulas of the ecumenical councils. These texts did not aim at recording the history or the events themselves but at recording a particular theological perspective on them, which they contributed to the early Christian discourse.¹¹

This chapter will discuss Mark’s contribution to this discourse. Our journey through the Gospel will introduce us to a fascinating narrative that discusses different ideas about Jesus. In its conclusion it will suggest one particular perspective that the Gospel of Mark visibly treasures. As we will see, Mark’s Gospel does not visualize Jesus as a divine or preexistent being but rather depicts him in Isaianic categories as a human messenger of God with an extraordinary experience and, as a result, extraordinary abilities.

Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Story about Jesus and the Beginning of the Gospel

Before setting out on this journey, let us get our gear together and consult some travel guides. As we are embarking on a trip into a biblical text, our travel guides come from biblical scholars. Those books resemble the old Baedeker guides more than Lonely Planet, and thus they tend to be somewhat theoretical and difficult to read. To make things as convenient as possible, I will give a brief survey of exegetical insight that I found particularly helpful for this journey. They consist of a global insight in the mode of traveling (reading Mark as a narrative text), a hint how to look at the different places in order see the fascinating sights (worlds and perspectives in the text), and a brief glance at the topography of the entire country (structure of the text).

There is a growing consensus among Markan scholars that we are dealing with a narrative text that is much more than just the sum of its parts. It is clear that the text has a narrative character, and it is equally obvious that it is not just any narrative. Mark’s Gospel is neither a novel nor a work of history. Its truth lies neither in a spotless preservation of the past nor a pious imagination of what Jesus might have been like. Regardless of whether we term it an ancient biography (a bios), it is a text that treasures experiences people have had with Jesus and his message. These experiences have been verbalized in the form of episodes and integrated into an overall story about Jesus and his proclamation.¹² While historical-critical research for a long time was predominantly interested in how the particular episodes and units came about—and what they might have to say about the historical Jesus and the passing on of Jesus traditions—Markan scholarship of the past few decades has shifted attention to the entire text as a holistic composition. Even though the approaches might differ, Mark’s Gospel is now commonly read and interpreted as a story.¹³

Approaching a text like Mark from a literary-studies perspective gives a different outlook (as compared to approaches that look for editorial layers with the text) and thus leads to different results. The underlying assumption is that the Gospel’s text as we know it today is a final product that carries meaning in itself. Moreover, it can be meaningfully understood and interpreted without knowing its prior stages of composition. This does not say that a text like Mark’s Gospel does not form part of a larger communication process. The narrative can nevertheless be understood independently of its original historical situation. Being a text-oriented approach, the task of a narratological analysis is not to describe the world from which the text has originated or which it seems to refer to but to depict the world of the text itself. The point is not to shed light on the historical author and the real world but on the narrator and the narrated world that comes alive while reading the text.¹⁴

This approach also changes the type of questions posed to the text. As regards Christology, the question is no longer what Christos (χριστός) means in general but rather what it means in the narrative world of Mark’s Gospel. Researchers need to put their twenty-first century christological spectacles aside and read Mark’s Gospel asking what it has to say about Jesus.¹⁵ Who is he and what is he doing? What does he say about himself and what do the narrator and characters say about him?

Reading Mark as Story¹⁶ means being occupied with what happens in the text. The basic question is: How does Mark work as a narrative? One basic observation is that Mark—like any other narrative—operates on different levels. On the one hand, there is the narrated world, namely, the universe that the characters inhabit. It is the world in which they live, love, quarrel, and reconcile with one another, where they eat, sleep, and die. On the other hand, there is the world of the narrator in which the narrator lives, thinks, and develops the story. Both worlds are features of the text and can clearly be distinguished from the real world of the author and, admittedly with a bit more of an effort, from each other.¹⁷

In addition, stories do not only consist of different levels or worlds but also of different perspectives. They contain both the characters’ perspectives and the narrator’s perspective. The narrator’s perspective is the narrator’s idea or construct of reality.¹⁸ The concept of the narrator’s perspective introduces another helpful, new agent, for it allows us to clearly distinguish different perspectives and voices within a given story, for example, when you realize that Jesus and the narrator both use the word “gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) but do so in different ways. While the narrator proclaims the “gospel of Jesus” (1:1), the character Jesus is said to be proclaiming the “gospel of God” (1:14), though in fact Jesus uses the term “gospel” without additional qualifiers (8:35; 10:29; 13:10; 14:9). Jesus’s proclamation concerns the “kingdom of God” (βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ), which he proclaims to be at hand (1:15)—an expression the narrator avoids as long as Jesus is alive.¹⁹ Or, even more striking, while the narrator seems anxious not to pick up Jesus’s use of the formula “Son of Man,” the character Jesus never vocally accepts the title “Son of God.” Even when he is asked by the high priest whether he is the “Son of the Blessed One,” he sticks to the formula “Son of Man,” equipping it with an eschatological twist (14:61–62).²⁰ In the case of Mark’s Gospel, observations of this type are particularly helpful, for they aid in solving a quite difficult problem, which goes to the core of the christological question: Who is Jesus?

In Mark’s Gospel, the question about Jesus’s identity is explicitly asked several times, and it remains an ongoing theme in the background. The quest for the right understanding of Jesus is a dynamic plot of the overall narrative. Reading the whole story, the following structure unfolds. The narrator opens the narrative universe with the words “beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God”²¹ (1:1, all translations from the Greek text of the Gospel are mine). Taking seriously this first line, it also introduces the matter of the narrative: Mark’s Gospel is more about the beginning of the gospel than about the character Jesus, even though Jesus is intrinsically tied to it. The story of the gospel, nonetheless, extends far beyond the life of the character Jesus.²² This can easily be illustrated by a brief glance at the text’s structure: the inner story (1:16–15:39) narrates the story of experiences with ...