Tuggy, Christ, and the Gospel of Mark

I wasn’t planning on doing any more blogging until after Christmas, but Dale Tuggy’s recent articles on Jesus and the Gospel of Mark encouraged me to leave a lengthy comment on his blog. It then occurred to me that I might as well take that comment and edit and post it. First take a look at Tuggy’s articles: “Does Mark Teach that Jesus is God?” and “Mark: Jesus is God’s Son, the Messiah.”

I left an initial comment on Dale’s blog, which prompted one of the readers, Jaco, to ask me two astute questions. I’ll respond to the first question in this article, and the second in the follow-up piece.

“Do I understand you correctly, namely that a historical/narrative reading of the Synoptics won’t bring one to arrive at the ‘Jesus is God’ confession?. It surely brings one to Jesus as the Messiah, one who would restore humanity! Why is arriving at Jesus as God so stubbornly elusive?”

Rather than asserting that the historical-critical reading of the synoptics will not bring one to the confession that Jesus is God, let me just say that it may not. Certainly there are plenty of historical-critical critics who have realized this possibility in their work. Indeed, it seems that every ten years a new group of New Testament scholars emerge into the full light of media day to claim they have disproven Christianity. Remember the Myth of God Incarnate folks and then later the Jesus Seminar? And now there’s Bart Ehrman. And before all of them there were a whole bunch of skeptical German scholars. Now I’m not a NT scholar and therefore lack the competence to get into those kinds of discussions and debates. Besides, everyone just chooses the scholars they like and quote them against the positions they dislike. I like to quote N. T. Wright. 🙂

To the question at hand: if we were to isolate the Gospel of Mark from the rest of the Bible, and indeed the Christian Church altogether, and read it just as historical artifact, would we come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth is God? I doubt it. Indeed, the more we locate it in its Jewish monotheistic and messianic setting the more unlikely the claim becomes.

But please first note the problematic nature of the clause “Jesus of Nazareth is God.” In his writings Dale repeatedly uses equivalent expressions; but of course, the Nicene Creed does not say that “Jesus is God,” because the Nicene Creed identifies the Father as God and confesses of Jesus that he is eternally begotten of the Father and of one substance with the Father. The way that Dale has formulated the question (“Is Jesus God?”) predetermines the results. Of course the Gospel of Mark does not say that Jesus is God, because God is the One who has named Jesus his Son (Mk 1:11) and the One whom Jesus addresses as Father (Mk 14:36).

So what we really want to know is not whether Mark says that Jesus is God but whether Mark envisions Jesus as divine alongside YHWH. But consider how difficult this would have been for a Jew to think or proclaim. Every 1st century Jew confessed that there is only one God, and every Jew knew that this one God had created the heavens and the earth, including all spiritual and angelic beings. How could a faithful son or daughter of Israel, even one who confessed Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, locate Jesus on the creator side of the creator/creature divide, without thinking that he or she was falling into blasphemy and abandoning the Shema?  A transformation of thought and language must first take place.

Given these obstacles, I am not surprised to find that the earliest gospel, viz., Mark, treads lightly on these questions. What I think we may find in Mark, though, are intimations that the inherited concepts of Messiah, Sonship, and divinity are inadequate to handle that which the 1st century Church strained to sing about Jesus. One just doesn’t jump from the confession that Jesus is the Son of God  to Jesus is God the eternal Son who hypostatically assumed human existence in the womb of the Theotokos.

And let’s also remember the disadvantage under which we are operating with regards to the historical evidence. Our knowledge of apostolic Christianity is extremely limited. All we have are the written documents of the New Testament. We know very little about how Christians preached, not only in evangelistic efforts but in their Sunday after Sunday congregational preaching. We know very little about 1st century Christian liturgy and prayer. We know very little about how first century Christians interpreted the Hebrew Bible, though we can certainly assume that they did not read the Bible through the lens of historical criticism, etc. Hence when someone tells me that historical criticism has demonstrated that the Gospel of Mark does not teach that Jesus is God, I’m inclined to shrug my shoulders and say in reply, Why should I take this report seriously? I do not think I’m being an irrational fundamentalist in treating this kind of report with a large degree of skepticism. I’m just acknowledging the serious limitations of critical New Testament scholarship. My Christian faith is not grounded upon what any given biblical scholar says. It never has been, never will be. Critical scholarship presents a challenge that cannot be ignored, but I’m certainly not frightened by it. The first century Christians didn’t read the Bible or or the gospels or the apostolic writings through the glasses of Bultmann either.

I received my basic instruction in the New Testament back in the late 70s. The two scholars I especially remember on New Testament christology are Reginald Fuller and Raymond Brown. One doesn’t hear much about them anymore. Perhaps scholarship has passed them by completely, but I doubt it. Hence I’d like to add Raymond Brown’s essay “Does the New Testament Call Jesus God?” to the discussion. In this essay Brown expresses my personal conviction regarding the New Testament witness to the divinity of Christ: “But were we to discover that the New Testament never calls Jesus God, this would not necessarily mean that the New Testament authors did not think of Jesus as divine.” Precisely.

(Go to Part 2)