The Jewish Gospels Read online

  Throughout this book, we have been observing how ideas that have been thought to be the most distinctive innovations of Jesus himself or his followers can be found in the religious literature of the Jews of the time of Jesus or before. This observation takes nothing away from the dignity or majesty of the Christian story, nor is it meant to. Rather than seeing Christianity as a new invention, seeing it as one of the paths that Judaism took—a path as ancient in its sources as the one that rabbinic Jews trod—has a majesty of its own. Many Jews were expecting the divine-human Messiah, the Son of Man. Many accepted Jesus as that figure, while others did not. Although there is precious little pre-Christian evidence among Jews for the suffering of the Messiah, there are good reasons to consider this too no stumbling block for the “Jewishness” of the ideas about the Messiah, Jesus as well. Let me make clear I am not claiming that Jesus and his followers contributed nothing new to the story of a suffering and dying Messiah; I am not, of course, denying them their own religious creativity. I am claiming that even this innovation, if indeed they innovated, was entirely within the spirit and hermeneutical method of ancient Judaism, and not a scandalous departure from it.

  This point of the “Jewishness” of the vicarious sufferings of the Messiah can be established in two ways: first by showing how the Gospels use perfectly traditional, midrashic ways of reasoning to develop these ideas and apply them to Jesus, and second, by demonstrating how common the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah was among perfectly “orthodox” rabbinic Jews from the time of the Talmud and onward. My reasoning is that if this were such a shocking thought, how is it that the rabbis of the Talmud and midrash, only a couple of centuries later, had no difficulty whatever with portraying the Messiah’s vicarious suffering or discovering him in Isaiah 53, just as the followers of Jesus had done?5 But I get ahead of myself: first, let us see how close biblical reading in the style of midrash can best explain the passages in Mark that speak of the shaming and death of Jesus.

  Shaming the Son of Man: Mark 8:38

  The first time in Mark that Jesus reveals the inevitability of his suffering and death is in chapter 8. As we have seen, the sometimes puzzling and shocking statements made by Jesus about his authority can be derived from close reading of the Daniel passages about the Son of Man. These Jews pored over the Scripture and interpreted every detail in order to understand what the Messiah would look like and what to expect when he came. Here we have a further example that illuminates our question about the suffering of the Messiah:

  27And Jesus went with his disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” 28And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets.” 29And he asked them, “But who do you say I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” 30And he charged them to tell no one about him. 31And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32And he said this plainly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. 33But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, “Get thee behind me Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” 34And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. 36For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? 37For what can a man give in return for his life? 38For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

  In this passage, as in the immediately following Mark 9:12, we are told by Jesus that the Son of Man must “suffer many things.” In the sequence of vv. 29–31 it is made absolutely clear that the Christ will suffer and that Jesus believes that he is the Christ. The equation of the Son of Man and his suffering with the Christ is made absolutely clear in these verses as well. This all makes the most sense if we assume that Jesus is alluding to the Son of Man figure from Daniel and his fate, which is to be crushed for a time, two times, and half a time before rising triumphant.

  Jesus had a very clear sense of his messianic role and fate, and that this role and fate were what had been predicted for the Son of Man in Daniel 7. Jesus first is identified as Messiah by others and then refers to himself as the Son of Man, thus establishing the identity of the Messiah and his ultimate fate as that of the Danielic Son of Man. Jesus is also clearly claiming that identity for himself.

  In Mark 14:62, we find a similar, and if anything even more explicit, self-identification by Jesus as Messiah and Son of Man. It would be no exaggeration to say that these two explicit moments in which this equation is made provide a key to reading all of the Son of Man passages in the Gospel as indicating Jesus’ sense of his divine vocation and role:

  “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?” And Jesus said “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of Heaven.” Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!”

  We learn several key things from this passage.6 The first, as we saw above, is that “Messiah” is for Jesus equivalent to the “Son of Man.” Second, we learn that claiming to be the Son of Man was considered blasphemy by the high priest and thus a claim not only to messianic status but also to divinity. When Jesus answers “I am,” he is going even further than merely claiming messianic status, for “I Am,” eigo eimi, is precisely what YHVH calls himself when Moses asks his name: “This is what you are to say to the Israelites, ‘I am [eigo eimi] has sent me to you’” (Exodus 3:14). The high priest of the Jews could hardly be expected to miss this allusion. Jesus claims to be the Son of God, the Son of Man, and indeed God himself. A statement such as that is not merely true or false; it is truth or blasphemy.* It is also the same blasphemy of which Jesus was accused in chapter 2, when he presumed the divine prerogative of forgiving sins. Third, we learn that for the Jesus of the Gospels, the title “Son of Man” derives from Daniel 7, is the name for the divine redeemer of a high Christology, and thus constitutes the blasphemy of which the high priest speaks.

  The high priest clearly knows the terms “Christ,” “Son of God,” and “Son of Man.” He also perceives that when Jesus says “I am,” he is declaring himself the one whose name is “I am,” YHVH himself. Through all of these terms, Jesus is claiming some share of divinity, hence the charge of blasphemy.7 Here it cannot be denied, of course, that there is a direct allusion to the Danielic source of the narrative of the Son of Man, which is explicitly signaled by the words “coming with the clouds of heavens”; thus I suggest the parallel provides good evidence for my interpretation of the Mark 8 passage as well. As in 14:62, he refers to the exaltation of the Son of Man; in 8:31 he refers to the suffering and humiliation of the Son of Man, which is then cited again in 9:12, “as it has been written.” The two verses thus complete each other.

  The progression of the Gospel narrative runs in the following fashion:

  •Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is.

  •Peter answers that he is the Messiah.

  •Jesus answers that the Son of Man must suffer many things.

  •Peter denies this (he is ashamed of a suffering Messiah).

  •Jesus rebukes him.

  •Jesus calls the disciples together to provide them with the lesson to be learned from his sharp rebuke of Peter.

  •All who would be followers of Jesus must pick up crosses and be willing to lose their lives as he will.

  •But if any are ashamed of Jesus in his humiliation and crucifixion, the exalted Son of Man (Jesus vindicated) will be ashamed of them in the final moment, when he comes in glory with his angels (Daniel 7
).8

  It is precisely under the title Son of Man that Jesus predicates his sufferings. At the end of chapter 7 of Daniel, the symbol of the Son of Man is interpreted as “the People of the Saints of the Most High,” who will be crushed for a certain amount of time under the heels of the fourth beast and then will arise and, defeating the beast, “will receive the kingdom and hold the kingdom forever and ever.”9 It surely can hardly be doubted that the phrase “the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected” is a palpable allusion to Isaiah 53:3, in which we are told that the suffering servant of the Lord “is despised and rejected of men.” This, as we have seen, is very plausibly read about the Messiah. We must also, of course, be mindful of other biblical texts in the background here, including especially the psalms of lament. We therefore don’t need to posit a special Christian mode of reading that led to this idea. Once again, the primary mode of early Jewish biblical exegesis is midrash, which is the concatenation of related (or even seemingly unrelated) passages and verses from all over the Bible to derive new lessons and narratives. It is midrash that we see at work here too.

  The association of these prophetic texts with the Son of Man from Daniel is precisely what enabled the full development of a suffering Christology, according to which Jesus’ demise (and exaltation) was interpreted. In other words, it is as plausible to assume that Jews held this view of the vicarious suffering of the Messiah and his atoning death, as predicted by the Prophet Isaiah before Jesus’ own suffering and death, as it is to assume that Christians made it up after the fact. Once again, we find a Jesus who sees himself, imagines himself, and presents himself as entirely fulfilling the messianic expectation already in place to the effect that the “Son of Man must suffer many things.”

  The Jews were expecting a Redeemer in the time of Jesus. Their own sufferings under Roman domination seemed so great, and this Redeemer had been predicted for them. Reading the Book of Daniel closely, at least some Jews—those behind the first-century Similitudes of Enoch and those with Jesus—had concluded that the Redeemer would be a divine figure named the Son of Man who would come to earth as a human, save the Jews from oppression, and rule the world as its sovereign. Jesus seemed to many to fit that bill. His life and death were claimed to be precisely a fulfillment of what had been predicted of the Messiah, Son of Man, by the old books and traditions. What happened as that expectation of redemption was delayed and as more Gentiles joined this community is the story of the Church, of Christianity. It is not the suffering and dying of the Messiah that precipitated that story at all, as we see once we read the Gospel in its close connection to Daniel.

  The connection with Daniel may be even clearer when we look at the parallel version of this teaching of Jesus to the disciples in 9:31:

  30They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he would not have any one know it; 31for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.” 32But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him.

  That this enmity will arise against the Messiah can also clearly be derived by midrashic reading of the end of Daniel 7 as well:

  25And he will speak words against the Most High, and he will oppress the high holy ones, and he will think to change the times and the law, and they will be delivered into his hand until a time, two times, and half a time. 26But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end. 27And the kingdom and the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High: his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

  Those Jews who read the Son of Man in accord with the end of the chapter as representing the People of Israel had to do some harmonizing work to explain away the clearly divine implications of the vision in the first part, but those Jews, in turn, who gloried in the divinity of the Son of Man also had some hard harmonizing work to do to explain the end of the chapter in accordance with their reading of the first part, understanding the “People of the Most High” as that divine Messiah. It is the Christ, Jesus, who is accordingly handed over to the wicked one for a prescribed interval, here said to be “a time, two times, and half a time.” This narrative of the Messiah was not a revolutionary departure within the religious history of the communities of readers of the Bible but an obvious and plausible consequence of a well-established tradition of reading Daniel 7 as being about a divine-human Messiah.10 Jesus’ resurrection “after three days,” according to the Markan version, as opposed to the “in three days” of the later evangelists, could possibly derive as well from a close reading of the Daniel passage, for if Jesus’ suffering before exaltation comes from the “time, two times, and half a time” during which the one like a Son of Man is to suffer in Daniel 7, and if these “times” are understood as days, then Jesus would rise after a day, two more days, and part of a day, that is, after the third day. But this must remain a speculation.

  “As It Is Written Concerning Him”: Mark 9:11–13

  Jesus’ story and his progressive self-revelation to his disciples return again and again to Scripture—and to midrash on that Scripture. Mark 9:11–13 is the account of Jesus’ conversation with his disciples after the transfiguration on the mountain. It thus represents a highly emphasized climactic moment in the story of the Gospel and one that is particularly telling for Christology. This passage has puzzled most commentators till now, but we will see that the text is best understood as part and parcel of a Jewish tradition of the suffering Messiah. Here are the verses in their necessary and immediate context, following the transfiguration in which Moses, Elijah, and Jesus have been revealed to be close associates (at the very least) in a vision:

  9As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. 10So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean. 11And they asked him saying, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first? 12And he said to them, Elijah when he comes first restores all things. And how has it been written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be rejected?11 13But I say to you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they wanted, as has been written concerning him.

  As many commentators have written, this passage raises great difficulties. There is no record in the Scriptures that Elijah would be mistreated, so on what basis does the Gospel read that “it has been written concerning him”?12 Further, as Joel Marcus has pointed out, “if Elijah restores all things, then how once conceive of a Messiah who is to be rejected by humanity, a Messiah whose suffering and rejection are foretold in the scripture (9:12c)? The two expectations appear to contradict each other.”13 Marcus’s brilliant move here is to realize that this is not a flaw in the Gospel text but its very vocation.14 This contradiction is what the Gospel text is about; this is not a “bug,” as we might say, but a feature. We have something very close to a standard midrashic form here: the question of the disciples is not “How is it written that Elijah will come first?” but “Why do the scribes say this, for if what they say is true: How is it written that the Son of Man will suffer many things?” They are pointing to a contradiction between the verse to which Jesus refers and the statements of the scribes, not between two verses.15

  The disciples understand Jesus of vv. 9–11 very well. They understand that what has been revealed to them is that Jesus is the Son of Man, and they know what that means. They are astounded, as they always are, that Jesus will suffer, even though, as Jesus points out, it is, indeed, written that the Son of Man will suffer. After all, at the end of the chapter in 9:30, they still have not understood Jesus’ prediction that he will be handed over to human beings, that they will kill him, and that he will rise. They are also puzzled that Jesus as the Messiah has come b
ut Elijah seemingly hasn’t, and the scribes say that Elijah will come before the Messiah and restore all things.

  Jesus’ answer is brilliantly to the point:

  11And they asked him saying, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first? 12And he said to them, Elijah when he comes first restores all things. And how has it been written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be rejected? 13But I say to you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they wanted, as has been written concerning him.

  The Scribes say that Elijah, coming before the Son of Man, will restore all things and thus how could it be that the Son of Man will suffer? And Jesus answers: Does the Prophet, in fact, say that Elijah will restore all things; if that were the case, how, indeed, could it be written that the Son of Man will suffer many things? No, Jesus maintains (correctly), it does not say in the verse that Elijah will restore all things; it is the Scribes who came up with this idea themselves. And the Scribes must simply be wrong in their interpretation of the coming of Elijah; all will be restored, not by Elijah but by the Son of Man and only after the terrible sufferings of the Day of the Lord, which are themselves written clearly in the text of Malakhi. Now the answer is clear: Elijah has come already in the form of John the Baptist (as explicitly in Matthew), the forerunner, and they did to him what they wished to.16 His suffering becomes a type of the suffering that the Son of Man also will undergo, and the disciples are answered in both of their questions. Jesus is shown here, as also in the halakhic discussions that we have encountered previously, besting the Scribes and the Pharisees at their own game of midrash. The idea of the suffering of the Son of Man is anything but an alien import into Judaism; in fact, it is its very vocation.