DramaQ

I know it’s been discussed that claiming to be the Messiah was not a blasphemy. But evidently “Mark” thought it was.

“Mark” doesn’t have the officials say “The Christ isn’t (a) god, he’s a man.” Just the opposite. They immediately see the claim of being the Christ as a blasphemy. In “Mark”’s context, Christ = god = blasphemy.

But if “Mark” thought that was the case, how did he EVER think a Messiah/Christ would come? Whoever it was, once identifying himself as the Christ, would have to be guilty of blasphemy.

And if the officials understood it this way, how exactly were they (or anyone) supposed to await the arrival of a “person” whom they would immediately charge with committing blasphemy? "Mark" doesn't indicate they had any OTHER expectation.

Is this some kind of indication of a shift in understanding of what "Christ" was?

dq

ETA

If they were expecting a man that wasn’t god, why was saying “I am the Christ” a blasphemy.

If they were expecting a god that wasn’t a man, what did they think he would look like or be?

John Kesler

What makes you think that because Mark reports that the high priest claimed that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy means that Mark believed that the charge had merit? For that matter, the high priest himself may not have believed that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy, but needed to get Jesus on something, so the "rules" were bent. After all, bearing false witness violates one of the commandments, but vv 55-58 indicate that this fact didn't stop Jesus' enemies from doing it.

stuart shepherd

I see it a little differently.

By saying that they would see him coming with the clouds, [Daniel 7:13]Jesus was claiming to be the "son of man" of Daniel 7.
This could not be since the 4th beast, Rome, had not yet fallen.
So Jesus' claim had to be false.

Stuart Shepherd

DramaQ

I think perhaps I was unclear here. I do not know that “Mark” himself believed the charge (of blasphemy) had merit. But as he relates it, the high priest felt it was a legitimate charge.

He does not say the high priest claimed it was blasphemy. It is a pretty clear declaration. And the Sanhedrin didn’t argue with him.

Therefore, as far as “Mark” was concerned, claiming to be the Christ was the same as claiming to be god, which was a blasphemy (to the Sanhedrin).

If they wanted to “get Jesus on something” they would have (and evidently did) falsely accuse him with trumped up charges. In the case of the “blasphemy” Jesus admits to the “charge”. He doesn’t say “So what? It’s not blasphemy to claim to be the Christ”. Clearly, all the characters in the story understood this to be the case.

As I understand you, you are suggesting that the high priest may have been trying to pull one over on the Sanhedrin by convincing them to believe the claim was blasphemous when it was not. That does not make sense to me.

But such a false claim would not have been blasphemous. Only false. There were plenty of other false claimants to the Messiah. Weren’t they dismissed as crackpots? Or perhaps guilty of political mischief? But not blasphemy.

What I’m getting at is: a man claiming to be a HUMAN Messiah is not a blasphemy.

A man claiming to be a SPIRITUAL or demi-god Christ IS a blasphemy.
Therefore, according to the way Mark has depicted things, a group of people (the Sanhedrin, the high priest) must have believed in a SPIRITUAL (and not HUMAN) Christ.

dq

Jeffrey Gibson

And your evidence for this claim, let alone that "spiritual Christ" was a Jewish christological category, is what?

Jeffrey

DramaQ

It's not a claim, it's a conclusion.

And I STARTED with the evidence: Mark 14:61-64.

Jeffrey Gibson

Except the verb for "seeing" in Jesus' statement about coming with the clouds (Mk. 14:62) is in the future tense. That at the time of his uttering it, Rome had not "fallen, could not falsify his claim.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Which is belied by Mk. 15:32 and the fact that blasphempy involves denigrating the dignity and majesty of God.


No. You started with a particular reading of certain bits of evidence in Mk. 14:61-64 which you assumed was true when it's not.

More on this later.

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

I hardly think so. And I do not believe that your claim is supported by anything in Mk. 14:61-64. In fact, your claim involves several misunderstandings -- the first about the nature of blasphemy; the second about what's going on in this text.

To see why I think this, have a look at two articles in link1 The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion Narrative in Mark, G. Van Oyen and T. Shepherd editors (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology, 45: PEETERS, 2006), namely, Adela Yarbro Collins' "The Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14:64" and my "The Function of the Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14:64".[*]

My article is available here (though you will have to join J.B. Gibson Writings to access it).

To give you some idea of my approach to, and conclusions about, the blasphemy charge, I've set out below the introduction to my article.

Jeffrey

*****

Quote:

The Function of the Charge of Blasphemy in Mk. 14:64. At Mark 14:64, at the conclusion of Jesus' "trial" before the Sanhedrin, Mark has Jesus' chief interrogator and judge, the (here unnamed) High Priest, proclaim that Jesus has committed the crime of blasfhmi/a, the willful and arrogant derision of the power and majesty of the God of Israel. On the nature of the crime of blasfhmi/a, "blasphemy", see H.W. Beyer, "blasfhmew, blasfhmi/a, blasfhmoj, TDNT Vol. 1 (1964) 621-625. R. A. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1994) 520-523: E.P. Sanders, Jewish Law From Jesus to the Mishnah (London: SCM/Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990) 67-80: C. A. Evans, Mark 8:27-16:20 (Thomas Nelson & Sons: Nashville, 2001) 453-455. The judgment, which secures a death sentence for Jesus from the rest of the Sanhedrin, is issued after, and in direct response to, Jesus' announcement in Mk. 14:62 that he is indeed "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed" whom his interrogator and all the Sanhedrin will eventually "see" being exalted by the God of Israel to this God's "right hand" and (if kai\ e)rxo/menon meta\ tw=n nefelw=n tou= ou)ranou= is a separate claim -- see below, note 8) also as one invested and acting with the authority to judge Israel and the world. Of the many questions that surround the interpretation of this passage, the one that I wish to deal with here is one that has not only long intrigued interpreters, but which (if I judge things aright) has recently received renewed attention due to the publication in 2000 of Darrell Bock's Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism. Darrell L. Bock, Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism: The Charge against Jesus in Mark:14:63 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000). Why it is that Mark presents the High Priest and the Sanhedrin as responding in the way they do to Jesus' declaration? What, according to Mark, is the reason the High Priest and those gathered with him pronounce Jesus a blasphemer and worthy of death? One answer that has long been given (and which Bock's work on blasphemy and exaltation in Judaism ultimately attempts to show, if not to prove, is a real possibility) is, of course, that historically this is exactly what the High Priest did. Jesus was actually pronounced guilty of the crime of blasphemy during a "trial" before the Sanhedrin and Mark is here simply passing on historical tradition. Cf. Blasphemy and Exaltation, 3, 209-233. Bock's recent book is not the only place where he has set out to explore and attempt to defend the historicity of this charge. See his earlier studies "The Son of Man Seated at God's Right Hand and the Debate of Jesus' ‘Blasphemy'" in Jesus of Nazareth Lord and Christ: Essays on the Historical Jesus and New Testament Christology, J.B. Green and M. Turner, eds. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994) 182-191; and especially "Key Texts on Blasphemy and Exaltation in the Jewish Examination of Jesus," SBL 1997 Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997) 115-160. It was within the 1997 SBL Session devoted to discussing this second essay, and in a private conversation with Darrell immediately afterwards, that the thesis of this present essay was germinated. But critical scholarship has tended to reject this answer for a variety of reasons, among which (and for our purposes, perhaps the most crucial) is the observation, grounded in both narrow and wide studies of the idea of "blasphemy" in first century Judaism, that nothing that Mark reports Jesus as saying at Mk. 14:62 would or could have been characterized as Mark says it was. As Raymond Brown and others have argued, the claim to be Christ/Messiah (or Son of God -- if a separate title here) On "the Son of the Blessed (God)" as a separate title in Mk. 14.61, see David Catchpole, The Trial of Jesus: A Study in the Gospels and Jewish Historiography from 1770 to the Present Day (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1971) 143-148; 200. was never considered blasphemous. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 1: 534-536; Sanders, Jewish Law, 67-80; Pace J.C. O'Neill, Who Did Jesus Think He Was (London: E.J. Brill, 1995) who argues that Jewish Law stipulated that it was forbidden for the Messiah to announce himself. And given that (as Bock himself has demonstrated) Judaism recognized that certain human figures, including the Messiah and the one designated by Daniel and Enoch as "(the) Son of Man," had been or could be divinely called "to sit" at God's right hand and to exercise judgment over Israel and the nations, neither was a claim such as we find Jesus apparently making about his right to heavenly enthronement. Brown, The Death of the Messiah. See also Donald Juel, Messiah and Temple, 97-102. I say "apparently" here because there is some reason to believe that in Mark's eyes, kai\ o)/yesqe to\n ui(o\n tou= a)nqrw/pou e)k deciw=n kaqh/menon th=j duna/mewj ktl. is not actually a claim but only a declaration on Jesus' part of his certainty that he will be vindicated by God as "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed". As Juel notes (Messiah and Temple, 104-105), " From the remainder of the passion story it is clear that for Mark, the titles "the Christ, the Son of the Blessed" [and not "the Son of Man"] are decisive. Jesus is tried, rejected, mocked, and executed as "the King of the Jews," "the Christ, the King of Israel" [not as "the Son of Man"]. ... And if the centrality of the messianic imagery in the passion story indicates that this is where the evangelist intends to place the emphasis in 14:61-62," it is reasonable to infer [not only that the charge [of blasphemy] is to be related to the messianic claim," but that the Son of Man saying does not function "as an independent source of information or a separate claim". Given this, it would seem that if we are to answer the question I wish to deal with here, we must move away from historical investigation about what was and was not considered blasphemous in Judaism in the first century and how this does or does not square with what Mark says is the occasion and cause of the charge leveled against Jesus, and adopt some other approach. The one that I will explore here involves following the lead given us when we take into consideration what Ernst Lohmeyer, Vincent Taylor, and other scholars have noted is indicated by the fact that the question from the High Priest which begins the portion of Jesus' interrogation that culminates in the blasphemy charge (i.e., ei)= o( Xristo\j o( ui(o\j tou= eu)loghtou) is fronted with an unnecessary su. According to Lohmeyer and Taylor, this su is "emphatic and contemptuous," and since ei)= by itself in this interrogative context would mean "are you", the sense of the question Mark has the High Priest ask is not "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed", but "Are you of all people [God forbid!] the Christ ...?". Ernst Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium des Markus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963) 328; Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to Mark (London: MacMillan, 1952) 567. See also C.A. Evans, The Gospel According to Mark, Vol 2 (Dallas: Word, 2001) 448; R. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993) 886. If so, then, for Mark, what lies at the heart of the blasphemy charge -- that is to say, what offends the High Priest's and the Sanhedrin's sensibilities and makes them feel that the God of Israel has been denigrated and insulted -- is not what Jesus claims about himself. Rather, it is the fact that it is Jesus who is making Messianic claims. But why, according to Mark, would the High Priest and the Sanhedrin feel so strongly not only that Jesus of all people is not someone whom God would ever ordain as his Messiah (or make judge of Israel and the nations), but that the claim on the part of Jesus to the contrary convicts Jesus of blasphemy? The answer lies, I think, in establishing six things. 1. Who, according to Mark, God was in the eyes of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. The High Priest's and the Sanhedrin's judgement that Jesus is a blasphemer means, after all, that Jesus has offended their conception of who God is. 2. What, according to Mark, the Temple -- the edifice whose destruction the Markan Jesus, claiming divine warrant, symbolically enacted in Mk. 11:15-17 before astonished and enraged Sanhedrinists -- represented to the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. 3. What, if anything, the Christology of the High Priest and the Sanhedrin was -- that is to say, who, in Mark's eyes, the Temple Aristocracy believed the Messiah was, in kind and character, to be, what it was that the God of Israel has called him to do, and what the means were that this God had ordained as fitting for the accomplishment of the task(s) assigned to him.. 4. Who it is, according to the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, who gets to do what Jesus apparently claims is his right to do , namely, to sit at God's right hand. 5. What, if anything, the Markan Sanhedrinists thought to be the case with respect to the question of what period in Israel's remembered and anticipated national history they and the rest of Israel now stood. 6. Who or what, at the point of Jesus' "trial", the Markan Sandedrinists know Jesus to be.

{* -mod note: check the Google books preview}

DCHindley

dq,

Don't forget that you are looking at the author of Mark's portrayal of Jesus. We really don't know how much of it to take at face value.

Claiming to be an "annointed one" (messiah) meant either one was claiming to be the high priest or a king.

Jesus, of course, was not a descendant of Levi or Aaron, etc, although Hebrews indicates that at some point he was considered to be a kind of high priest. Notice his response "I am" (ego eimi). This can be taken as a circumlocution for YHWH (from Exodis 3:14), which in that period only the HP was supposed to utter on the Day of Atonement. Obviously, had he actually said the name, this would have been considered blashphemy by the HP. The circumlocution may have been introduced by the author of Mark, with the added benefit that it could also mean simply "(Yes) I am (the Christ)." The addendum to the HP's question ("son of the holy one") may have been added to the story by the author of Mark to shift the emphasis to a Christian interprtation of Daniel 9, as the section of Jesus' response following "I am" is IMHO clearly based on Daniel 9.

Would answering that he is claiming to be the "one like a son of man" in Daniel, or predicting that he would come again with "the Mighty One [literally "power(ful one)"]" right at his side, be considered blashphemy?

The HP, if what we know about Sadduccees is anything close to accurate, would not have considered Daniel to be sacred literature, and may have objected on principal to the idea of divine beings carrying out any sort of political action on earth, let alone a man claiming he will sieze power by means of heavenly beings or God himself. This would have been seen as audacious and presumptive, and IMHO might be considered blashphemous.

Blashphemy is punishable by stoning. Even if the HP did not have authority to execute Jesus, would he have turned him over to the Romans for punishment? Hard to say. I believe that in the 2nd century BCE a Jewish ruler turned over certain Jews to gentile authorities for execution and there was an outcry about that outrage. However, times change and so do political realities. The High Priests of Jesus' day were far from the autonomous princes of Hasmonean times. They may have had no option but to turn him over, or risk inquiry by the Roman governor. To overstep their authority could result in very serious repercussions.

The Romans would have taken a very dim view of anyone claiming a kingship in a region under their control, unless they had given that person the authority to do so (such as was the case with Herod the Great, who worked damn hard for that honor). Claiming kingly authority without Roman permission would be a crime, but a Roman one, punishable by crucifixion. This is in fact how he died.

The only problem seems to be that these kind of statements appear to have been added to a narrative in which Jesus simply utters the divine name and is condemned for it.

Lots of literary action here.

DCH

PS: Love your soft serve ice cream.