aa5874

It must be special since ONLY Jesus was SINGLED out as the Son of God in gMark.

Please, if the author of gMark wanted to claim Jesus was the Son of God what would he write???

He would write EXACTLY what is found in gMark. The supposed Jesus was IDENTIFIED as the Son of God in gMark.

The very story in gMark shows that the supposed Jesus made a Blasphemous statement.

Why are you boneheadedly TRYING to re-write gMark??

Mark 14 Why is it so difficult to accept the STORY.

gMark is a story about the Son of God called Jesus that was REJECTED by the Jews and was crucified.

dog-on

Let me ask you this question.

Do you think that such a strict monotheism, in the sense that there were thought to be absolutely no other types of gods in existence, is the correct basis from which to argue Mark?

graymouser

First, some MSS omit "Son of God," so it is possible that this line is an interpolation. This would be consistent with NT interpolations, which generally tend to add extra honorifics and descriptors to Jesus. So we can't at all rely on this verse to give us a high Christology in Mark.

Second, it shouldn't say "the Son of God" - that's reading the trinity back into Mark, when the problem is precisely that Mark didn't present a trinitarian view. Linguistically the Greek is "υἱοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ", which means "(a) son of the God." Sticking the later meaning of "the Son of God" into this passage is sloppy eisegesis. Other Jewish leaders had been called "sons of God" in the past, it was hardly without precedent or with the special meaning of a being with no father other than God.

Third, again, it's still lower than Luke or Matthew. Lacking entirely a virgin birth, and therefore the miraculous descent literally from God, Mark is fully compatible with an adoptionistic world view, where Jesus is not the pre-existing deity of John or the virgin-born literal son of God of Matthew and Luke, but is made a figurative "son" of God either at his baptism or his crucifixion.

And yet if Mark were constructing his Gospel out of an understanding of a mythical god-man, as the mythicist case requires, the low Christology makes no sense. You don't know Mark's motive any more than I do.

graymouser

This is correct, and it's one of the frustrating things for me about people trying to understand early Christian documents. There is a ton of back-reading later Christian ideas into them. Mark doesn't make his Jesus out to be God. Paul, while taking a somewhat "higher" view (as I've said, this may be a dichotomy of Christ on earth versus Christ crucified), doesn't require him to either be God incarnate, or to be born of a virgin. So if the earliest Christian writers were not writing about a god-man, as most of their modern followers think, the actual positive case of the mythicists doesn't make sense.

sotto voce

What was the blasphemy that Mark recorded that Jesus was accused of?

graymouser

Mark 14:61-63 (ESV):
I have to emphasize yet again - the "son of the Blessed" (if we assume that εὐλογητός is referring to God here) does not imply that Jesus would be the son of God in the sense of Matthew and Luke's literal "born of a virgin", or the idea that he was somehow himself God. He again emphasizes that he is the "Son of Man." Presumably the blasphemy is that Jesus has arrogated to himself the title of the Christ, which technically according to Jewish Law would not have been blasphemy. In order to actually commit blasphemy under the Law, Jesus would have had to curse the name of YHWH, which he does not do nor is accused of doing. You don't get "I am God" here unless you read the Trinity back into the document.

Diogenes the Cynic

Mark thought claiming to be the Messiah was blasphemy. He was wrong, but he needed to contrive some way to blame the Jews for killing Jesus rather than the Romans. The irony is that claiming to be the Messiah violates no Jewish law, but was a seditious claim under Roman law.

sotto voce

Why the quote? Why the ESV?

Self-contradictory nonsense.

Why did the Sanhedrin, who knew all about the Law, accuse Jesus of blasphemy?

graymouser

You asked specifically about the accusation of blasphemy in Mark, which is dealt with clearly and explicitly in the quote I provided.

Do you have a problem with the ESV specifically? I find it reads better than the NASB while not going toward the heavy dynamic equivalence of the NIV, and it doesn't mess around with terminology in the way the NRSV did.

As Diogenes clearly stated above, the charge of blasphemy was incorrect - but they needed some capital crime for Jesus to be executed. It's fairly clear that the Sanhedrin has acted as a kangaroo court in Mark, not giving way to any technical niceties about what the actual blasphemy was.

sotto voce

Which I therefore don't need to read! Neither does anyone, if it's already quoted, from the original language, surely.

Personal pronouns are out of place.

Personal preferences are out of place. Scholarship is appropriate; as is the NASB, if any quote is needed, which is not the case.

More personal opinion/propaganda.

The statement made was that Mark was mendacious; to the point of criminality, of libel, in this case.

Is this a correct assessment of Mark?

So it was the mendacious who opposed Jesus.

But they did not need an execution to get rid of Jesus. They were going to stone him theretofore; and they succeeded, with Stephen. So Jesus had forced them into making a genuine, or apparently genuine reason, for a public death that would be shaming, in the hope of terminating the following of Jesus; not a lynching, that would be liable to increase their own reputation for corruption, and their unpopularity.

So it's nonsensical to suppose that they had got to this necessity but then did not find a substantive reason, or apparently substantive reason, for legal execution. It's even more nonsensical to quote a passage and then ignore it. We clearly read, in any version, that 'the whole Sanhedrin' was told, "You have heard the blasphemy." It was not the claim to be the Messiah per se. So what had the Sanhedrin heard from the lips of Jesus as recorded in this gospel that was blasphemous?