Originally Posted by EarlDoherty

Then why, when Jesus admitted to being the "son of the Blessed One" did the HP (i.e., Mark) call it blasphemy and deserving of death? this is what I asked Jon to explain.

Earl Doherty

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

You seem to be conflating two very seperate things here. One is the quite correct view that messiah did not mean "god" and messianic claims did not mean a claim to divinity. The other is that the only way such claims could be seen as "blasphemy" would be if they were divine. That seems to me to be quite ill-founded. It's true that, when it comes to 1st century judaism, and the various movement, tensions, etc., our sources are somewhat limited in many respects, and one of these is what, exactly, eschatological hopes involved, especially in terms of a messiah. However, the claim seems to have been intricately tied with socio-political (which, in that time, and particularly for the Jews, implied religious) ideas linked to the restoration of Israel, kingship, and authority. It seems that one central reason for discontent in and around the early 1st century was the Hasmonean claim to priestly authority despite the fact that they were not of the "line of Zadok." In other words, we are already dealing with a priestly elite whose "authority" and proper interpretation of the law was questioned at a time when this authority was already subject to Rome. From Josephus and Philo (who discusses the zeletoi nomon or zealots of the law, persecuting other Jews because of any number of what they considered "blasphemies") to Roman historians, we get a picture in which the authority of the priests was tenuous and there were plenty apart from the priests who would kill over the claims about the Law. And from what we know of the Pharisees and the support they had, the life and execution of John the baptist as described by Josephus, and the evidence from some of the so-called intertestamental literature (and even rabbinic literature), a claim to be the "annointed" of god could easily be deemed blaphemy and was certainly a dangerous claim to make in front of the elite. It came with a claim to authority from god over Israel. I find it hard to believe the priestly authority ~30 CE would not have thought someone claiming to be the messiah was making a blasphemous claim.

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Blasphemy has an extremely narrow definition under Tamudic law. It actually only constitutes a single phrase which includes the Tetragrammaton, but not only the tertagrammaton. Essentially it's a curse (though I don't remember the Hebrew word).

I would like to see evidence that Messianic claims were ever considered blasphemous. It's sacrilegious even to say that the Messiah is God, so calling a Messianic claim blasphemous is, in itself, arguably sacrelegious.

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Blasphemy has an extremely narrow definition under Tamudic law.

Originally Posted by stephan huller

But is the original reference in Mark to chrestos or Christos? Chrestos works better because it is already an attested divine epithet cf philo

Originally Posted by LegionOnomaMoi

As studies of "2nd temple Judaism" (esp. those by Neusner) have demonstrated quite convincingly, it is hazardous in the extreme to project rabbinic thought (even when it purports to date to or before the time in question) onto the first century. Moreover, from what our sources tell us, the Jewish priestly authorities held the Torah to consist of, and only of, what it means in the technical sense (the "books of moses", rather than the Law of god in general). So not only is it quite problematic to read Talmudic interpretations back into the first century, but here we are talking about a group which as far as we know from our sources specifically rejected the "oral Torah" and the beginnings of what became Talmudic law.





In Mark specifically, the charge of blasphemy doesn't simply follow "I am" but a reference (probably) to Daniel, and in a way similar to that for which the rabbi Akiba seems to have been castigated. However, again the term doesn't necessarily mean a technical charge of profane use of the name of god or a sacriligious reference to god, but had a much wider sense. It's possible that the wider sense is used here, or that the author of Mark intended readers to interpret the word that Jesus suggested that either he or (if not understood as a self-reference) another human was the one who was to sit upon the throne described in Daniel.

Which may have been the problem: that to suggest the figure on the throne in Daniel to a human or was meant to be the messiah was to commit exactly this kind of sacriledge. Not that Jesus was claiming to be god, but that the suggestion that the passage referred to a human was enough to charge him with blasphemy, and this is what Mark intended his audience to understand.