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

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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.