Jesus in the Four Gospels

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patrick457

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Let’s wrap this up quickly before I get bored and abandon a thread once more, shall we? 😉

As everyone knows, each of the four gospels have their own unique portrait of Jesus, so much so that anyone expecting a modern, factual, ‘unbiased’ biography would be frustrated. Here let’s take a look as to how each gospel sketch Jesus’ character, and how it relates to the gospel’s overall theme/s.

Mark: Jesus as Enigma

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Let’s start with Mark, the shortest of the four gospels - and according to one theory perhaps even the earliest of them.

Mark is a very short, rapid and terse gospel. It begins simply with a very brief introduction (“The beginning of the euangelion of Jesus Christ, son of God”) and most likely ends in an ambiguous cliffhanger at 16:8 (“They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”) In between the narrative pace is very fast: Mark has a rather quick montage of a series of episodes from Jesus’ life, but slows down a bit in order to tell the story of Jesus’ final week. These factors, along with Mark’s rather unpolished, colloquial style and certain quirks (he uses the word kai “and” a lot to connect sentence after sentence and has a penchant for Latin loanwords), have led people to label his gospel with a number of adjectives ranging from ‘terse’ to ‘clumsy’, from ‘simplistic’ to ‘uncouth’, from ‘subtle’ to ‘crude’. Alternatively, however, we can view Mark as someone like Ernest Hemingway: one who uses straightforward and understated narrative and dialogue (the so-called iceberg theory) to present a complex but subtle portrait of Jesus. While each of these adjectives have some truth to them, they nevertheless fail to completely and precisely capture Mark’s gospel. Both the gospel and its main character are enigmatic, resisting facile comprehension or simplistic interpretation.

The very first thing that Mark tells us is that Jesus is God’s Son (a running theme throughout the gospel, as we’ll later see), although he does not elaborate further on the status of His sonship. After a brief introduction involving John the Baptizer, Jesus then appears abruptly into the scene as an adult - Mark eschews any discussion of Jesus’ birth or boyhood and by means of this succinctly presents Jesus as a sort of mysterious, divine figure distinct from your average 1st century Galilean peasant. Whereas a modern biographer would trace patterns of interaction between the subject and his environment in highlight the subject’s distinctive features, Mark simply proclaims Jesus’ uniqueness but not gives us the reason why,
 
Care to give us your summary on the remaining Gospels, or was it your intention to start with Mark separately?
 
Does Mark indicate anywhere at all that Jesus was actually God, as distinct from his son, and if not, why do you think he would have missed out this apparently significant point?
 
Hokomai said:
Does Mark indicate anywhere at all that Jesus was actually God, as distinct from his son, and if not, why do you think he would have missed out this apparently significant point?
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In the very first sentence

[BIBLEDRB]Mark 1:1[/BIBLEDRB]
 
Hokomai said:
Does Mark indicate anywhere at all that Jesus was actually God, as distinct from his son, and if not, why do you think he would have missed out this apparently significant point?
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The New Testament in general lays the foundation for Trinitarian belief. Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of God, yet also declares that He and the Father are One. He discussed the Holy Spirit, and provides an understanding of how the Holy Spirit will continue to grace us.

There is no direct statement to be found in any Gospel account that Jesus claimed to be God, or declared Himself to be God. He confessed to being the Son of God, and One with the Father.
 
ByzCathCantor said:
The New Testament in general lays the foundation for Trinitarian belief. Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of God, yet also declares that He and the Father are One. He discussed the Holy Spirit, and provides an understanding of how the Holy Spirit will continue to grace us.

There is no direct statement to be found in any Gospel account that Jesus claimed to be God, or declared Himself to be God. He confessed to being the Son of God, and One with the Father.
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Isn’t the bit about “I and the father are one” in John? I was asking why Mark seems to overlook this critical piece of information (given that Mark could have had no idea that a New Testament would one day be put together, with another author providing this fact.
 
Hokomai said:
Isn’t the bit about “I and the father are one” in John? I was asking why Mark seems to overlook this critical piece of information (given that Mark could have had no idea that a New Testament would one day be put together, with another author providing this fact.
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Yes, the"bit" as you put it is in John, but that was not the point. Your question could be asked and answered consistently with respect to any of the four Gospels.
 
ByzCathCantor said:
Care to give us your summary on the remaining Gospels, or was it your intention to start with Mark separately?
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Sorry, I got cut off right there. I’m not yet finished - I’ll post the rest as soon as I get my hands free. I have a life (a very harsh one) after all. 😃
 
ByzCathCantor said:
Yes, the"bit" as you put it is in John, but that was not the point. Your question could be asked and answered consistently with respect to any of the four Gospels.
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Ummm you may be right that it could be answered, but it has not been. I was asking how Mark managed to write a whole book about Jesus, intended as a stand-alone work, without mentioning that Jesus was God. "Son of Man’ and “Son of God” is not the same thing as “God” in any clear sense, and there seems to reason to believe they would have been so understood by Mark’s intended audience. If Mark thought Jesus was god, why did he not say so?
 
Hokomai said:
Ummm you may be right that it could be answered, but it has not been. I was asking how Mark managed to write a whole book about Jesus, intended as a stand-alone work, without mentioning that Jesus was God. "Son of Man’ and “Son of God” is not the same thing as “God” in any clear sense, and there seems to reason to believe they would have been so understood by Mark’s intended audience. If Mark thought Jesus was god, why did he not say so?
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The Gospel of Mark decidedly and thematically focused on the “Sonship” of Jesus Christ, but that does not mean that Mark did not believe that Jesus Christ was One in the Holy Trinity.

Perhaps there is some intent in your question that escapes me, but once again, never did Jesus claim to be God alone in any of the Gospel accounts. He presents Himself as Son of God, and One with the Father, which together with the other Scriptural teachings provide the foundation for belief in the Triune God.
 
Hokomai said:
If Mark thought Jesus was god, why did he not say so?
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Mark was a secretary of St. Peter the Apostle. He wrote the Gospel by the preaching of St. Peter in Rome. It would be a consideration that he could not of chosen how to present the story.

Jesus “saith to them: But whom do you say that I am? Peter answering said to him: Thou art the Christ.” (Mk 8:29) Mark had to of known the whole story, the whole message to understand what does pertain to being the Christ, and what does not. It would be a far stretch for a committed follower of the first Pope to be intentionally ignorant in order to protect a false belief of what is and what is not a Christ.
 
Hokomai said:
Isn’t the bit about “I and the father are one” in John? I was asking why Mark seems to overlook this critical piece of information (given that Mark could have had no idea that a New Testament would one day be put together, with another author providing this fact.
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Mark may not have known that his Gospel would eventually become a part of a four Gospel ‘testimony’ of the life and public ministry of Jesus Christ, but the Holy Spirit did when he inspired these four evangelists to write their Gospels. That is the beauty of having all four Gospels instead of one. They are written at four different times and places in the Church and by four different men, each with a different prospective. We have Mark showing us that Jesus truly became man (one of us) so we could relate to him. We have John who emphasizes Jesus’ divinity and showing us the he was also one with the Father, Matthew who emphasizes his Jewishness and connection to the Old Testament (for a Jewish audience), And Luke, a gentile who writes about Jesus to a gentile audience. All four Gospels have a purpose, and together they paint a vivid picture of Jesus Christ that one Gospel by itself would be unable to do.
 
To make a long story short, read Benedict XVI’s first volume of Jesus of Nazareth – prayerfully.

Jesus does indeed proclaim his divinity, as “astonished” his listeners. He spoke with authority as only a divine person could. He fulfilled scripture, as only a divine person could. He established a new covenant, with an eternal liturgy, involving himself, as only a divine person could.

Scripture cannot be understood solely as literature. Modern godless historical criticism concludes only back at its assumptions of godlessness. This approach tells you who the critics are, not what scripture proclaims, that it is really and actually the “good news” (gospel).
 
patrick457 said:
These factors, along with Mark’s rather unpolished, colloquial style and certain quirks (he uses the word kai “and” a lot to connect sentence after sentence and has a penchant for Latin loanwords), have led people to label his gospel with a number of adjectives ranging from ‘terse’ to ‘clumsy’, from ‘simplistic’ to ‘uncouth’, from ‘subtle’ to ‘crude’.
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I should also add here that Mark also often uses the historic present (“And answering, He says…”), something that is unfortunately obscured in many translations - where it is often rendered into simple past tense.
The very first thing that Mark tells us is that Jesus is God’s Son (a running theme throughout the gospel, as we’ll later see), although he does not elaborate further on the status of His sonship. After a brief introduction involving John the Baptizer, Jesus then appears abruptly into the scene as an adult - Mark eschews any discussion of Jesus’ birth or boyhood and by means of this succinctly presents Jesus as a sort of mysterious, divine figure distinct from your average 1st century Galilean peasant. Whereas a modern biographer would trace patterns of interaction between the subject and his environment in highlight the subject’s distinctive features, Mark simply proclaims Jesus’ uniqueness but not gives us the reason why,
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Alright, now to continue:

Mark is so keen to emphasize Jesus being a unique person that in the very first healing in the gospel (the demoniac at Capharnaum; 1:21-28), we are at once told that:

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. …] And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.

As the gospel progresses, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to know as to just what sort of person Jesus wants to present to the world. He performs miracles but warns people to not tell everyone about it (more on this theme later). He draws crowds to Himself because of His words and actions, but then withdraws away from the people attracted to Him. In fact, He even disassociates Himself from His blood relations:

That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered together at the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”

Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.” …] And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

To say that Mark’s Jesus is lonely is somewhat of an overstatement, since the author very rarely comment on Jesus’ thoughts, but He is certainly alone. This loneliness will eventually reach a climax at His death, where none of His acquaintances provide any moral support.

And Jesus said to them, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the Scriptures be fulfilled.” And they all left him and fled. And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body. And they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” …] There were also women looking on from a distance, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome.

Here let’s pause for a bit to talk about the so-called ‘messianic secret’ motif.

Again and again in the gospel, when Jesus performs something miraculous He rather oddly tells the witnesses to keep quiet about it. The very first time Jesus tries to silence someone is in Mark 1:25, when He rebukes the unclean spirit possessing a man in Capharnaum in response to its claim to know who Jesus is: “Be muzzled shut, and come out of him.”

A little later Mark tells us: “And many demons he drove out, and was not permitting the demons to speak because they knew him.” (1:34) Jesus does not silence them because they were saying false things about Him; on the contrary, He did so “because they knew him.” We often get this pattern in Mark where Jesus heals or exorcises someone, or when someone reveals His true identity, Jesus tells them all to shut up about what just happened, but very often the people can’t seem to restrain themselves from blabbering about it for some reason and so fame about Jesus and His abilities spreads anyway. This also applies for Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration:

And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” And he strictly charged them to tell no one about him.

And as they were coming down the mountain, he charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean.

The first person to notice and identify this theme was a man called William Wrede, who also applied the title of “messianic secret” to this phenomenon. Now Wrede advanced the theory that Jesus did not really proclaim Himself as the Messiah during His lifetime nor was He identified as one by anyone. It was only after Jesus’ death that the disciples eventually came to believe that He was indeed the Christ. Now what happened, according to Wrede, was that the early Christians then invented the literary motif of having Jesus keep His true identity secret throughout His ministry when they retold the story of His life, in effect (anachronistically) transposing their understanding of who Jesus is back to an earlier time. Wrede thought that the clue to this lies in Jesus’ admonition to the disciples after the Transfiguration, where the disciples are told to keep everything a secret “except when the son of man should rise from the dead.”

The problem with Wrede’s theory, however, is that first of all, while he argued that the messianic elements in the Jesus story were later insertions by the early Christians some of the ‘Jesus tradition’ do look rather messianic in nature (the entry to Jerusalem, for instance - which evokes the prophecy from Zechariah). Secondly, while Jesus does command silence, the people proclaim the news anyway - hence the theory doesn’t really make sense of the messianic-secret motif and its function in Mark’s gospel. Thirdly, there is one instance (5:19-20) where Jesus actually commands a healed person to tell the news.
 
The usual explanations from a historical, “this is what happened” perspective (Jesus wanted to keep any unwanted fame in check, etc.), while helpful, do not fully answer the mystery of this motif: why Mark seems to make such a big deal out of it and why this theme seems to appear during key moments. I think that one good way to look at it is to see this motif in light of the other literary elements in Mark’s gospel, the other things he chooses to put into the spotlight: the disciples being slow-witted and blind and Jesus as the crucified Messiah.

http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/1/0/4/1/6/0/9/stooge-1268479273.jpeg

Let’s first start off with the ‘blind disciples’ motif. Mark actually starts off his portrayal of the disciples pretty well: for instance, when Jesus calls His disciples, they obediently follow, leaving behind everything to follow Him (1:16-20; 2:13-17; 3:13-18). However, aside from a handful of places where the disciples shine, everything goes downhill from there, as we will soon see:

The gospel pays partiular attention to the alienation that Jesus feels from His disciples. When Jesus articulates His first parable in the gospel (that of the sower), He concludes it with an exhortation: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” In other words, “You’d better use your ears and listen well!” Mark does not relate the crowd’s reaction, but he does tell the disciples’, and they pointedly lack “ears to hear.” Jesus responds to their request for an explanation of the parable by pointing their privileged position of having “the mystery of the kingdom of God” plainly revealed to them, while to those outside everything is said in parables. In other words, Jesus does not explain Himself immediately, but provides a justification for His parables, and this justification divides insiders from outsiders. In the hyperbole of this explanation, everything sounds parabolic to outsiders in order that they will remain outside. Mark’s Jesus, according to His own admission, intentionally confounds His listeners to push them away: He slams and locks the door on their faces, so to speak.

The disciples would seem to play the role of insiders, in contrast to the scribes and other opponents, but this is not exactly right. Their position only allows them exposure to the “mystery,” but not necessarily understanding. This gift would prove to be a mixed blessing. In 4:13 Jesus asks them a pair of questions: “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables?” The implied answer for the first question being “no,” and to the second, that they won’t. Hence, the insiders have no more luck than the outsiders in comprehending Jesus’ riddles. After more parables (mostly involving more seeds), Mark closes this section of the gospel with the words:

With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

The parable of the sower epitomizes Jesus’ teaching to the disciples. He presents them something which confounds them, and when they ask for an explanation, they become more confused. Returning to Jesus’ question, we see that if the disciples do not understand one parable, then they necessarily cannot understand all or any of the parables.

Perhaps to drive home the point that the disciples are faithless dullards, Mark in the following pericope (the calming of the storm; 4:35-41) has the disciples tell Jesus rather bluntly: “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” and Jesus retorting back: “Have you still no faith?” When Jesus finally orders the storm to die down, the disciples could only remark: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” thereby bringing us back to Mark’s emphasis on Jesus being a mysteriously unique figure, as well as further hammering the point of the disciples’ blindness (the only ones who know Jesus’ true identity as “son of God” within the story are supernatural beings like God and the demons; by contrast, most of the human dramatis personae are in the dark as to who Jesus is - Mark’s hearers, in a case of dramatic irony, are thus privileged to be ‘in the know’).
 
Hokomai said:
Isn’t the bit about “I and the father are one” in John? I was asking why Mark seems to overlook this critical piece of information (given that Mark could have had no idea that a New Testament would one day be put together, with another author providing this fact.
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I believe that the claim that Jesus is God is overt in the Gospels, but that we don’t see it because we don’t look at the Gospels as a Jew in the first century would have.

One of the ways in which Mark tells us that Jesus is God is through an overt reference to the very first verses of the Hebrew Scriptures.

*In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!” The wind ceased and there was great calm*. Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” They were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this whom even wind and sea obey?” (Mark 4:39-41)*

In Genesis 1, God creates Heaven and earth, and in so doing, wields absolute power over wind and water. I believe that Mark’s placement of Jesus in a power of absolute authority over wind and sea was overt, and that Jews who were knowledgeable about the Hebrew scriptures would have recognized the reference. I believe that this passage, and parallel passages in the other Gospels, were clear statements of Jesus divinity - that he was the same God who created Heaven and earth in the book of Genesis.

Mark and the other Gospel authors use similar techniques, references to Genesis and God’s power to create, to tell their audiences that Jesus is in fact God.

Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27:28)

The sabbath was of divine origin, created by God on the seventh day when God rested, and given by God as a gift to mankind. To claim that you were “lord of the sabbath” was to claim that you were the creator of the sabbath, and that you had authority over the sabbath. Again, the Jews would have recognized this as a clear indication that Jesus claimed to be the same God who created the Sabbath for man in Genesis 2:1-3.

Similarly, Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in Mark 11:17 was a sign that he had authority over the temple. Jesus claim that “Something greater than the temple is here” in Matthew 12:6 would have been especially shocking. To a Jew in the first century, the Temple was the center of the universe, where God dwelt with men, and to say that you were greater than the temple was to claim that you were God.

This is why the chief priests and scribes sought to kill Jesus for blasphemy, because to a Jew, these were clear claims by Jesus that he was divine, that he was in fact the same God (consubstantial?) who created Heaven and earth, the sabbath, and the temple.

-Tim-
 
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