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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
In the early chapters of Mark’s gospel, the only beings to identify Jesus as “Son of God” are the Father and demons. No human being recognizes Him until He dies, and then it’s a Roman centurion.
Perhaps Mark intends us to remember the demonic identifications when we get to the centurion – not that the centurion is a demon (though this might be true in some sense, since Jesus battles a “legion” of demons earlier in the gospel), but rather in the sense that the death of Jesus is the great final exorcism of Israel. What Jesus had been doing as “Son of God” in the synagogues He does climactically at the cross.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 12:16 pm
In a 1986 article in Semeia, Jerome Neyrey examines the role of purity in Mark’s gospel against the background of Mary Douglas’s work. Importantly, he emphasizes that, while Mark shows how Jesus transgresses the boundaries of purity, he also shows that Jesus is the “Holy One” who has come to refound Israel’s holiness system on a new basis:
“While Mark presents Jesus challenging the Jewish purity system, he also describes him as reforming it in favor of other core values. He is ‘the Holy One of God’ and agent of God’s reform: he is authorized to cross lines and to blur classifications as a strategy for a reformed covenant community which is more inclusive than the sectarian synagogue. As God’s agent of holiness, Jesus makes sinners holy and the sick whole. Yet he draws clear lines between those in his group and those outside, setting up distinguishing criteria for membership and for exclusion in the reformed covenant community.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 7, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Graham Twelftree (In the Name of Jesus: Exorcism among Early Christians
There are several problems with these arguments. First, at least in Matthew “legion of angels” does have a military connotation. Yahweh is the Lord of “armies” or hosts, and those hosts are His angels. Second, it’s not only the word but the subsequent story that shows that the gospel writers have a military setting in mind. The pigs possessed by Legion drown in the sea, like Pharaoh and his “legions.” Third, the Gentile setting seems as much to support a political reading of the story as to undermine it. Finally, Twelftree’s understanding of “political” is overly narrow.
I agree with Twelftree’s ultimate conclusion that Jesus’ battle is with Satan more than Rome, but that doesn’t necessitate deleting the political echoes of the story.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 4, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Timothy Gray’s monograph on Temple in the Gospel of Mark, The: A Study in Its Narrative Role
1) Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem brings together several primary themes and terms in Mark’s gospel: kurios, hodos (“way”), ho erchomenos (“the coming one”). In particular, these themes appear at the very outset of Mark’s gospel, in the combined quotation from Isaiah and Malachi, and thus Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is the climax of these opening themes. The Lord comes to the end of His “way,” and He comes into the temple, fulfilling Isaiah’s hope for Yahweh’s eschatological return to Zion and Malachi’s warning about the sudden “coming” of the Lord into His temple. Gray says, “Jesus’ actions in the temple demonstration seem to have been scripted by Malachi. For Malachi warns about the Lord’s coming to the temple (Mal 3:2) as he will come in judgment (3:5f), a judgment particularly focused upon the priests (3:3). The charge against them is that they are robbing God (Mal 3:8-9), a charge that resonates with the accusations Jesus will make against the temple authorities.” A step beyond Gray: It would be important to explore the nature of the “robbery” in Malachi to help determine what kind of robbery Jesus has in view.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 at 9:03 am
Mike Bull offers this suggestive reply e to my earlier post on the Romans and the swine:
Based on the structure of the early chapters in Matthew, the story of the Gadarene is a Day of Atonement (http://www.bullartistry.com.au/wp/2009/09/08/why-jesus-healed-some/).
Matt 1 – Genesis
Matt 2 – Exodus (Passed over by Herod’s sword, etc.)…
Judgment begins at the house of God, so perhaps Jesus is not symbolically casting Romans out of Judea; He is casting the “intermarriage” with Rome out of the Judeans. As with Saul and David, the sending of the troubling spirit and the Holy Spirit are one event.
The Gadarene is the first goat, cleansed in the “Holy Place” cave tomb. The swine are Jews with uncircumcised hearts, the second goat who takes on the demoniac’s self-harming mania and carries the compromise into the Gentile Sea.
The Herods, like Saul, were “kings before God’s time.” They desired to be kings like the Gentiles, free from God’s authority, so God gave them to the Gentile authorities.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 2:59 pm
In his intriguing interpretation of the exorcism in Mark 5, Nick Perrin notes that the allusions to the Roman occupation go beyond the demonic name “Legion.” The swine, he suggests, supplied the Roman garrison in nearby Hippos. By sending the pigs over the cliff into the sea, Jesus is depriving “the legionnaires of a staple delicacy. In this way, Jesus’ measures amounted, albeit in an indirect way, to an act of political sabotage.”
Further, “the wild boar was the mascot of the Tenth Legion, which occupied Palestine and therefore also Hippos.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 10:54 am
The best I can make, at this point, of Matthew’s strange conflated quotation of Jeremiah 18-19/Zechariah 11 in Matthew 27:9-10.
Judas took thirty pieces of silver from the Jewish leaders to betray Jesus. Reading this in the light of Zechariah 11, we know that this expresses the contempt of the Jews for Jesus’ labors as the shepherd who seeks to raise up those who are thrown down (9:36). Also in the light of Zechariah 11, there is the ironic hint that Judas functions as the true shepherd of Israel, the shepherd who is shepherding them toward destruction.
Judas throws the money back in the temple, where it comes before the face of God. Innocent blood is “thrown” in the form of money into the presence of God. God will arise and scatter His enemies, and destroy the house defiled with innocent blood.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, February 20, 2010 at 10:02 am
In a recent article, Rikki Watts challenges the notion that Jesus’ “My God, my God” is a cry of despair, suggesting that it is instead an act of power: “given the . . . its immediate impact on the temple, that it too expresses Jesus’ power. Citing John’s use of the phrase “loud voice” in 11:43 at the grave of Lazarus, Watts argues that the phrase “in its most common NT use . . . expresses God’s sovereign authority over his creation (e.g., 1:10; 5:12; 7:2, 10; 8:13, etc.), echoing the Sinai theophany (Deut. 4:11; 5:22; cf. 1 Sam. 7:10) and God’s sudden moment of delivering judgment on the ungodly who gather against Zion (Isa. 29:5-6; cf. Ezek. 3:12; Sib. Or. 3.669; 5.61-63).”
The cry thus completes a theme begun in the first verses of Mark’s gospel, and kept alive by a thread of quotations from the Psalms (2, 22, 110, 118): “In Mark’s beginning, the voice through the rent heavens at Jesus’ baptism declared him to be God’s messianic son sent to purge and restore the temple. Here at the climactic moment on the cross, Jesus again reveals his divine authority. His ‘great cry’ rends the hostile temple’s curtain thereby both demonstrating and effecting the reality that it, not he, is the one ‘forsaken’ . . . . But Ps. 22:27, 30-31 also declares that all the families of the nations would worship before him. So also then, as the transfigured understanding of Psalm 2 comes to full expression, in fulfillment of Psalm 22′s hope and Isa. 56:7′s vision of a house of prayer for all nations (Mark 11: 17), a Roman centurion, no less, becomes the Gentile firstfruits of a newly reconstituted people-vaos . . . as he confesses before its messianic suffering chief stone that Jesus and not Caesar is ‘son of G/ god.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 8:05 pm
A thought from a student exam: In Mark’s gospel, as soon as the veil of the temple is torn, the centurion confesses Jesus as Son of God. It’s a crucial scene because it’s the first time any human recognizes Jesus as Son.
And the sequence of veil and confession is crucial. The temple existed to keep people away from the presence of Yahweh. Jews were called to be nearer, and Gentiles further. If the temple is open, it doesn’t fulfill this function anymore. There’s a way into the holy place, and at the very moment a way is made into the holy place the division of Jew and Gentile becomes irrelevant.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 9:05 am
Joel Marcus has an intriguing article on the Markan crucifixion account in JBL (2006). He points out that Mark reserves the title “king” until chapter 15, where Jesus is called king six times. As in the other gospels, Mark presents the crucifixion as an exaltation.
Old news, that. Where Marcus shines is in showing that the connection between crucifixion and exaltation predates Christianity. Crucifixion was reserved for criminals who had tried to “exalt” themselves, to lift themselves up to a place they didn’t deserve, to sit in a seat they had not earned. Crucifixion was a “penal liturgy” parodying the pretensions of rebels against Rome.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 22, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Mark 8:7 says that Jesus “blessed” the fish before distributing them to the 4000. As my colleague Toby Sumpter points out, this is the verb of the sea creatures in Gen 1:27, where Yahweh tells them to be fruitful and multiply. Jesus too, the Creator incarnate, blesses fish to multiply in order to feed his Gentile crowd.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 15, 2008 at 11:53 am
Jesus tells the Pharisees who accuse Him of casting out demons by the power of Satan that, on the contrary, He is the stronger man who binds the strong man and comes to plunder the “vessels” of his house (Mark 3). The only other place where Mark uses the word “vessel” is in chapter 11, during Jesus temple action. The house Jesus is plundering is the temple, which has become infested with demons.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2:06 pm
NT Wright suggests that Jesus’ response to the Pharisees’ complaint about his disciples “harvesting” on the Sabbath puts them in the role of Doeg the Edomite, who watched David get showbread from the priests at Nob (end of Mark 2). A student points out that the Edomite theme is still there in the Sabbath incident in Mark 3:1-6: After all the Pharisees go out from the synagogue to plot against Jesus with the Herodians, supporters of the Idumean/Edomite Herod Antipas.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2:04 pm
The structure of Mark 3:1-6 seems to be basically chiastic:
A. Jesus’ entry to synagogue
B. man with withered hand
C. heal on Sabbath?
D. Jesus to man
E. Jesus to Pharisees
F. Silence
E’. Jesus angry and grieved at Pharisees
D’. Jesus to man
C’. ??
B’. restored hand
A’. Pharisees consult with Herodians about how to destroy him
Two observations: First, the Pharisees’ silence seem to be central, the turning point of the story and one of a series of important turning points in the gospel. Jesus reacts to their silence with the beginnings of eschatological wrath and grief. Second, the fact that the text doesn’t return to the Sabbath issue is noteworthy. The Pharisees are very interested in learning whether Jesus will break the Sabbath, but by the end of the story their Sabbatarianism is just dropped, as they go out to plot a murder. As they forget the Sabbath, Mark leaves an open space in the story where we would expect another Sabbath reference.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2:01 pm
In a 1984 JBL article, Elizabeth Struthers Malbon suggested that the boat in Mark’s gospel represents a “mediator” between sea and land, and pointed out that Jesus treats the sea as if it were land (walking on it, showing no concern for the unsteadiness of the waves, etc.).
If we link this to the OT symbolism of sea=Gentiles and land=Israel, we can see the indications of the Pauline theme that Jesus combines Jew and Gentile into one new man. And, the fact that Jesus teaches from a boat shoved out in the sea perhaps gives us an image of the church – the church is a little ark, a little bit of Israel, tossed about on the sea of nations. But there’s no danger, because the Lord of the church walks on the sea as dry land.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, May 3, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I am convinced by N. T. Wright and others that Jesus is not attacking the temple for financial impropriety. At the same time, economic abuses are certainly part of the evil that Jesus condemns. Jesus final scenes in the temple in Mark are framed by His condemnation of the temple as a “den of brigands” (11:17) and the widow putting her two coins in the temple treasury (12:41-44). Jesus leaves the temple in 13:1, never to return, and describes its destruction in the Olivet Discourse.
The widow is pious, of course, but in context the point of the story is that the temple authorities devour widows’ houses (12:40, just before the scene with the widow). Jesus condemns the temple, among other things, because instead of providing food for widows and orphans (as the festival laws of Deuteronomy require), the temple authorities suck the life from widows, devouring the weak instead of feeding them.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 6:31 am
The following is drawn largely from David Garland’s commentary on Mark.
Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem changes everything in His ministry. He has been moving about in secret, teaching in private, refusing to draw attention to Himself, speaking in coded parables. He cleanses a leper but then sternly warns him, “See that you say nothing to anyone” (1:44). He raises a little girl from the dead, but then “gave them strict orders that no one should know about this” (5:43). He heals deaf and mute man by touching and spitting, and then “gave them orders not to tell anyone” (7:35). He heals the blind man at Bethsaida, but then tells him to go home and not even enter the village where he was healed (8:26). Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, but Jesus warns Him “to tell no one about it” (8:30), and after the transfiguration he “gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen, until the Son of Man should rise from the dead” (9:9).
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 6:24 am
Mark 11:9-10: Then those who went before and those who followed cried out, saying: “ Hosanna! ‘ Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!’ Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”
As Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the crowds acclaim Him as the Davidic king, come to claim his throne in the name of the Lord. Jesus arrives with an entourage that precedes and follows Him, and celebrates His coming. “Hoshana,” they shout; “Save!” The people celebrate Jesus’ coming as a deliverer and conqueror.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 5:52 am
The story of Palm Sunday is oddly anticlimatic. Jesus enters Jerusalem surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd that acclaims Him as the Son of David.
We expect something to happen. Jesus will perform some stunning miracle that will finally convince His enemies. He will defeat them in debate and they will slink back to the holes they came from. He will take over the temple and turn it into a house of prayer for all nations. Instead, He enters the temple, looks around, and leaves.
What’s going on? Continue reading…
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 5:40 am
In his NIV Application commentary on Mark, David Garland interprets Jesus’ statement about the temple as a “house of prayer for all nations” as a condemnation of the separation of Gentiles in the temple: “During his entire ministry Jesus has been gathering in the impure outcasts and the physically maimed, and has even reached out to the Gentiles. He expects the temple to embody this inclusive love. The various purity barriers in the temple, however, have been preventing that. Gentiles were not allowed entry into the temple proper. Would Jesus have envisioned the nations gathered in Mount Zion and then forced to cool their heels in the outer court? Would he have condoned segregation – separate and unequal – in God’s temple? What kind of beacon is it that would draw the nations to Jerusalem only to partition them from the main body of worshipers in the temple?”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 14, 2008 at 6:06 am
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