It’s common to hear that Mark doesn’t have the strongest case for Jesus’ deity among the gospels. Some of the work on Dr. Bart Ehrman’s website refers to the Marcan Jesus as a merely messianic figure, who “embodies both the power of the Messiah and the vulnerability of the suffering servant”, but his opinion is not as stable as some might think. In one such presentation some years ago, Dr. Brant Pitre questioned him on a specific passage in the gospel, Mark 14:62, and Dr. Bart Ehrman didn’t give a response that would be favorable to sceptics. It makes the most sense to simply write out the exchange here to form the basis of my ‘point’ for this verse.
Mark 14:62
Dr. Brant Pitre and Dr. Bart Ehrman’s exchange
I’ll give some notes on the exchange after – note that there is slight paraphrasing since this was a conversational encounter.
Dr. Pitre:
“My question is about the charge of blasphemy in Mark, in particular in Mark 14, and it’s for Dr. Ehrman, but I’d like to hear what both of you think. I thought I heard you saying that Jesus doesn’t claim to be divine in the earlier gospels, in particular in the Gospel of Mark. And yet we were just looking at the account of the trial before Caiaphas, where Caiaphas asks him, “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed?” He says, “I am, and you’ll see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of power and coming in the Clouds of Glory.” Then they charge him with blasphemy. He’s quoting Psalm 110 and Daniel 7.
So my question is, I just want to be clear: Is Jesus claiming to be divine there? If he’s not, then why do they charge him with blasphemy in the context of a question about his identity? And second, why does he quote Psalm 110 and, well, this ties into pre-existence and Mark 12. He quotes Psalm 110, which is the one psalm in the Old Testament that says, “Before the day star, I have begotten you.“ Isn’t there implicit pre-existence there? So, two questions in one. Sorry about that—my main question is: Is he making a divine claim there? And if not, why the blasphemy charge?”
Dr. Ehrman:
“Well, it’s a complicated question, and it would take a very long time to answer in detail. I think it’s one of the more confusing passages in the Gospel of Mark because, technically speaking, Jesus does not commit a blasphemy. The chief priest asks him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?” and Jesus says, “I am.” Now, that’s not a blasphemy. He’s saying, “Yes, I am the Messiah.” There’s no blasphemy in claiming to be the Messiah. The Messiah was just the future king of Israel, and so that’s not a blasphemy.
Then he says, “You will see the Son of Man coming on the Clouds of Heaven.” That’s not a blasphemy either. That’s just referring to Daniel, that you’re going to see what Daniel predicted in Daniel 7:13-14. But then they cry out “blasphemy!” So, what’s the blasphemy?
There are a number of theories about this. One theory that I don’t accept is that when Jesus says “I am,” he’s claiming the divine name for himself. I don’t think so, because the words “I am” simply mean “Yes.” Are you the Messiah? “Yes, I am the Messiah.” It’s not claiming the divine name; it’s just how you say “Yes.”
So then, if that’s not the blasphemy, what is the blasphemy? I think you have to understand that, for Mark, the author of this gospel, Jesus is the Son of Man. Jesus is coming back in glory. Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God, and he’s coming back as the judge of the earth. It’s not that some anonymous Son of Man is coming; Jesus is coming. Mark thinks that. That’s what Mark thinks Jesus is. So, when Jesus says, “You will see the Son of Man,” Mark requires you to think Jesus is the Son of Man.
The high priest knows that he thinks that, and so the high priest thinks he’s claiming to be the Son of Man. And so, he calls out blasphemy.
Is it a divine claim? Well, yeah, kind of. I mean, it is, yeah, kind of. But it’s not like Jesus is saying, “I and the Father are one.” Sorry, I’m out of time.
[an audience member chimes in, claiming this passage to be ‘the invention of Mark’]
Yes, of course it’s the invention of Mark, it’s the invention of Mark! There’s no way we know what happened at the trial of Jesus before Caiaphas – this is Mark’s account, I’m talking about the historical Jesus, we don’t know what happened at the trial of Jesus, how would we know that? Jesus would have known.
Dr. Pitre asks an excellent question. He notes that Jesus quotes a passage the Book of Daniel. In this passage, Daniel describes a vision he has:
“’ I was watching in the night visions, “And with the clouds of the sky one like a son of man was approaching. He went up to the Ancient of Days and was escorted before him. To him was given ruling authority, honor, and sovereignty. All peoples, nations, and language groups were serving him. His authority is eternal and will not pass away. His kingdom will not be destroyed.’”
Daniel 7:13-14
There are many other places in the Old Testament where one is cloud imagery is used to describe divine action or presence, such as Exodus 34:5, Psalm 68:4 and Isaiah 19:1. One might be able to find some wiggle room, as Dr. Ehrman initially tries to, but after reading Psalm 110, you might be inclined to switch your opinion, just like Dr. Ehrman does above:
‘ Here is the Lord ’s proclamation to my lord: “Sit down at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool!” The Lord extends your dominion from Zion. Rule in the midst of your enemies! Your people willingly follow you when you go into battle. On the holy hills at sunrise the dew of your youth belongs to you. The Lord makes this promise on oath and will not revoke it: “You are an eternal priest after the pattern of Melchizedek.” O sovereign Lord , at your right hand he strikes down kings in the day he unleashes his anger.’
Psalm 110:1-5
It’s clear that the person signified in this Psalm shares the authority/power of God. This person is above David (note the two ‘lords’) and can ‘rule’ over [their] enemies. This person is also ‘eternal’ and sits at the ‘right hand’ of God, which is an honor. The NET comments tell us that, in Ugaritic myth, the artisan god Kotharand Khasis is described as sitting at the right hand of the storm god Baal.
Dr. Pitre also notes that Jesus quotes Mark 12, and I’m guessing he’s referring to Mark 12:35-37:
‘ While Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, he said, “How is it that the experts in the law say that the Christ is David’s son? David himself, by the Holy Spirit, said, ‘ The Lord said to my lord, “ Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet. ”’ If David himself calls him ‘Lord,’ how can he be his son?” And the large crowd was listening to him with delight. ‘
It’s quite clear that Jesus did not see the character of the Messiah in the same light that the ‘experts of the law’ (Scribes) did, after all, that seems to be the only interpretation that makes sense his questioning of the experts’ calling the Christ ‘David’s son’. In Jerusalem, the king’s palace was located to the right of the temple as a declaration of honor – it seems quite clear that Jesus wants the listeners to reflect on how great the Messiah is, as one who is able to take his place at the side of God.
The hook-line-and-sinker (that I’m not sure is even needed) comes in the form of Dr. Pitre’s question about pre-existence. Dr. Pitre quotes Psalm 110:3. In the NET, it reads:
‘ Your people willingly follow you when you go into battle. On the holy hills at sunrise the dew of your youth belongs to you.’
Not that impressive, right? However a brief introduction is in order before I make the fullness of my point. The below aside relies on material taken from Dr. Brant Pitre and Dr. John Bergsma’s “Catholic Introduction to the Old Testament”, pages 28-29.
Aside:
The Masoretic Text
The NET is a more Protestant translation of the Bible. It relies on the Masoretic Text which is the standard Hebrew form of the Tanakh (the Jewish Bible) – a collection of 24 books including the Torah (Genesis, Exodus…Deuteronomy), the Nevi’im (generally prophetic literature), and the Ketuvim (generally wisdom literature). The text takes its name from the Masoretes, a school of Jewish scribes that flourished between the 8th and 11th centuries AD, but some sources [1] reckon its writing began as early as the 6th century AD.
The Septuagint
The Septuagint is what Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches tend to rely on when it comes to biblical translation. Jewish scribes brought from Jerusalem to Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy II (283-246 B.C) were tasked to translate the sacred books of the Jews into Greek for the Library of Alexandria. The name (Greek for ‘seventy’) originates from the seventy scholars commissioned to make the translation. The Septuagint carried enormous prestige in the ancient world, with Jewish scholars such as the philosopher Philo and the historian Josephus regarding it as virtually inspired, but as Christianity grew and became the leading religion of the Roman Empire Jews began to reject the Septuagint, calling it inaccurate and misleading.
Which one is better?
I would argue the Septuagint is. As Dr. Pitre and Dr. Bergsma write – “For the millions of Greek-speaking Jews living in the Roman Empire outside of Palestine, [the Septuagint] was the only form of the Scriptures they used. The majority of the Old Testament quotations are taken from the Greek Septuagint, since the apostles and other New Testament authors typically wrote for a broad audience, rather than just the Jews of Palestine”. Jews in Palestine primarily spoke Aramaic, a semitic language closely related to Hebrew, whereas Jews outside of Palestine predominantly spoke Greek.
Though the Masoretic Text shows greater fidelity to Jewish custom and older understandings of the Messiah, the Septuagint seems to cohere better with the prevailing understanding of the Messiah in first-century Palestine, based on its use in the New Testament.
The Masoretic Text translates Psalm 110:3 as:
“Your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power, in holy garments; from the womb of the morning, the dew of your youth will be yours.”
This is more or less what you will find in every Protestant bible translation, and it’s pretty close to the NET translation I gave before. The Septuagint reads slightly differently:
“From the womb, before the morning star, I have begotten you.”
Dr. Pitre’s quotation makes sense now. God begets a ‘lord’ which is greater than David before the “creation” of anything else. Considering the New Testament authors’ use of Septuagint scriptures, it’s reasonable to believe that Jesus was also referencing the Septuagint translation when he made this quote, and therefore is affirming the following:
- Pre-existence (Psalm 110:3)
- Greater than David (Mark 12:35-37)
- The power of God (Psalm 110, Daniel 7:13-14)
- Eternal authority, honour and sovereignty (Daniel 7:13-14)
Kudos to Dr. Ehrman, it’s not easy to change your opinion live, in front of hundreds of people.
Divinity on a Spectrum?
The last thing that Dr. Ehrman can do is claim that Ancient Monotheism was seen on a spectrum – i.e., was in some way henotheistic, and therefore that Jesus’ claim, if anything, doesn’t amount to much. This is something he has done on one of his blog daily post podcasts, and here are parts of the transcript from 3:13 onwards for those interested in exactly what he said:
“Most of the Bible assumes there are indeed other gods in the world.…Now, you might be tempted to think that just because the Israelites worshipped other gods, it doesn’t mean these gods really existed…my point is that many Israelites thought so. So, they weren’t monotheists. There is very solid evidence that ancient Israel, for many centuries, did not even claim to be monotheistic.
Israelites regularly acknowledged that there were indeed other gods in the world. Their religion did not deny the existence of these other superhuman beings; it simply claimed that the Israelites were not supposed to worship them. Yahweh was the only god to be worshipped—but that didn’t mean he was the only god. He was the only god for the Israelites…a favourite passage for many people who argue this point is a rather important one for other reasons as well: the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2–17)….In Jewish reckoning, the first of those “words” is not a commandment but a statement of fact meant to ground and justify the commands that follow:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2).
The second commandment in Jewish reckoning is the first in most of the Protestant Churches and in the Orthodox Tradition. The two are put together with the Protestant second commandment in the Catholic and Lutheran traditions, just to keep all of us confused:
“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).
Notice how it is worded. The commandment is not, “You shall not believe or even think for a second that there is another god besides me.” Yahweh…is to be the top god in the pantheon. No other god should take precedent…Thus, the view found most widely in the Old Testament tradition is that there are other gods, but they are not to be worshipped—either instead of or alongside Yahweh. That is not monotheism. It is known as henotheism. Henotheism is not polytheism because it does not worship other gods or even value them. It simply acknowledges that other people have valued and worshipped them…Even Jews who later became monotheists recognized other divine beings. Sometimes these beings are called “gods.” Sometimes they are good beings, and sometimes they are worshipped.“
To be fair, in the above transcript, Bart is not completely wrong. John Walton, who I depended on heavily in parts of my previous series corroborates Dr. Ehrman’s points regarding initial henotheism in the Ancient Israelite religion. In page 234 of “The Lost World of the Torah” he notes about the first commandment:
“The availability of the ANE literature brought an increased recognition that the commandment dictated only monolatry or henotheism rather than what we now call monotheism—relating as it did to the question of whom the people worshiped rather than to whether other gods existed 10 Earlier interpreters had made this same point, but the ANE material tended to push interpretation more firmly in this direction”
Therefore, we can agree that the early Israelites were likely not strict monotheists, but henotheists. Dr. Ehrman and I also agree that by the time of Jesus, the Jews were strict monotheists. Ehrman states this, along with some more controversial comments in his book How Jesus became God and arguably, pushes his points further than he should and makes some strange mistakes:
“It may not have come as a huge surprise to learn that pagans who held to a range of polytheistic religions sometimes imagined that humans could be divine in some sense. It is more surprising, for most people, to learn that the same is true within Judaism. It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists. But even as they believed that there was only one God Almighty, it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases. Moreover, there was some sense of continuity—not only discontinuity —between the divine and human realms. And there was a kind of spectrum of divinity: the Angel of the Lord, already in scripture, could be both an angel and God. Angels were divine, and could be worshiped, but they could also come in human guise. Humans could become angels. Humans could be called the Son of God or even God. This did not mean that they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God. Thus, even within a strict monotheism, there could be other divine beings and the possibility of a graduation of divinity. And even among Jews at the time of Jesus there was not a sense of an absolute break, a complete divide, an unbridgeable chasm between the divine and human.”
How Jesus Became God, Ehrman, p.83
The mistake that Ehrman makes, though, is confusing ‘spirituality’ with ‘divinity’. The ‘angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases’ that Bart refers to count as spiritual – that is, non-material beings, but they do not count as divine beings – which are beings that (I would argue) bear the characteristics of the God of Classical Theism (omnipotence, omniscience, pure actuality, necessary existence etc). God can materialise as an angel as Ehrman notes, but the reverse doesn’t follow. The only time angels do not explicitly rebuke what could possibly be counted as worship (Genesis 19:1-3), as I argued in the third section on Matthew, is at a time when the action in question, bowing, does not necessarily constitute worship. In fact, there was a strong Jewish prohibition about the worship of angels in the Old Testament, such as in Tobit 12:16-22.
Therefore, and quite simply, Ehrman’s theory of ‘divinity on a spectrum’ is decidedly wrong, and Chris Tilling – lecturer in New Testament Studies at St Mellitus College, puts it quite well:
“All Ehrman has done is deploy this problematic notion of monotheism in the garb of an imprecise wordplay with terms “divine” “God,” and so on. The game has worked to put all exalted language about Jesus in the New Testament in the “divine” box, all the while separating Jesus from “God Almighty.” But the effect is a misleading rhetorical trick, not a position that sheds light on the data.”
“Problems with Ehrman’s Interpretative Categories” – How God became Jesus, p128
Mark 2:5-8
‘ When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the experts in the law were sitting there, turning these things over in their minds: “Why does this man speak this way? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” ‘
Here, Jesus forgives the sins of a paralytic he had just healed. Some sceptics have claimed that since Priests offered sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish population that Jesus’ claim here isn’t necessarily a divine one, but it doesn’t seem like Mark’s telling of the story gives that representation. After all, the experts of the law note that it doesn’t make sense for a mortal man to pronounce the forgiveness of a man’s sins.
Overall, the point to be made regarding Mark (specifically 14:62) is that when Jesus is in a situation that he knows is orchestrated to frame him in a distasteful light with the intention to have him killed, why does he answer the question in such a way that almost certainly will cause those accusing him to label him with the capital crime of blasphemy? Why does he quote two passages that would very easily identify him as divine – when his identity is exactly that which is in question? Further, as the experts of the law said, “who can forgive sins but God alone?”
John’s next 🙂
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