Undeception

It’s common to come across the well-founded observation that Luke’s Gospel is particularly interested in highlighting the universality of the Kingdom of God. References to the outcast of society abound, including Gentiles, women, the poor, and the sick. So when I heard someone casually mention that in one of the Gospel accounts Jesus’ given rationale for the temple cleansing was, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations,” I assumed with great confidence that it must have been Luke’s version.

I was very wrong! The quotation from Isaiah 56.7 occurs in all three of the Synoptics, and the only one in which Isaiah’s phrase “for all the nations” is included is the one that seemed to me the least likely.

Matthew 21.13: He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you are making it a den of robbers.”

Luke 19.46: and he said, “It is written,
‘My house shall be a house of prayer’; but you have made it a den of robbers.”

Mark 11.17: He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

It certainly would have made sense with Matthew’s replacement-theology-esque emphasis to include the phrase from Isaiah; ditto with Luke, for reasons cited above. Why is it, then, that both Matthew and Luke omitted this statement of high significance from Jesus’ words in this act of seminal importance, diverging from their (widely assumed) source in Mark?

Turns out, the universality of the gospel is not as rare in Mark as I had thought. Via Google Books, I found R.T. France commenting on 13.10, “And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations”:

Jesus’ excursions into Gentile territory (5:1-20; 7:24-8:10) and his Gentile following in 3:8 have begun to prepare us for this vision, and we have seen in 7:24-8:10 a deliberate extension of the blessings of Israel’s Messiah to the surrounding peoples. It is possible that the specific inclusion of πάντα τὰ ἔθνη in the Isaiah quotation in 11:17 is a further pointer in this direction, even if that is not the main thrust in context. Later the confession of Jesus as Son of God by a Gentile officer will be a foretaste of the universal church (15:39). But this verse (and by implication 14:9) is the most explicit indication in Mark’s gospel of the universal scope of the good news and therefore of the Christian mission, as it will be spelled out in Matthew’s final commission (28:19-20) and in the whole narrative of Luke’s second volume.¹

So the universality of the gospel of the Kingdom seems like an obvious recurring theme in Mark that Matthew and Luke expand upon in different ways. Mark’s interest in that idea is coincident with and even necessary for his vision of the Kingdom of God as rival to the power of Rome (as Joel discusses here et passim), for how could the kingdom over which Jesus is ruler be of smaller geographic scope than that of Rome? France goes on to argue that the eschatological gathering “from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” in 13.27 is reflective of this universal vision of God’s dominion, which also makes sense and could only be made to refer to Diaspora Jews if 1) Mark was written later than 70 or 2) the phrase or passage is a post-Diaspora interpolation.

This doesn’t answer why this key phrase was omitted in Matthew and especially Luke, where much theological hay could have been made from it. Any guesses?
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Keying off a comment from Marc on my last post, I looked at Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to him in the immediately following verses in a slightly different light.

Here are the verses immediately following those I quoted in my other post.

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Mark 10.28-31 NRSV

One interesting thing I missed in my original post was that before the scenario in question in this same chapter Jesus affirmed the Kingdom of God as belonging to “such as these” children, and then here he uncharacteristically and therefore pointedly calls his disciples “children” so as to assure them that they were not subject to his remarks. This makes it even more unlikely that the disciples were afraid of not getting in on the kingdom — only that, as Marc suggested, the kingdom wasn’t looking like such a sunny prospect as they imagined. If their worry was over their own reward, it would make sense that Jesus would reassure Peter that no one who sacrificed now would lose their reward in the future.

Another interesting thing I’ve just noticed is that Jesus is careful throughout this passage not to exclude the rich. Indeed, compared to Matthew and Luke he seems amazingly even-handed:

1) He was interested in (indeed, “loved”, v. 21) the rich young man despite his wealth.

2) He denies that it is impossible for the rich to be a part of the kingdom, because “for God all things are possible.”

3) He says that “many who are first will be last,” but that the last will more generally be first. Note also that Mark shows the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea faithfully “waiting for the Kingdom of God” [Mk 15.43].

The author of Mark was apparently careful to articulate that Jesus did not bifurcate the “greatest” and “least” down strictly socio-economic lines. Here Jesus seems to be stressing that although there is a strong correlation between the “great” in social status and “great” in pride, the kingdom order is not strictly an inversion of social status, but of attitude. The recurring emphasis almost strikes me as a corrective to what may have been a class warfare trend among the lower classes; it seems not unlikely that Mark was trying to widen the appeal of Christianity beyond the lower classes in which it originated.

Some will no doubt find it tempting  to write off Mark’s nuanced teaching as a wholly innovative accommodation to an affluent audience. Before doing that, we’d need to fully motivate this accommodation. Even the possibility of an appeal for patronage or respite from political or social pressures must be balanced against the central teachings of Jesus, and I don’t find it particularly likely that someone taken with Jesus enough to perpetuate his movement would compromise such a fundamental teaching in order to secure favor for a watered down message. Besides, if campaigning for the support of the elite was the author’s raison d’écrire, it seems he really blew it in key areas, especially when it came to the “little apocalypse” (provided it is original to Mark), which if Allison, Stark, and others are correct was a promise to defeat Rome would have been a preposterous inclusion. Moreover, that this leveling irrespective of social status was a somewhat core teaching of the Jesus Movement is affirmed by other New Testament writers who also believed that Jesus taught that God exalts the proud and gives grace to the humble but who cannot be described as hostile to the wealthy.

There seems to be an adequate reason to think that the author of Mark shows Jesus teaching such an egalitarian socio-economic order: he believed that Jesus taught it. In fact, starting with Jesus’ announcement in Mark 9.35, it seems that Mark is seeking to view all angles of Jesus’ teaching. Neither the rich nor the poor are demonized, because the author understood a focus on class or status to be missing Jesus’ point.

This does not mean that the kingdom come that Jesus proclaimed was not envisaged as having concrete social/economical/political dimensions; indeed, Jesus is reassuring Peter and the others that there would be tangible, social/economical/political rewards for the faithful, and by implication the opposite for the unfaithful. What it does mean is that faithfulness would not be evaluated by social, economical, or political dimensions, but by humility before God.

Chalk this one up to staring too closely at the text. It’s not a felicitous scenario when the material you’re analyzing for your dissertation keeps distracting you from the actual subject.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.’ They were greatly astounded and said to one another, ‘Then who can be saved?’ Jesus looked at them and said, ‘For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.’

Mark 10.23-27 NRSV

I’ve been trying to figure out why Mark shows the disciples finding this teaching so hard to believe, first to be “perplexed” and then still more “astounded” after Jesus was obliged to restate it more explicitly. It’s hard for me to find a compelling narrative or rhetorical purpose behind the disciples’ astonishment.

They had just witnessed the rich young man’s reaction, so a clear illustration of the subject of Jesus’ statement had just been demonstrated before their eyes. The real question is why Mark portrays them as taking the news so personally. They seem almost horrified. Peter goes on to remind Jesus that they should hardly be in danger of exclusion from the Kingdom for wealth’s sake, because they had left all theirs behind to follow him.

Luke appears to pick up on this and redirects the “How hard it is…” statement to the rich man directly and then has a more vague audience (“those who heard him”) react in amazement, letting the disciples off the hook a bit, as Luke is wont to do, by allowing Peter to state more confidently, “Look, we have left our homes and followed you.”

If not a narrative purpose, it seems there would at least be an intended dramatic or rhetorical purpose. But what effect did the writer expect this to have?

Maybe Mark as a famed drama queen simply used Jesus’ disciples as props to set up this implausible scenario of despair to give Jesus a chance to still the storm with his reassurance that “…for God all things are possible.” But why use the disciples and not, as did Luke, a more general audience? Perhaps he was writing with an affluent audience in mind and chose to voice their anticipated incredulity at this hard saying by placing it in the mouths of such generally creditable characters as the disciples of Jesus. Jesus does let the rich off the hook pretty quickly. I can think of no other reason why we should draw such a conclusion about Mark’s audience, however.

There’s a good chance the author wanted to portray Jesus’ teaching as shockingly innovative in its inversion of social status in the Kingdom of God. Yet because the principle of inversion was not an out-of-the-blue doctrine in Judea, this would make it seem that the author was either out of touch with Judean apocalyptic or that he was banking on the possibility that his audience was.

One of the factors that might come into play is Mark’s oft noted pattern of showing the disciples as not quite “getting it”. It is fairly clear however that in this case it was not a lack of understanding but a clear realization of what he said that caused their reaction; this is consternation, not confusion. Why are they painted as feeling threatened by this teaching even though they clearly, even within the narrative, are exempt?

Perhaps it is an awkward attempt to kill two birds with one stone in presenting Jesus’ explosive teaching about the danger of riches while also incidentally intimating that the disciples were not at all on the same page as Jesus, even when they actually knew what he was talking about.

It’s probably multiple of these. But even stirring them in together I don’t come up with anything that can make this passage make sense. So either 1) I’m missing something or 2) the author wouldn’t win many modern writing awards for this passage. Any other ideas?

A fascinating discussion from two conservative evangelical scholars on the subject of the historical Jesus took place on last weekend’s episode of Unbelievable.

Adam Bradford, defending his book The Jesus Discovery, presented some interesting arguments in favor of the idea that Jesus was a lifelong participant in the religious community, trained from adolescence and recognized as an authority right up until the events that unraveled his rapport among the Jewish leadership and got him killed. David Instone-Brewer countered that Jesus, as a simple itinerant peasant from backwater Nazareth, was always an outsider to the Jewish leadership, as is commonly inferred from the Gospel of Mark especially.

Both sides were engaging and respectful. A brief pericope representative of the exchange: Bradford was arguing that Jesus would only have been allowed to drive out the money-changers and continue teaching within the temple habitually afterward (Lk 19.47) if he were recognized as having authority as a teacher, whereafter the host iterated, “Must have been some kind of authority he had then,” prompting Instone-Brewer’s quick and dry response, “Well, he had a whip in his hand…” All in all, I found most of Instone-Brewer’s rebuttals to be the more convincing, but there definitely seems to be something to Bradford’s contention as well.

Also coming available over the weekend was the ninth podcast in Dr. Phil Harland‘s enjoyable series on Historical Jesus studies, this one entitled Jesus in the Context of Educated Groups and Leaders, in which he described Jesus’ affinity, but not necessarily his identification with, first century groups such as the Essenes.

It’s intriguing to hear all the ways of approaching the topic, “Who was the man Jesus?” Conservative evangelicals typically react to this question with an indignant, “I can tell you who he was — the Bible tells us all about him!” But even conservative evangelical scholars such as Bradford and Instone-Brewer answered a basic question of Jesus’ background, whether he was a self-taught peasant preacher or a learned maverick rabbi, in completely different ways based upon indistinguishable hermeneutic sets approaching the same biblical data. The other expected response, “Does it matter? He’s Lord either way,” is not so easily answered, either: his background is a vital piece in determining what Jesus’ idea of his own mission was, which then informs our understanding of what it was he was sent to do, how exactly he accomplished it, and how we are to emulate him to our world.