The Jewish Gospels (17 page)

The connection with Daniel may be even clearer when we look at the parallel version of this teaching of Jesus to the disciples in 9:31:

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They went on from there and passed through Galilee. And he would not have any one know it;
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for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”
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But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to ask him.

That this enmity will arise against the Messiah can also clearly be derived by midrashic reading of the end of Daniel 7 as well:

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And he will speak words against the Most High, and he will oppress the high holy ones, and he will think to change the times and the law, and they will be delivered into his hand until a time, two times, and half a time.
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But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end.
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And the kingdom and the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people
of the saints of the Most High: his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.

Those Jews who read the Son of Man in accord with the end of the chapter as representing the People of Israel had to do some harmonizing work to explain away the clearly divine implications of the vision in the first part, but those Jews, in turn, who gloried in the divinity of the Son of Man also had some hard harmonizing work to do to explain the end of the chapter in accordance with their reading of the first part, understanding the “People of the Most High” as that divine Messiah. It is the Christ, Jesus, who is accordingly handed over to the wicked one for a prescribed interval, here said to be “a time, two times, and half a time.” This narrative of the Messiah was not a revolutionary departure within the religious history of the communities of readers of the Bible but an obvious and plausible consequence of a well-established tradition of reading Daniel 7 as being about a divine-human Messiah.
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Jesus' resurrection “after three days,” according to the Markan version, as opposed to the “in three days” of the later evangelists, could possibly derive as well from a close reading of the Daniel passage, for if Jesus' suffering before exaltation comes from the “time, two times, and half a time” during which the one like a Son of Man is to suffer in Daniel 7, and if these “times” are understood
as days, then Jesus would rise after a day, two more days, and part of a day, that is, after the third day. But this must remain a speculation.

“As It Is Written Concerning Him”: Mark 9:11–13

Jesus' story and his progressive self-revelation to his disciples return again and again to Scripture—and to midrash on that Scripture. Mark 9:11–13 is the account of Jesus' conversation with his disciples after the transfiguration on the mountain. It thus represents a highly emphasized climactic moment in the story of the Gospel and one that is particularly telling for Christology. This passage has puzzled most commentators till now, but we will see that the text is best understood as part and parcel of a Jewish tradition of the suffering Messiah. Here are the verses in their necessary and immediate context, following the transfiguration in which Moses, Elijah, and Jesus have been revealed to be close associates (at the very least) in a vision:

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As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
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So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.
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And they asked him saying, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?
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And he said to them, Elijah
when he comes first restores all things. And how has it been written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be rejected?
^11
13
But I say to you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they wanted, as has been written concerning him.

As many commentators have written, this passage raises great difficulties. There is no record in the Scriptures that Elijah would be mistreated, so on what basis does the Gospel read that “it has been written concerning him”?
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Further, as Joel Marcus has pointed out, “if Elijah restores all things, then how once conceive of a Messiah who is to be rejected by humanity, a Messiah whose suffering and rejection are foretold in the scripture (9:12c)? The two expectations appear to contradict each other.”
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Marcus's brilliant move here is to realize that this is not a flaw in the Gospel text but its very vocation.
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This contradiction is what the Gospel text is about; this is not a “bug,” as we might say, but a feature. We have something very close to a standard midrashic form here: the question of the disciples is not “How is it written that Elijah will come first?” but “Why do the scribes say this, for if what they say is true: How is it written that the Son of Man will suffer many things?” They are pointing to a contradiction between the verse to which Jesus refers and the statements of the scribes, not between two verses.
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The disciples understand Jesus of vv. 9–11 very well. They understand that what has been revealed to them is that Jesus is the Son of Man, and they know what that means. They are astounded, as they always are, that Jesus will suffer, even though, as Jesus points out, it is, indeed, written that the Son of Man will suffer. After all, at the end of the chapter in 9:30, they still have not understood Jesus' prediction that he will be handed over to human beings, that they will kill him, and that he will rise. They are also puzzled that Jesus as the Messiah has come but Elijah seemingly hasn't, and the scribes say that Elijah will come before the Messiah and restore all things.

Jesus' answer is brilliantly to the point:

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And they asked him saying, Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?
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And he said to them, Elijah when he comes first restores all things. And how has it been written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be rejected?
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But I say to you that Elijah has come and they did to him whatever they wanted, as has been written concerning him.

The
Scribes
say that Elijah, coming before the Son of Man, will restore all things and thus how could it be that the Son of Man will suffer? And Jesus answers: Does the
Prophet, in fact, say that Elijah will restore all things; if that were the case, how, indeed, could it be written that the Son of Man will suffer many things? No, Jesus maintains (correctly), it does not say in the verse that Elijah will restore all things; it is the Scribes who came up with this idea themselves. And the Scribes must simply be wrong in their interpretation of the coming of Elijah; all will be restored, not by Elijah but by the Son of Man and only after the terrible sufferings of the Day of the Lord, which are themselves written clearly in the text of Malakhi. Now the answer is clear: Elijah has come already in the form of John the Baptist (as explicitly in Matthew), the forerunner, and they did to him what they wished to.
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His suffering becomes a type of the suffering that the Son of Man also will undergo, and the disciples are answered in both of their questions. Jesus is shown here, as also in the halakhic discussions that we have encountered previously, besting the Scribes and the Pharisees at their own game of midrash. The idea of the suffering of the Son of Man is anything but an alien import into Judaism; in fact, it is its very vocation.

It is here perhaps more than anywhere else in the Gospel of Mark that we see its background in the Jewish mode of biblical interpretation, midrash. Once again, to remind readers, midrash is a way of multiply contextualizing verses with other verses and passages in the Bible,
in order to determine their meaning. Our passage here is quite close in form to a type of tannaitic midrash in which a verse is cited, a commentary is offered, another contradictory verse is cited, and the first comment is either revised or rejected.
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This argument would strongly support the claim that the Gospels, or at least this Gospel, are working in something very close to a midrashic mode for the generation of their narrative, especially for the present purposes in anything having to do with the Son of Man. Once again, we see here evidence that the idea of a suffering Messiah would not have been at all foreign to Jewish sensibilities, which derived their very messianic hopes and expectations from such methods of close reading of Scripture, just as Jesus did. This identification between the Son of Man and the fate of Jesus comes to its culmination in the verses from chapter 14 (discussed above) in which Jesus is asked about his messianic identity by the high priests just before the crucifixion and confesses openly (for the first time) that he is the Son of God, the Messiah, the Son of Man who will come on the clouds of heaven.

Isaiah's “Suffering Servant” as Messiah in Jewish Traditions

The suffering Messiah who atones for our sins was a familiar idea throughout the history of the Jewish religion, even long after there truly was a separation from Christianity. The idea of a suffering Messiah is present in ancient, medieval, and early modern Judaism. This fact, at the very least, calls into question the truism that the formation and acceptance of this idea by followers of Jesus constituted the necessary and absolute breaking point with the religion of Israel. The Suffering Messiah is part and parcel of Jewish tradition from antiquity to modernity. Not only, then, is the Gospel drawing on Jewish tradition but this idea remained a Jewish one long after Christianity had indeed been separated off in late antiquity.

One of many important pieces of evidence for this view is this history of how Jewish commentators have interpreted Isaiah 53:

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
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For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
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He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and
acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account.

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Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
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But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed.
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All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
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He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
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By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people.
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They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.

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Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
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Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and
he shall bear their iniquities.
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Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

I cannot overstate the extent to which the interpretation of this passage has anchored the conventional view of Judaism's relationship to Messianism. It has been generally assumed by modern folks that Jews have always given the passage a metaphorical reading, understanding the suffering servant to refer to the People of Israel, and that it was the Christians who changed and distorted its meaning to make it refer to Jesus. Quite to the contrary, we now know that many Jewish authorities, maybe even most, until nearly the modern period have read Isaiah 53 as being about the Messiah; until the last few centuries, the allegorical reading was a minority position.

Aside from one very important—but absolutely unique—notice in Origen's
Contra Celsum,
there is no evidence at all that any late ancient Jews read Isaiah 52–53 as referring to anyone but the Messiah.
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There are, on the other hand, several attestations of ancient rabbinic readings of the song as concerning the Messiah and his tribulations.

The Palestinian Talmud, commenting on the biblical
passage “And the land shall mourn” (Zechariah 12:12), cites two amoraic opinions: one amora who interprets “This is the mourning over the Messiah” and one who disagrees, arguing that it is the mourning over the sexual desire (that has been killed in the messianic age) (PT Sukkah 5:2 55b).
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There are, moreover, traditions in the Babylonian Talmud and thus attested from the fourth to the sixth centuries
A.D.
(but very likely earlier), the most famous and explicit of which is Sanhedrin 98b. Referring to the Messiah, the Talmud asks there openly, “What is his name?” and various names are proffered by different rabbis. After several different views, we find: “And the Rabbis say, ‘the leper' of the House of Rabbi is his name, for it says, ‘Behold he has borne our disease,
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and suffered our pains, and we thought him smitten, beaten by God and tortured' [Isa. 53:4].” We see here both the vicarious suffering of the Messiah and the use of Isaiah 53 to anchor the idea. This midrash (or one very like it) is what lies behind the heartrending image that appears only one page earlier in the Talmud of the Messiah sitting at the gates of Rome among the poor and those who suffer from painful disease. They all loosen and bind their bandages at one time, and he loosens and binds them one at a time, saying: “Perhaps I will be needed and I don't want to delay.” Thus the Messiah too, ever mindful of his soteriological mission, suffers from the same disease and painful tortures of the indigent and sick of Rome.