The Jewish Gospels (9 page)

In seeking to distinguish the radically new and un-Jewish in Jesus' preaching, Christian writers have frequently read his statement that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath both as indicating total opposition to the keeping of the Sabbath laws at all and as initiating a religion of love and not one of casuistry. In this text, however, we see that the Rabbis themselves held views about the Sabbath that were closely related to Jesus' own (more expansive, to be sure) views, certainly not in direct contradiction of them. The thematic similarities between some of these arguments and Jesus' arguments in the Gospel are striking. This parallel gets even stronger when we consider one further argument that we find in Matthew 12 but not in Mark: “Or have you not read in
the law how on the sabbath the priests in the temple profane the sabbath and are guiltless? I tell you something greater than the Temple is here,” thus providing a parallel to Rabbi Akiva's argument from the Temple as well.
³⁹

Jesus may very well have been in controversy with ancient Pharisees who had not yet articulated the principle that saving a life supersedes the Sabbath. As my colleague Aharon Shemesh points out, such was the opinion of the Jews of the Dead Sea Community.
⁴⁰
Jesus' teaching in this regard, however, is hardly in opposition to the teaching of the later
tannaim
, who possibly did learn it from Jesus but probably did not. What is distinctive to the Jesus of the Gospels is, I think, the further apocalyptic extension of these principles, namely, the Son of Man statement—the statement that the Son of Man, the divine Messiah, is now lord of the Sabbath.

It is this too that explains the one probable and potentially huge difference between the saying of the Rabbis and that of the evangelist (or Jesus). The rabbinic interpretations, and their halakha, tend strongly in the direction of allowing the violation of the Sabbath by a Jew to save another Jew, while the setting of Jesus' saying and its consequence seem (but not inescapably) to indicate that any human might be saved on the Sabbath. If it is the case, as it seems, that the Rabbis' law applies only to Jews, Jesus' extension of it is a product of the radical apocalyptic moment within which the Gospel of Mark is written, a moment
in which the Torah was not rejected but expanded and “fulfilled”—to use Matthean terminology—a moment in which the Son of Man was revealed and claimed his full authority.
⁴¹
The Son of Man, according to Daniel, was indeed given jurisdiction over all of the nations, and I would suggest gingerly that this explains the extension of the Sabbath (and thus Sabbath healing) to them. Here in Mark we find a Jesus who is fulfilling the Torah, not abrogating it.

The Gospels are testimony to the antiquity of themes and controversies that later appear in rabbinic literature. Since there is little reason to believe that the Rabbis actually read the Gospels, it follows that we have independent witnesses to these controversies. The arguments from David's violation of the Torah, from the assertion that the Sabbath was made for the human being, and from the service in the Temple constituting a permitted violation of the Sabbath (the latter found in Matthew and not in Mark) are all mobilized in rabbinic literature in order to justify saving life on the Sabbath (including, no doubt, salvation from starvation), with only the important proviso that it must be necessary for the healing to be done on the Sabbath, that is, the condition is life-threatening, or might be if not treated. This concatenation can hardly be coincidental; some very early version of a controversy of the permission to heal on Sabbath is to be found in this passage.
⁴²
Were we to remain at this level of interpretation, we would find a not particularly radical, even strangely
“rabbinic” Jesus fighting against some rigorists whom he identifies as Pharisees. However, this approach leaves too much in the text unexplained. It doesn't explain at all the argument from David's having fed himself and his followers on forbidden bread. We will see presently how taking that textual moment seriously will reveal another dimension of the Markan theology of Jesus (Christology).
⁴³

In short, my suggestion is that a set of controversy arguments in favor of allowing violation of the Sabbath for healing (now an accepted practice) has been overlaid with and radicalized by a further apocalyptic moment suggested by the very connection with David's behavior. The David story itself can go either way. Just as the Rabbis chose to emphasize David's hunger and thus the lifesaving aspect of the story, justifying other breaches of the law if a life can be saved (Palestinian Talmud Yoma 8:6, 45:b), so did Matthew; Mark, by contrast, understanding the story as being about the special privileges of the Messiah, pushed it in the direction that he did. On this account, the reason for the absence of v. 27 in Matthew (and Luke) is that Mark's messianic theology was a bit too radical for the later evangelists.

I think that the problems of this sequence of verses are best unraveled if we take seriously its context following Mark 2:10, as I have just discussed. If Jesus (the Markan Jesus, or the Jesus of these passages) proclaims himself as the Son of Man who has
ἐ
ξουσία by virtue of Daniel 7:14, then
it is entirely plausible that he would claim sovereignty over the Sabbath as well. Extending the clearly controversial notion that healing is permitted on the Sabbath by virtue of various biblical precedents and arguments, Jesus makes a much more radical claim: not only does the Torah authorize healing of the deathly sick on the Sabbath, but the Messiah himself, the Son of Man, is given sovereignty to decide how to further extend and interpret the Sabbath law. This is, I suggest, primarily motivated by the fact that it is David who violates the Law to feed his minions, so Jesus—the new David, the Son of Man—may do so to feed his minyan.
⁴⁴
The point is surely not—as certain interpreters give it—that David violated the Law and God did not protest, so therefore the Law is invalid and anyone may violate it. Rather, it is that David, the type of the Messiah, enjoyed sovereignty to set aside parts of the Law, and so too does Jesus, the new David, the Messiah. This is not an attack on the Law or on alleged pharisaic legalism but an apocalyptic declaration of a new moment in history in which a new Lord, the Son of Man, has been appointed over the Law.

Paying attention to the Danielic allusion implicit in every use of the phrase “Son of Man,” one can see that in all those situations the Markan Jesus is making precisely the same kind of claim on the basis of the authority delegated to the Son of Man in Daniel as he does in Mark 2:10.
⁴⁵
This enables me to propose a solution to the sequence of vv. 27–28. One objection could be that the
Sabbath is not “under the heavens” but in heaven and thus not susceptible to the transfer of authority from the Ancient of Days to the one like a son of man. This objection is entirely answered by the statement that the Sabbath was made for the human being; consequently the Son of Man, having been given dominion in the human realm, is the Lord of the Sabbath.
⁴⁶
It is actually a necessary part of the argument that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath, for if the Sabbath is (as one might very well claim on the basis of Genesis 1) in heaven, then the claim that the Son of Man, who has sovereignty only on earth, can abrogate its provisions would be very weak. I think that this explanation of the connection between vv. 27 and 28 answers many interpretative conundrums that arise when 27 is read as a weak humanistic statement, something like “The Sabbath was made for man, so do whatever you want.”
⁴⁷
In my view, in contrast, what may have been a traditional Jewish saying to justify breaking the Sabbath to preserve life is, in the hands of Mark's Jesus, the justification for a
messianic
abrogation of the Sabbath.
⁴⁸
This interpretation has the virtue, I think, of solving two major interpretative sticking points in the text: the unity of the two answers of Jesus (both are references to his messianic status) and the subordination of “So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”
⁴⁹

The halakhic arguments in Jesus' mouth here and in chapter 7 are too well formed and well attested historically to be ignored; Jesus, or Mark, certainly knew his way
around a halakhic argument.
⁵⁰
They are not a relic but represent, I believe, actual contests from the first century, and as such, they provide precious evidence that such halakhic discourse and reasoning was extant already then. But that is not all there is here, of course. There are two elements that mark off the Gospel mobilization of these arguments from a purely halakhic controversy. The first is that in both cases, Jesus uses the argument itself and the halakha itself as a sign of an ethical reading, a kind of parable (called such explicitly in chapter 7); the second and most exciting is that the apocalyptic element of the Son of Man is introduced here, as in the story of the paralytic, to bring home the messianic nature, the divine-human nature, of the sovereignty of Jesus as the Son of Man now on earth. The comparison to David is, of course, very pointed and does suggest that the Redeemer of Daniel 7:13–14 is indeed understood as the messianic king, son of David. I would find here, therefore, clear evidence of identification of the Davidic Messiah with the Son of Man, an identification that clearly does not require a human genealogical connection between the two, for the Son of Man is a figure entirely heavenly who becomes a human being.
⁵¹
There were other ancient Jews from around the time of the earliest Gospel writings who also read Daniel 7 in the way that I am suggesting Jesus did. On this reading, Mark's saying about the Son of Man being Lord of the Sabbath is precisely a radical eschatological move, but not one that is constituted by a
step outside of the broad community of Israelites or even Jews. If Daniel's vision is now being fulfilled through the person of Jesus as the incarnation of the Son of Man, some radical change is exactly what would be expected during the end times. The sovereign, we are told by modern political theorists, is the one who can make exceptions to the law when judged necessary or appropriate. It is exactly for such judgments that the Son of Man was given sovereignty. The sovereignty is expressed by extending the permission granted to Jews to violate the Sabbath to save the lives of other Sabbath observers by Jesus the Messiah to include all humans. This eschatological move is one that many Jews would have rejected not because they did not believe that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath but because they did not believe that Jesus was the Son of Man.

I would argue that this divine figure to whom authority has been delegated is a Redeemer king, as the Daniel passage clearly states.
⁵²
Thus he stands ripe for identification with the Davidic Messiah, as he is in the Gospel and also in non-Christian contemporary Jewish literature such as Enoch and Fourth Ezra. The usage of “Son of Man” in the Gospels joins up with the evidence of such usage from these other ancient Jewish texts to lead us to consider this term used in this way (and, more important, the concept of a second divinity implied by it) as the common coin—which I emphasize does not mean universal or uncontested—of Judaism already before Jesus.

 

*
This is the way most translators have translated the term, as a Jewish-Greek equivalent of
Messiah
, and it seems to me correct. Some more recent translators translate it literally as “anointed,” which is not the value that the term had in Hebrew by the first century, let alone in Greek.

*
In these ideas lie the seed that would eventually grow into doctrines of the Trinity and incarnation in all of their later variations, variations that are inflected as well by Greek philosophical thinking; the seeds, however, were sown by Jewish apocalyptic writings.

*
Note that at least some of the later Rabbis also read this passage as a theophany (self-revelation of God). The following passage from the Babylonian Talmud (fifth or sixth century) clearly shows this and cites earlier Rabbis as well as seeing an important moment in the doctrine of God emerging here.

One verse reads: “His throne is sparks of fire” (Dan. 7:9) and another [part of the] verse reads, “until thrones were set up and the Ancient of Days sat” (7:9). This is no difficulty: One was for him and one was for David.

As we learn in an ancient tradition: One for him and one for David; these are the words of Rabbi Aqiva. Rabbi Yose the Galilean said to him: Aqiva! Until when will you make the Shekhina profane?! Rather. One was for judging and one was for mercy.

Did he accept it from him, or did he not?

Come and hear! One for judging and one for mercy, these are the words of Rabbi Aqiva. [BT
Ḥ
agiga 14a]

Whatever the precise interpretation of this talmudic passage (and I have discussed this at length elsewhere), there may be little doubt that both portrayed Rabbis understood that the Daniel passage was a theophany. “Rabbi Aqiva” perceives two divine figures in heaven, one God the Father and one an apotheosized King David. No wonder that “Rabbi Yose the Galilean” was shocked. In an article in the
Harvard Theological Review
, I have presented the bases for my own conclusion that such was the original meaning of the text as well; see Daniel Boyarin, “Daniel 7, Intertextuality, and the History of Israel's Cult,” forthcoming.

*
Adela Yarbro Collins has recently distinguished two senses of “divinity”: “One is functional. The ‘one like a son of man' in Daniel 7:13–14, ‘that Son of Man' in the Similitudes of Enoch, and Jesus in some Synoptic passages are divine in this sense when they exercise (or are anticipated as exercising) divine activities like ruling over a universal kingdom, sitting on a heavenly throne, judging human beings in the end-time or traveling on the clouds, a typically divine mode of transport. The other sense is ontological.” Adela Yarbro Collins, “‘How on Earth Did Jesus Become God': A Reply,” in
Israel's God and Rebecca's Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal
, ed. David B. Capes et al. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 57. It is that former sense to which I refer throughout this book, as I believe that the very distinction between “functional” and “ontological” is a product of later Greek reflection on the Gospels. In this context, see the ever-sensible and ever-helpful Paula Fredriksen, “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the Study of Christian Origins Whose Time Has Come to Go,” in
Israel's God and Rebecca's Children
, 35–38. (I am grateful to Adela Yarbro Collins for this last reference.)