Jesus and God in the Gospel of Mark: unity and distinction
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Date
26/06/2012Author
Johansson, Daniel Lars Magnus
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Abstract
This thesis examines the relationship between Jesus and God in the Gospel of Mark.
Against the predominant view since the early 1970’s, it argues that the Markan Jesus
is considerably more than a merely human Messiah; he is a divine figure. But he is
not placed in a general, Hellenistic category of superhuman or divine beings, nor
ascribed only a general transcendent status. Instead, Mark links Jesus directly and
closely to YHWH, the one God of Israel. In contrast to many earlier studies of the
christology of Mark, which focus on christological titles, this study is primarily
concerned with Mark’s narrative and the author’s portrayal of Jesus. Assuming that
Mark’s audience were familiar to varying degrees with different traditions of the
Hellenistic world, the text is interpreted in its wider Old Testament/Jewish, Greco-
Roman, and early Christian context, all the while remaining sensitive to intra-textual
links. It appears that the Markan Jesus assumes divine attributes and acts in
exclusively divine roles, that he fulfils Old Testament promises about God’s own
intervention and coming, and that his relationship to people is analogous to God’s
relationship to Israel. It is of particular significance that Jesus in several cases takes
on roles which were used to demonstrate someone’s deity or, YHWH’s sovereignty
above all other gods. The result is a surprising overlap between Mark’s portrait of
Jesus and the presentation of Israel’s God in the biblical and early Jewish traditions
and, in some cases, the divine beings of the Greco-Roman world. While early Jewish
literature occasionally can ascribe divine roles to a few exalted figures, the Markan
description of Jesus is unique in two respects: the majority of the divine prerogatives
ascribed to Jesus are without parallel in any of the aforementioned texts, and the
number of these is unrivalled. Such a portrait of Jesus may call into question both the
true humanity of Jesus (Jesus is not fully human) and the monotheistic faith of Israel
(Jesus is a second divine being alongside God), but it is clear that Mark maintains
both. The christology of Mark represents a paradox in which Jesus is fully human
and, at the same time, in a mysterious way placed on the divine side of the God-creation
divide.