Earlier this week, we’ve been considering the question of whether the Jesus depicted in Mark’s Gospel contradicts the Jesus in John’s Gospel. For a review of that argument, click here. For Part 1 of our rebuttal, click here.
The purpose of this post is to question whether Mark’s depiction is actually all that different from John’s. Spoiler: we believe it’s not.
To recap, the argument goes something like this: Mark’s “Jesus” is shy, coy, and human. He doesn’t claim to be God and doesn’t want other people thinking he is. But John’s “Jesus” is overt in his claims to divinity.
It is often said that error is truth out of proportion. That certainly applies here. The grain of truth in this is that Mark’s depiction of Jesus is more indirect and more secretive than John’s. For the modern reader especially, it’s easier to understand Jesus’ claims to divinity in the book of John than in the book of Mark. They are legitimately distinct portraits, emphasizing different aspects of Jesus’ ministry.
But recognizing differing emphases doesn’t mean we’re talking about two contradictory people. Let’s take each side of the argument and look at the Gospels themselves.
On one side, John’s Jesus, while overt about his divinity, is actually much more indirect than critics let on. Consider:
1. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus’ mother asks him to intervene (when the wine ran out at a local wedding party). Jesus responds with the sort of answer you might expect in Mark: “My hour has not yet come.” Just like in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus doesn’t want news to spread about him before the right time (John 2:4). 2. When standing before Pilate (John 19), Jesus has several opportunities to be clear about his divine identity. He hints at it, but it’s indirect and evasive. Pilate asks, “Are you the King of the Jews?” to which Jesus only says, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” This sounds much more like the “Mark” Jesus than the “John” one.
And on the other side, Mark’s Jesus leaves no room for doubt regarding his divinity.
1. Mark begins his account by calling Jesus “the Christ, the Son of God.” (Mark 1:1) 2. John the Baptist announces that Jesus is “the Lord.” (Mark 1:3) 3. Jesus forgives sins, something those watching knew only God could rightfully do. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they ask (Mark 2:5). 4. Jesus says he is the “Lord of the Sabbath,” another claim that religious rulers knew was a claim to divinity. (Mark 2:28) 5. Demons call Jesus “the Son of God.” He doesn’t respond by correcting them, but by telling them not to make that known. (And thereby, Mark lets us know Jesus has a determined, if not mysterious, reason for keeping the fullness of his identity under wraps!) (Mark 3:11) 6. Jesus miraculously calms a storm. When his disciples see it, they are more afraid than when they thought they were going to drown in the storm! (Mark 4:39) 7. Jesus refers to the Messiah (i.e. himself) as Lord over King David, quoting a Psalm that provides the clearest endorsement of the divinity of the Messiah. (Mark 12:35-37; see how the writer in Hebrews 1:13 uses this Psalm that Mark quotes as the “slam dunk” proving Jesus’ divinity) 8. Jesus tells the high priest that he is “the Christ” and the “Son of Man” prophesied by Daniel who would ride on the clouds and occupy a throne next to God. It’s such an audacious claim that the priest tore his robes, because (once again) he knew that Jesus was claiming divine status. (Mark 14:61-62)
It takes rather significant pre-conceived bias to look at the book of Mark and conclude that the Jesus depicted there is merely a misunderstood religious teacher, confused and timid about who he is. True, John goes to greater lengths to prove that Jesus really is God, because that is one of his primary, admitted agendas of the book (John 1:1; 20:31). But even though each Gospel presents only certain angles on Jesus, that by no means indicates that they are talking about different Jesuses. The response to Jesus is the same in every Gospel: the priests know he’s claiming to be God, and it drives them to kill him. And the earliest Christians, who believed in Jesus’s divinity, put these books side by side in the canon, not seeing seem them as contradictory, but complementary. Do we really think that we, removed culturally and historically by great margins, are in a place to confidently overrule their interpretation, writing them off as naïve simpletons? Were they so dumb that they didn’t even know what a “contradiction” was?
If we look to the book of Mark and expect Jesus to utter a 4th-centry Nicene Creed to affirm his divinity, we’re not playing fair. Mark’s account is thoroughly Jewish, and the proof of Jesus’ divinity is painted there in first-century, Jewish terms. The only way to deny this is to remain willfully ignorant of that cultural context.
The self-conception of Jesus as God is the biggest “contradiction” in the Gospels. Seeing it for the fraud that it is disarms most of the problem. In that light, the other specific “contradictions” become less alarming. For instance:
1. Mark says that Jesus taught everything in parables, but John has no parables. Well, not exactly. Mark specifically says that Jesus taught the crowds everything in parables, while explaining it privately to the disciples (Mark 4:34). The book of John contains much more one-on-one and private interactions with Jesus, so it follows that the parables would be less prominent. Plus, when you examine the enigmatic way that Jesus spoke to the Pharisees in John, much of that has to be classified as “parable.” As one among several examples, Jesus told the Pharisees to tear down the temple, and he would rebuild it in three days—an allegorical reference to his own death and resurrection.
2. John’s Jesus used “I am” a lot in his teaching. Mark’s never did. Even if this were true (it’s not, as Mark 14:62 shows), it wouldn’t be that incriminating. John’s Gospel is only 15,000 words long, and Mark’s is 11,000 words. In chronicling the life of an itinerant preacher whose ministry spanned 3 years, you’re not going to get a comprehensive historical account with that word count. This doesn’t mean our Gospel accounts are unreliable; simply that they could both be faithfully reporting Jesus’ words without overlapping every single time.
A good writer, you see, doesn’t just concern himself with “getting all the facts.” That’s indispensible, of course. But writers have goals. They’re trying to convince readers of certain views. It might strike us as odd that Mark didn’t make Jesus’ divinity more obvious (even though, as we’ve shown, it is extremely prominent). But Mark’s goal was to answer the question a lot of Jews had: if Jesus was the true Messiah, why didn’t more Jews accept him?
Think of how biographies today are written. Say that you were telling the story of a defensive back who was known for his tenacity and determination in competition and also for his compassion and tenderness, demonstrated also by his work in later years to help children suffering with cancer. You come across a story of this athlete in high school who presses so hard to make a tackle that he breaks the shoulder of the star running back on the other team, thus ending the running back’s high school football career. He feels so bad about it, however, that he visited the student every day in the hospital, and still sends a $10,000 check to his family each year at Christmas time.
Your biography wants to focus on the athlete’s tenacity, so you only tell the story of the accident. Another biographer wants to focus on the athlete’s compassion. So you focus on one part of the story; the other writer focuses on the latter part. Are these contradictory accounts, or complementary?
3. Mark and John have different “last words” for Jesus. No, they don’t. While the last words that Mark and John record are different, neither one says, “This is the last thing that Jesus said before he died.” Here’s what they do say:
“And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ And some of the bystanders hearing it said, ‘Behold, he is calling Elijah.’ And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.” (Mark 14:34, 37)
“When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, ‘It is finished,’ and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” (John 19:30)
There’s obviously some wiggle-room in those two accounts. Did Jesus say something (in John) as he “gave up his spirit?” How about (in Mark) during the entire exchange with the sour wine—couldn’t Jesus have said something then that Mark didn’t record (“It is finished,” for instance)? And what about the “loud cry” in Mark’s Gospel: was that just a yell, or were those words as well? We can speculate about the exact order of events, but these two accounts, on the face of it, don’t present a contradiction.
In the end, we come to a similar place as where we started. The Gospel accounts don’t present themselves as legends, and their depiction of Jesus is surprisingly united in claiming that Jesus was the Son of God, crucified and miraculously resurrected. The question still stands: do you believe he was who he said he was?
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