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The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

Book by Robert M. Price · 5 quotes · Bible, Jesus, New Testament

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The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? Quotes

“Mark 9:8, "where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched," comes directly from Isa. 66:24, but whose voice are we listening to in the preceding verses? It might be Jesus, but then again, it might be anybody. Then as now, there were plenty of fire-and-brimstone preachers. And, since the climax of the pericope is a quotation of Isaiah, implying the whole thing is something of a sermonic commentary on it, we must deny it to Jesus. Again, who remembers the great man quoting someone else?”

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“The average reader of the New Testament reads Matthew before Mark and then goes on to Luke and John. Matthew gives him the impression that Jesus was born God's Son in a miraculous fashion. Mark begins only with the baptism, but the reader will think little of this: perhaps Mark begins in medias res. With Luke we are back to a miraculous nativity for one born the Son of God. In John the reader learns that Jesus had already been God's Son from all eternity. But suppose one read Mark by itself, as its first readers did. What impression would one receive? Surely in a book where the main character shows up as an adult and, right off the bat, experiences a vision of divine calling in which he and no one else is told that he is God's Son, the natural inference would be that the baptism was the beginning of an honorific Sonship. If he were already God's son, wouldn't he have known it? And then why should God tell him what he already knew? It seems that Mark might believe what others in the early church did, namely, in Jesus' adoptive Sonship. Ebionite Jewish Christians and Cerinthian (also Jewish) Gnostics were adoptionists, rejecting any miraculous generation of Jesus Christ from the deity. [...] Once we know this was a popular, though eventually controversial, option among early Christians, it begins to make a new sense that the earliest gospel, Mark, sounds adoptionist but is flanked and overwhelmed by subsequent gospels that have moved the Sonship further and further back, attributing to Jesus some degree of divine nature in the process.”

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“The Synoptic gospels agree that after being baptized, Jesus was driven by the Spirit, to which he was newly sensitive, out into the desert to be tested or tempted (same Greek word) by Satan. [...] "Satan," originally not a proper name but a title, "the Adversary," was a servant of God, a kind of security chief who occasionally urged the Almighty to take a second look at his favorites about whose character the Satan harbored some doubts. [...] Thus, in the Gospels it seems only natural that Jesus, newly commissioned as God's Son, should be put through his paces by the Satan to determine whether he is really up to the job. That is the point of the taunt, "If you are the Son of God...." Does Jesus understand what that entails? In the same way, Luke will later (22:31-32) portray Satan, again in character, as demanding, as is his right, to sift the twelve disciples like wheat, the same task as the Baptist ascribes to the Coming One, and they fail the test. Peter unwittingly acts the role of the Adversary when he tests Jesus' resolve to go forward with the crucifixion (Mark 8:32-33). Satan becomes the enemy of God and the champion of evil only insofar as he becomes mixed with other ancient characters like Beelzebul the Ekronite oraclegod (Matt. 12:24, 26; 2 Kings 1:2), Leviathan the Chaos Dragon (Ps. 74:13-14; Rev. 12:3 ff.), and Ahriman the Zoroastrian antigod (2 Cor. 4:4; Luke 10:17-19).”

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“Jesus is shown healing the blind in Mark 8:22-26. This episode is especially remarkable in that it has Jesus employ common magical healing techniques ("Here's mud in your eye!"), something Matthew and Luke did not care for and so omitted. Equally notable is the fact that the healed man does not recover his sight all at once. Jesus has to try again before sight is fully restored. Some critics have understood this detail as symbolic of the two stages of the awakening of the disciples' faith. They see the truth clearly enough to heed Jesus' call to follow, and yet they have no understanding of his divine fate till the end. Their spiritual blindness, then, would have cleared up in two stages. If we accept this interpretation, we are pretty much saying Mark created the detail. [...] My guess is that it is a Markan creation, drawing upon magical techniques that were commonenough knowledge in order to make it seem authentic. He thought no more of having Jesus have to try again than he did of having him repent in baptism. His Christology was not "high" enough for any of this to be an embarrassment [...] Matthew would never have created such a story, true, but Mark saw nothing wrong with it.”

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“Luke 17:5-6, a Lukan paraphrase of Mark 11:22-24, strikes a surprising note of pessimism: "The apostles said to the Lord, `Increase our faith!' And the Lord said, `If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, "Be uprooted and planted in the sea!" and it would obey you."' The point is surely that, since such a thing is plainly never going to happen, you can see how little faith any one will ever have. It is like the rhetorical question of Luke 18:8, "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" The same double bind has caught the father of the deaf-mute epileptic in Mark 9:24, "1 believe; help my unbelief!" (How striking that the single most poignant and insightful New Testament statement about faith is made not by the Messiah or an apostle or prophet, but just by ... some guy!)”

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