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Jesus Traditions |
The
reader’s patience is requested in the fact that these Jesus
pages are in effect a kind of sub-Web, “piggy-backing” on the
principal Web, http://www.paulonpaul.org,
and thus that the As Paul Tells It . .
. designation at the top of each page is not quite accurate.
The Jesus
Traditions Home Page is readily accessible by clicking on Contents,
to be found at the top and bottom of each page.
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Contents
of Jesus Traditions
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Addenda (4)
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Addendum L
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For adventurous types, we offer here an alternative
which attempts to tease additional Jesus material (layer 1) out of
Mark’s account. It comes with a user
warning.
In this segment we
will present the case that can be made for assigning the vocation as
messiah and suffering servant to layer 1, that is, to the original experience
of Jesus at the Jordan, rather than to layer 2, representing the
interpretation of Mark and the early
church. Thus, at his baptism Jesus’ vocation would have been confirmed as
a messiah who would realize his mission along the lines of the Servant
of the Lord, in Second Isaiah.
This particular understanding of the messianic mission is noteworthy
because Jesus would have brought together two models of
leadership which had never before been connected in Jewish thought. By its
originality and its spiritual profundity, this kind of vocation seems not
to have been invented by the early church, but may have emerged out of
Jesus’ own pondering of Biblical texts, and (to add a theological
perspective) out of a unique filial
relationship to God. If suffering and death, the innocent for the sinful
and alienated, were implied in this mission, these would have lent a
particular gravity to an otherwise exultant experience for him at the Jordan River. The prospect of such a
vocation would surely have called for a quite extraordinary level of commitment and
self-denial on the part of Jesus.
Accordingly, John’s baptism of repentance would have been for Jesus the point at which he
turned about (the etymological meaning of the Hebrew “to repent”),
not from a life of sin to virtue, but from the relatively tranquil
carpenter’s trade to the public and demanding servant’s vocation.
The three temptations
(Matthew 4:1-11 || Luke 4:1-13) would then become intelligible as three appealing
alternatives to a vocation of service and suffering:
 | Would it be a career built
upon feeding people, as a means of gaining popular support, or would it be
the cross? |
| Would it be a
career built upon exhibitionist feats, to convince the populace that he was
the leader they were looking for, or would it be the cross? |
| Would it be a career built upon expediency and compromise, making an
alliance with evil to achieve a goal as universal ruler, or would it be
the cross, to bring about the eventual downfall of evil? |
It could be no easy decision.
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USER WARNING
In the interests of methodological caution, we need to consider
the following issues:
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§ We proposed above as an alternative interpretation that at his baptism Jesus’ vocation was confirmed as
a Messiah who would realize his mission along the lines of the (suffering)
Servant of the Lord, in Second Isaiah. But the messiah part of this proposal is
not entirely convincing, since the
affirmation of Jesus as messiah is definitely a
part of the early church’s proclamation; and, as we shall see at a later
stage of our discussion, there is a certain
dissonance between Jewish messianic expectation and Jesus’ interests
(click on Messianic Expectation;
further discussion at Messianic Mission).
§ The suffering part of the proposal is less easy to dismiss, in part because
suffering servant texts did not seem to be widely used in the early church
to support a theory of vicarious suffering;
and in part because it is difficult to explain the behavior of
Jesus in the events leading up to his death, if we assume that he was a
person of prudence and “political” sense, who could honorably have
avoided the chain of events in which he became involved. This issue will be discussed further, when we
consider the Passion
Narrative. § Of special
interest here is 1 Corinthians 15:3, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had
received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the
scriptures . . . .” This text provides evidence of a theory of vicarious suffering embedded in the
earliest stages of church tradition. One could argue that because the
tradition being quoted by Paul is so early, perhaps within five to ten
years of the crucifixion, that the text is deserving of consideration
as the view of Jesus himself. On the other hand, others might argue that
this text provides evidence of how early the church was busy trying to explain an
otherwise tragic death.
Back to: Point
of Departure
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Addendum M
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| LISTING OF CONTROVERSY
STORIES: Mark
2:1 – 3:6
2:1-12 ( || Matthew 9:1-8 || Luke 5:17-26)
Paralytic, healed
2:15-17 ( || Matthew 9:10-13 || Luke 5:29-32) Eating with
sinners and tax collectors
2:18-22 ( || Matthew 9:14-17 || Luke 5:33-39 Fasting
Mark 2:23-28 ( || Matthew 12:1-8 || Luke 6:1-5) Plucking
grain on the Sabbath
Mark 3:1-6 ( || Matthew 12:9-14 || Luke 6:6-11) Healing
of man with withered hand
Mark 3:22-30 ( || Matthew 12:24-32 || Luke 11:15-23)
Beelzebul controversy
[Mark 6:1-6 ( || Matthew 13:53-58)] Jesus, not honored at
Nazareth
Mark 7:1-23 ( || Matthew 15:1-20) Dispute about clean and
unclean
Mark 8:11-13 ( || Matthew 16:1-4 || Luke 11:29)
Pharisees request a sign from heaven
Mark 11:15-19 ( || Matthew 21:12-13 || Luke 19:45-48)
Temple commerce disrupted by Jesus
Mark 11:27–12:37
Mark 11:27-33 ( || Matthew 21:23-27 || Luke 20:1-8)
Debate about authority
Mark 12:1-12 ( || Matthew 21:33-46 || Luke 20:9-19)
An allegory: the wicked tenants
Mark 12:13-17 ( || Matthew 22:15-22 || Luke 20:20-26)
Debate about tribute to Caesar
Mark 12:18-27 ( || Matthew 22:23-33 || Luke 20:27-40)
Debate about the resurrection
Mark 12:28-34 ( || Matthew 22:34-40; cp. Luke 10:25-28)
Discussion: the first commandment
Mark 12:35-37 ( || Matthew 22:41-46 || Luke 20:41-44)
Discussion: Davidic descent
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| LISTING OF CONTROVERSY
STORIES: Q
Matthew 11:20-24 || Luke 10:13-15 Woes on cities of
Galilee
Matthew 23:1-36 || Luke 11:37–12:1; 20:45-47;
cp. Mark 12:38-40 The Pharisees condemned
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| LISTING OF CONTROVERSY
STORIES: Other
Matthew 17:24-27 The Temple tax
Matthew 21:28-32 Parable of the two sons
Luke 4:16-30 Rejection at Nazareth
Luke 13:31-33 Derisive words about Herod
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Addendum N
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| As already noted, this
is a curious and perplexing text, which in its present form presents some
difficulties. If we suppose Jesus to be a reasonable man, why would he
curse a tree that was not bearing fruit, when it was not yet the season to
do so? After all, the tree was right on schedule, doing its best!
The text of the incident follows. |
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Matthew 21:18-20 |
Mark 11:12-14,
20-21 |
[Luke] |
18In the
morning, when he returned to the city, he was
hungry.
19And seeing a fig tree by the
side of the road, he went to it
and found nothing at all on it but leaves.
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12On
the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. 13Seeing
in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he
would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but
leaves, for it was not the season for figs.
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[Lacking in Luke, but compare Luke 13:6-9]
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Then he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from
you again!” |
14He said to it,
“May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard
it. . . .
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And the fig tree withered at once. 20When
the disciples saw it they were amazed, saying, “How did the fig tree
wither at once?” |
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20In
the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to
its roots. 21Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi,
look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” |
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It appears that there are some three layers of interpretation, as
follows:
3. The outer synoptic layer is
represented by Matthew, who has telescoped the narrative from two days to
one; the tree withers immediately, and the miraculous element is heightened.
One notes also that Matthew drops Mark’s interpretive phrase, “for it was not the season for
figs,”
a phrase which would only compound the problem for Matthew
by calling attention to the irrational expectation of finding fruit so
early in the season. 2. Mark’s version is the inner
synoptic layer of interpretation. His account locates the fig tree
story at the beginning of several highly charged controversies
with the Jewish establishment (Mark 11:27–12:37). The two
days of the narrative bracket the confrontational episode of Jesus
disrupting Temple commerce (Mark 11:15-18). The air is heavy
with denunciation, and into this heated context, the author inserts the
fig tree tradition, which he (or possibly his source) likely viewed as a
judgment upon Jerusalem. To be sure, these controversies have been
assembled at the Passover visit, when the fig tree episode is necessarily
out of place, and Mark acknowledges that there is a problem. But the
symbolic impact of consigning the fig tree to destruction takes precedence
for Mark over plausibility.
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1. If the fig tree episode is out of
place during the Passover season, what then was the innermost layer,
the original life setting
of the story? The difficulty with finding an answer goes back to the
fact that the gospel material circulated in isolated units during the
period of oral transmission,
without any context. If the location of our traditional unit was not in
the first instance at Jerusalem during Passover, we may assume that it
happened at some time during Jesus’ travels with his disciples, at a
time when figs would ordinarily be found: Jesus approached a tree
in full leaf, on closer inspection discovered no fruit and perhaps some
evidence of disease, and offered the opinion that no one would ever eat
fruit of this tree again, a statement which in the retelling became at
some point the wish (Greek, phagoi, optative) that the tree would
die.
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One alternative to the preceding interpretation is to suppose that originally this story was a
parable, perhaps not unlike the one we find in Luke 13:6-9, where a
fig tree will be cut down if after a last attempt to cultivate and
fertilize it the tree does not bear fruit.
Whatever the precise history of the fig tree episode, it appears likely
that it is in the wrong context, and should be interpreted as a freely
circulating unit of tradition.
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| Revised
July 14, 2003
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Contents
of Jesus Traditions
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