This is the second of the two-part series that appeared on Bart Ehrman's blog (ehrmanblog.org). I encourage folks to access his blog if you're interested in a scholarly view of the New Testament and early Christian writings. There's also occasional forays into the Old Testament and other philosophical topics. A paid subscription is required to access the full contents, but it is modest and 100% goes to charity.
Anyway here's the second part of the series:
The Plausibility of the Fourth Gospel: The Sayings of Jesus
Dennis J. Folds
In Part 1 of this two-part post, I described the vast differences between the gospels of John and Mark in the chronology of events of Jesus’s ministry. Matthew and Luke follow Mark’s chronology, and these three (the Synoptic Gospels) are thought to be more accurate. I argued that the narrative in John is more credible, as it spread the action over two-plus years, had Jesus going back and forth to Jerusalem for major religious festivals, and had a growing conflict with the religious authorities. I concluded that if John is accurate, “Holy Week” is entirely Mark’s invention. But Jesus wasn’t executed for any of his actions, but for what he was saying. In this Part 2, I’ll describe differences in how Jesus talks about himself. My main conclusion is that if John is accurate, Jesus was probably executed because he was thought to be dangerously insane.
In both Mark and John, Jesus is controversial for what he is teaching. The contrast between the two is starker than the differences in their respective chronologies. In John, some of his followers defected because his teaching had become so strange. In Mark, Jesus is a simple country preacher, a prophet of the apocalypse, delivering short, pithy parables along with his declaration that the kingdom of God is about to arrive. His message is a continuation of JTB’s. He talks a lot about the Son of Man, a cosmic figure who appeared in the book of Daniel, and was a major actor in the non-canonical Book of Enoch. In John, Jesus’s message is much more about himself, about his identity as the One, as God’s son. He talks about having coming down from heaven. He says he is the living water and the bread of life. He says people must eat his flesh and drink his blood to find eternal life. He says he is the resurrection and life, that no one comes to the Father except through him. He says that all that really matters is whether you believe in him, that he is the Son of God. He doesn’t talk like that in Mark.
I suppose Jesus could have talked one way when talking to the crowds, and another way when talking to more religiously educated folks. But if anyone today talked as Jesus talked in John, we would say he was insane. And, if he was attracting a big political following, we would say he was dangerous. Mark’s Jesus isn’t much of a threat. His popularity in Galilee might have been worrisome, but it was just a nuisance. Mark does hint that some thought Jesus was crazy, and his family comes to get him. In John, this crazy talk about how people must eat his flesh and drink his blood led a large proportion of his followers to give up on him, and to subsequently oppose him. They thought he might be suicidal, and surely thought he was insane.
Both Mark and John make it clear that it was this blasphemy – claiming to be God’s son – that was the main reason the leadership wanted him to be executed. Mark doesn’t have him say it explicitly, though it is implied strongly enough for the authorities to object. As this claim was not of concern to Pilate, they had to emphasize his potential role in insurrection. If John’s account is accurate, they believed Jesus was dangerously insane and had to be silenced. It’s one thing for a country preacher to get a big following, but it’s quite another for a madman to upend society and bring the whole house down with him.
John’s own comments about Jesus indicate that his disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was talking about until after his death. Perhaps they heard it through their own mental model of the Messiah: he would set up the kingdom of God on earth, and they would be important rulers. They kept expecting those events, but Jesus kept talking about his identity. Jesus kept talking about how people had to believe he was the Son of God to have eternal life. After they became convinced he had been raised from the dead, they remembered and re-understood some of what he had said. They re-interpreted his Son of Man sayings to be him talking about himself. Some of them – maybe holdouts from the hard core JTB movement – continued to expect revolution and the imminent apocalypse. But others of them, perhaps from the more educated faction, remembered the message as told by John. This group would have been more sympathetic to Paul’s emergence, and perhaps helped give rise to it. Paul’s message is not incompatible with John’s. What matters is what you believe about Jesus being the Son of God.
Modern scholars seem to want Mark’s Jesus to be the authentic account. They want John’s to be a later invention, after people had started making divinity claims about him. They think John put those words in Jesus’s mouth. If John’s is the more credible narrative of events, perhaps his is also the more accurate description of what Jesus said. Maybe Mark is the one that distorted Jesus, making him bold and sane, though misunderstood. I offer that is quite plausible that Jesus came to believe that he was the One, and said so aloud, to some audiences. Perhaps his mother had a story and stuck to it. Certainly, JTB saying that Jesus was the One would be impactful. Those temptations in the wilderness were of the form, “If you are the Son of God, do so-and-so.” Maybe Jesus struggled with what this meant, and by faith, stepped up to it. Luke has Jesus announce his identity in Nazareth, and the hearers wanted to stone him. After his death, some of his closest followers remembered those crazy things he said and came to believe it, too. That created an environment in which Paul’s message could emerge, with whatever influences those original witnesses might have had on him. Maybe the reason the divinity claims took root is that Jesus actually said some of these things. And that leaves us with an uncomfortable choice: Either he was who he said he was, or he was crazy.
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