The Jewish Gospels (16 page)

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Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
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Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
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Therefore I will allot
him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

If these verses do indeed refer to the Messiah, they clearly predict his suffering and death to atone for the sins of humans, but the Jews allegedly always interpreted these verses as referring to the suffering of Israel herself and not the Messiah, who would only triumph. To sum up this generally held view: The theology of the suffering of the Messiah was an after-the-fact apologetic response to explain the suffering and ignominy Jesus suffered, since he was deemed by “Christians” to be the Messiah. Christianity, on this view, was initiated by the fact of the crucifixion, which is seen as setting into motion the new religion. Moreover, many who hold this view hold also that Isaiah 53 was distorted by the Christians from its allegedly original meaning, in which it referred to the suffering of the People of Israel, to explain and account for the shocking fact that the Messiah had been crucified.

This commonplace view has to be rejected completely. The notion of the humiliated and suffering Messiah was not at all alien within Judaism before Jesus' advent, and it remained current among Jews well into the future following that—indeed, well into the early modern period.
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The
fascinating (and to some, no doubt, uncomfortable) fact is that this tradition was well documented by modern Messianic Jews, who are concerned to demonstrate that their belief in Jesus does not make them un-Jewish. Whether or not one accepts their theology, it remains the case that they have a very strong textual base for the view that the suffering Messiah is based in deeply rooted Jewish texts early and late. Jews, it seems, had no difficulty whatever with understanding a Messiah who would vicariously suffer to redeem the world. Once again, what has been allegedly ascribed to Jesus after the fact is, in fact, a piece of entrenched messianic speculation and expectation that was current before Jesus came into the world at all. That the Messiah would suffer and be humiliated was something Jews learned from close reading of the biblical texts, a close reading in precisely the style of classically rabbinic interpretation that has become known as midrash, the concordance of verses and passages from different places in Scripture to derive new narratives, images, and theological ideas.

Throughout this book, we have been observing how ideas that have been thought to be the most distinctive innovations of Jesus himself or his followers can be found in the religious literature of the Jews of the time of Jesus or before. This observation takes nothing away from the dignity or majesty of the Christian story, nor is it meant to. Rather than seeing Christianity as a new invention, seeing
it as one of the paths that Judaism took—a path as ancient in its sources as the one that rabbinic Jews trod—has a majesty of its own. Many Jews were expecting the divine-human Messiah, the Son of Man. Many accepted Jesus as that figure, while others did not. Although there is precious little pre-Christian evidence among Jews for the suffering of the Messiah, there are good reasons to consider this too no stumbling block for the “Jewishness” of the ideas about the Messiah, Jesus as well. Let me make clear I am not claiming that Jesus and his followers contributed nothing new to the story of a suffering and dying Messiah; I am not, of course, denying them their own religious creativity. I am claiming that even this innovation, if indeed they innovated, was entirely within the spirit and hermeneutical method of ancient Judaism, and not a scandalous departure from it.

This point of the “Jewishness” of the vicarious sufferings of the Messiah can be established in two ways: first by showing how the Gospels use perfectly traditional, midrashic ways of reasoning to develop these ideas and apply them to Jesus, and second, by demonstrating how common the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah was among perfectly “orthodox” rabbinic Jews from the time of the Talmud and onward. My reasoning is that if this were such a shocking thought, how is it that the rabbis of the Talmud and midrash, only a couple of centuries later, had no difficulty whatever with portraying the Messiah's vicarious
suffering or discovering him in Isaiah 53, just as the followers of Jesus had done?
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But I get ahead of myself: first, let us see how close biblical reading in the style of midrash can best explain the passages in Mark that speak of the shaming and death of Jesus.

Shaming the Son of Man: Mark 8:38

The first time in Mark that Jesus reveals the inevitability of his suffering and death is in chapter 8. As we have seen, the sometimes puzzling and shocking statements made by Jesus about his authority can be derived from close reading of the Daniel passages about the Son of Man. These Jews pored over the Scripture and interpreted every detail in order to understand what the Messiah would look like and what to expect when he came. Here we have a further example that illuminates our question about the suffering of the Messiah:

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And Jesus went with his disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?”
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And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets.”
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And he asked them, “But who do you say I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.”
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And he charged them to tell no one about him.
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And he began to teach
them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
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And he said this plainly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.
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But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, “Get thee behind me Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.”
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And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
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For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it.
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For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?
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For what can a man give in return for his life?
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For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

In this passage, as in the immediately following Mark 9:12, we are told by Jesus that the Son of Man must “suffer many things.” In the sequence of vv. 29–31 it is made absolutely clear that the Christ will suffer and that Jesus believes that he is the Christ. The equation of the Son of Man and his suffering with the Christ is made absolutely clear in these verses as well. This all makes the most sense if we assume that Jesus is alluding to the Son of Man figure
from Daniel and his fate, which is to be crushed for a time, two times, and half a time before rising triumphant.

Jesus had a very clear sense of his messianic role and fate, and that this role and fate were what had been predicted for the Son of Man in Daniel 7. Jesus first is identified as Messiah by others and then refers to himself as the Son of Man, thus establishing the identity of the Messiah and his ultimate fate as that of the Danielic Son of Man. Jesus is also clearly claiming that identity for himself.

In Mark 14:62, we find a similar, and if anything even more explicit, self-identification by Jesus as Messiah and Son of Man. It would be no exaggeration to say that these two explicit moments in which this equation is made provide a key to reading all of the Son of Man passages in the Gospel as indicating Jesus' sense of his divine vocation and role:

“Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?” And Jesus said “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming on the clouds of Heaven.” Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!”

We learn several key things from this passage.
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The first, as we saw above, is that “Messiah” is for Jesus equivalent to the “Son of Man.” Second, we learn that claiming
to be the Son of Man was considered blasphemy by the high priest and thus a claim not only to messianic status but also to divinity. When Jesus answers “I am,” he is going even further than merely claiming messianic status, for “I Am,”
eigo eimi,
is precisely what YHVH calls himself when Moses asks his name: “This is what you are to say to the Israelites, ‘I am [
eigo eimi
] has sent me to you'” (Exodus 3:14). The high priest of the Jews could hardly be expected to miss this allusion. Jesus claims to be the Son of God, the Son of Man, and indeed God himself. A statement such as that is not merely true or false; it is truth or blasphemy.
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It is also the same blasphemy of which Jesus
was accused in
chapter 2
, when he presumed the divine prerogative of forgiving sins. Third, we learn that for the Jesus of the Gospels, the title “Son of Man” derives from Daniel 7, is the name for the divine redeemer of a high Christology, and thus constitutes the blasphemy of which the high priest speaks.

The high priest clearly knows the terms “Christ,” “Son of God,” and “Son of Man.” He also perceives that when Jesus says “I am,” he is declaring himself the one whose name is “I am,” YHVH himself. Through all of these terms, Jesus is claiming some share of divinity, hence the charge of blasphemy.
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Here it cannot be denied, of course, that
there is a direct allusion to the Danielic source of the narrative of the Son of Man, which is explicitly signaled by the words “coming with the clouds of heavens”; thus I suggest the parallel provides good evidence for my interpretation of the Mark 8 passage as well. As in 14:62, he refers to the exaltation of the Son of Man; in 8:31 he refers to the suffering and humiliation of the Son of Man, which is then cited again in 9:12, “as it has been written.” The two verses thus complete each other.

The progression of the Gospel narrative runs in the following fashion:

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Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is.

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Peter answers that he is the Messiah.

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Jesus answers that the Son of Man must suffer many things.

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Peter denies this (he is ashamed of a suffering Messiah).

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Jesus rebukes him.

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Jesus calls the disciples together to provide them with the lesson to be learned from his sharp rebuke of Peter.

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All who would be followers of Jesus must pick up crosses and be willing to lose their lives as he will.

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But if any are ashamed of Jesus in his humiliation and crucifixion, the exalted Son of Man (Jesus vindicated) will be ashamed of them in
the final moment, when he comes in glory with his angels (Daniel 7).
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It is precisely under the title Son of Man that Jesus predicates his sufferings. At the end of chapter 7 of Daniel, the symbol of the Son of Man is interpreted as “the People of the Saints of the Most High,” who will be crushed for a certain amount of time under the heels of the fourth beast and then will arise and, defeating the beast, “will receive the kingdom and hold the kingdom forever and ever.”
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It surely can hardly be doubted that the phrase “the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected” is a palpable allusion to Isaiah 53:3, in which we are told that the suffering servant of the Lord “is despised and rejected of men.” This, as we have seen, is very plausibly read about the Messiah. We must also, of course, be mindful of other biblical texts in the background here, including especially the psalms of lament. We therefore don't need to posit a special Christian mode of reading that led to this idea. Once again, the primary mode of early Jewish biblical exegesis is midrash, which is the concatenation of related (or even seemingly unrelated) passages and verses from all over the Bible to derive new lessons and narratives. It is midrash that we see at work here too.

The association of these prophetic texts with the Son of Man from Daniel is precisely what enabled the full development of a suffering Christology, according to which
Jesus' demise (and exaltation) was interpreted. In other words, it is as plausible to assume that Jews held this view of the vicarious suffering of the Messiah and his atoning death, as predicted by the Prophet Isaiah before Jesus' own suffering and death, as it is to assume that Christians made it up after the fact. Once again, we find a Jesus who sees himself, imagines himself, and presents himself as entirely fulfilling the messianic expectation already in place to the effect that the “Son of Man must suffer many things.”

The Jews were expecting a Redeemer in the time of Jesus. Their own sufferings under Roman domination seemed so great, and this Redeemer had been predicted for them. Reading the Book of Daniel closely, at least some Jews—those behind the first-century Similitudes of Enoch and those with Jesus—had concluded that the Redeemer would be a divine figure named the Son of Man who would come to earth as a human, save the Jews from oppression, and rule the world as its sovereign. Jesus seemed to many to fit that bill. His life and death were claimed to be precisely a fulfillment of what had been predicted of the Messiah, Son of Man, by the old books and traditions. What happened as that expectation of redemption was delayed and as more Gentiles joined this community is the story of the Church, of Christianity. It is not the suffering and dying of the Messiah that precipitated
that story at all, as we see once we read the Gospel in its close connection to Daniel.