The Jewish Gospels (20 page)

33
.
Given the meaning of the underlying Aramaic word in Daniel, “authority” strikes me as a rather weak rendering; “sovereignty” would be much better. Sovereignty would surely explain why the Son of Man has the power to remit sins on earth.

34
.
Cf. Morna Hooker,
The Son of Man in Mark: A Study of the Background of the Term “Son of Man” and Its Use in St Mark's Gospel
(Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), 90–91, who seems to take this (in partial contradiction to her own position earlier) to be significant of a prerogative of “man” in general.

35
.
This final insight was stimulated by a comment of Gudrun Guttenberger, followed by a further comment of Ishay Rosen-Zvi. See too Seyoon Kim,
“The ‘Son of Man'” as the Son of God
, WUNT (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1983), 2: “In claiming this divine prerogative Jesus classes himself as the Son of Man into the category of the divine, and his superhuman act of healing is the sign for this claim. So already in 1927 O. Procksch suggested that here ‘the Son of Man' stands for the Son of God.”

36
.
As New Testament scholar F.W. Beare has written, “In the gentile churches, this will not have been a burning question in itself; it will have arisen only as one aspect of the much broader issue of how far the Law of Moses was held to be binding upon Christians. Insofar as the pericope [discrete passage of the narrative] is a community-product, accordingly, it will be regarded as a product of Palestinian Jewish Christianity, not of the Hellenistic churches. The way to understanding will therefore lie through the examination of Jewish traditions and modes of thought.” F.W. Beare, “‘The Sabbath Was Made for Man?'”
Journal of Biblical Literature
79, no. 2 (June 1960): 130.

37
.
Generally, and this is highly important, New Testament critics have seen vv. 27–28 as an addition to an original text that incorporated only the answer regarding David—or the opposite, that only vv. 27–28 were original and that the reference to David is a secondary addition. “As Guelich observes (similarly Back,
Jesus of Nazareth,
69; Doering,
Schabbat,
409), these four suggestions basically boil down to two: (1) either Jesus' argument from the action of David is original, with vv. 27–28 being added later in one or two stages, or (2) v. 27 (and possibly v. 28) constituted Jesus' original answer(s), with the story of David being added later.” John Paul Meier, “The Historical Jesus and the Plucking of the Grain on the Sabbath,”
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 66
(2004): 564.

38
.
Translation mine:
.

39
.
To be sure, Matthew is frequently closer in thought and expression to rabbinic texts than Mark. It is this point, in fact, that has given rise to the notion that Matthew's Gospel is more “Jewish” than Mark's, a distinct error in my view, although Matthew may have been closer to proto-rabbinic traditions than Mark was. Rabbi Akiva's own argument is somewhat difficult to understand, but may be best understood as meaning something like this: We know that one removes a murderer from the altar, even in the midst of a sacrifice, from Exodus 21:14, where we are told of the premeditated murderer that “You shall take him from the altar to execute him.” Now, it follows that redressing murder is more important than even the sacrifices, and the sacrifices are more important than the Sabbath (since the Sabbath is violated in the Temple in order to maintain the cult); therefore, argues Rabbi Akiva, it follows that saving a human life is more important than the Sabbath and sets it aside. The reasoning from executing the murderer to saving a life seems to be an instance of the general tannaitic principle that the measure of mercy is always more powerful than the measure of retribution. This will enable us to understand anew v. 6 there. When Jesus says, “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here,” he is, at the first glance, simply anticipating the a fortiori argument that we hear later from Rabbi Akiva's mouth, to wit, that benefit to humans is greater than the worship in the Temple, and if, therefore, we violate
the Sabbath for the Temple worship, even more so for the benefit of humans. It must, however, also be recognized that Jesus' halakhic statement is afforded a much more radical import in that it includes a broader test for benefit, not merely the saving of a life, as the Rabbis would have it, but also the saving from hunger. (Cf. Aharon Shemesh, “Shabbat, Circumcision and Circumcision on Shabbat in Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” unpublished paper [2011]. I am grateful to Prof. Shemesh for his comments on this chapter and for sharing his work with me prior to publication.) Finally, in a pattern that repeats itself in Mark 7, as we shall see in chapter 3 below, Jesus' halakhic argument—a virtually impeccable one and well formed on rabbinic principles that are thus shown to be far older than the Rabbis—is interpreted as a kind of parable and one with reference to the messianic age in which Jesus and the evangelist were living. As Shemesh remarks, “It should be admitted that in both arguments, Jesus makes a better case than the Rabbis.”

40
.
Shemesh, “Shabbat.”

41
.
There is a tendency among certain Christian scholars to insist on an absolute contrast and hence conflict here between “Judaism” (bad) and “Christianity” (good). Exemplary of this tendency is Arland J. Hultgren, “The Formation of the Sabbath Pericope in Mark 2:23–28,”
Journal of Biblical Literature
91, no. 1 (March 1972): 39n8, who delivers himself of the following statement:

There is a close parallel, to which many commentators refer, in the statement of the second century R. Simeon b. Menasya (Mekilta on Exod 31:14): “The sabbath is delivered unto you, and you are not delivered to the sabbath.” But this saying does not have the same meaning as Mark 2:27. In context it emphasizes the sabbath as a distinctive Jewish institution, i.e., as given to Israel (so Exod 31:14). The sabbath is delivered to Israel as a gift, and it is understood that Israel will therefore observe it. In Mark 2:27 it is understood that the sabbath has been established for man's good. It will be kept in a Jewish milieu, of course, but what is to prevail is that which enhances human life, not sabbath casuistry—even if the intention of the latter is to make the day one of celebration.

The willful ignorance displayed in this statement simply takes the breath away, since it is absolutely clear from the context that the saying of Rabbi Shim
ʾ
on ben Menasya is, indeed, about the permission to heal on the Sabbath. Hultgren is precisely wrong; his sentence should read: “The Sabbath is delivered to Israel as a gift, and, therefore, it is permitted to heal Jews on Sabbath.” Lest matters be less than clear, I emphasize that I am not denying the highly significant difference between Jesus and the Mekhilta (the Rabbis) here. The Rabbis surely restrict the permission to heal on the Sabbath to Jews, while Jesus seems to intend this to be a general permission to save all human life. It remains the case, nonetheless, that the Rabbis here use exactly the same argument to justify healing on the Sabbath as Jesus does, namely, that the Sabbath was given to human beings (Israel) for their welfare and that the humans were not given to the Sabbath. My point, then, is not to deny the possible moral superiority of Jesus' position over the Rabbis (see Shemesh in previous note) but to protest rather the assertion of absolute and total difference between allegedly polar opposite religious approaches, one allegedly rigid, harsh, and legalistic and the other promoting a humanistic religion of love. Hultgren's contemptuous use of “casuistry” gives his game away. Even more offensive than Hultgren's is the opinion of E. Lohse that “The Sabbath was made for man” etc. is an authentic saying of Jesus owing to its alleged
dissimilarity
from Judaism, following the highly questionable criterion that only what is not like “Judaism” can be asserted to be the actual words of the Lord. This statement is dissimilar from Judaism and therefore allegedly authentically dominical, since precisely the same statement when it does appear in Jewish texts (the Mekhilta, as above) “means something different.” If there ever was an example of begging the question, this is it. The perversity of this kind of argument must be obvious, for even Occam's razor would demand that if we find the same (or virtually the same) saying in a similar context in two historically related texts, they must mean roughly the same thing. The special pleading involved in distorting the rabbinic saying from its obvious meaning in order to make it different (and “worse”) than Jesus' and then using this as an implicit
argument against “Judaism” is simply anti-Judaic special pleading. For the Lohse, see Frans Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath: Some Observations on Mark Ii, 27,” in
Jesus Aux Origines de la Christologie
, ed. J. Dupont et al., Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1975), 229–30. Neirynck himself surely gets this right; Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath,” 251–52. However, he is exactly wrong to say that “on both sides [i.e., with respect to the Gospel and the rabbinic saying] we are confronted with a variety of interpretations.” No interpreter in the history of Judaism has ever seen this saying, nor does its context permit seeing it, as anything but a support for the principle that saving a life takes precedent over the Sabbath; any other readings by modern New Testament scholars are the product of prejudice and nothing else. The alleged “chaos of talmudic scholarship,” at least in this instance, is a pure figment of the imagination. Much better is an interpreter such as William Lane, for whom the
similarity
of Jesus' saying to that of the Rabbis is taken as evidence in favor of its dominical origin (William L. Lane,
The Gospel According to Mark: The English Text with Introduction, Exposition, and Notes,
New International Commentary on the New Testament [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974], 119–20). More recent Christian scholars follow in this general tendency, such as Joel Marcus,
Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary
(New York: Doubleday, 2000), 245–46, and Collins,
Mark: A Commentary,
203–4, who get this just right.

42
.
Menahem Kister, “Plucking on the Sabbath and the Jewish-Christian Controversy” [Hebrew],
Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought
3, no. 3 (1984): 349–66. See also Shemesh, “Shabbat.”

43
.
John P. Meier has written, “Clearly, then, this Galilean cycle of dispute stories is an intricate piece of literary art and artifice, written by a Christian theologian to advance his overall vision of Jesus as the hidden yet authoritative Messiah, Son of Man, and Son of God. As we begin to examine the fourth of the five stories, the plucking of the grain on the Sabbath, the last thing we should do is treat it like a videotaped replay of a debate among various Palestinian Jews in the year
A.D.
28. It is, first of
all, a Christian composition promoting Christian theology. To what extent it may also preserve memories of an actual clash between the historical Jesus and Pharisees can be discerned only by analyzing the Christian text we have before us.” Meier, “Plucking,” 567. I completely agree with Meier's formulation here; the text will not allow us to see simplistically here only a record of halakhic controversies (although the fact that it allows us to see this
also
is of enormously precious importance). My dissent from Meier is only in his mobilization of the term “Christian” here as a term in opposition to “various Palestinian Jews.” I would like to present here a reading based on my views expressed until now in which both the halakhic controversy and its apocalyptic radicality go back to the same Palestinian Jewish milieu.

44
.
The fact that David's action did not take place on the Sabbath is completely irrelevant,
pace
Meier, “Plucking,” 576–77, and Collins,
Mark: A Commentary,
203. Also partly disagreeing with Meier, I would suggest that Jesus' erroneous substitution of Abiatar for Ahimelek as the name of the high priest denotes familiarity with the biblical text, not ignorance, and rather supports the historicity of the moment. Someone very familiar with a text and quoting it from memory could easily make such a mistake, while a writer rarely would. I thus disagree on all points with the following sentence: “The conclusion we must draw both from this error and from the other examples of Jesus' inaccurate retelling of the OT story is simple and obvious: the recounting of the incident of David and Ahimelech shows both a glaring ignorance of what the OT text actually says and a striking inability to construct a convincing argument from the story;” Meier, “Plucking,” 578. And I don't think I fall into the category of Meier's “conservative scholars.” My reading, if he accepts it, could somewhat reduce Meier's “surprise” at discovering that Haenchen claims that the author (or inserter) of vv. 25–26 was knowledgeable in Scripture; Meier, “Plucking,” 579n35., citing Ernst Haenchen,
Der Weg Jesu. Eine Erklärung Des Markus-Evangeliums und der Kanonischen Parallelen,
Sammlung Töpelmann, vol. 6. (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1966), 121. I believe that the Lukan version supports my interpretation in that the direct move from David to the Son of Man implies the
messianic parallelism strongly (Luke 6:4–5). For this reading of Luke, see Neirynck, “Jesus and the Sabbath,” 230.