Month: February 2019

Why did Jesus say, “No one is good except the One God”?

After Jesus and the three disciples descended from the mount of transfiguration (Mk 9.9-13), they encountered a man who had brought his demon-possessed son for healing— but the disciples had failed to cast it out. The episode turns on the man’s anguished cry, “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us!” Jesus almost scoffs at him with indignation— “This ‘If you can’!— All things are possible for one who trusts” (9.22-23). After Jesus casts out the demon, the disciples ask, “Why couldn’t we do it?” and Jesus replies, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer” (9.28-29). Later manuscripts say “prayer and fasting” but, apart from the mere fact that that’s apparently not the original reading, this seems contrary to Jesus’ point, that the disciples’ authority over demons is based on their connection with God, not on their “position” as disciples or their personal “spiritual powers” or ascetic exploits, or whatnot— and both trust and connection with God will come up again at the end of the subsection of the “Way” that follows (9.30–10.31).

“They then departed from there and passed through Galilee, and he didn’t want anyone to know, because he was teaching his disciples and saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And having been killed, he will rise on the third day'” (9.30-31).

The disciples don’t get it and are too afraid to ask about it (9.32). Plus they have other things on their minds. When they get back home in Capharnaum, Jesus asks them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” Dumb as they are, they know when to keep quiet, because they can see they’re in for a licking this time— they’ve been arguing about who among them was the greatest (9.33-34).

So at this point Jesus sits down and— your translation probably says, he “called” the Twelve. But “call” is kaleō and Mark says proskaleō— he “summoned” the Twelve. This is serious. But we already know that this is serious, because Jesus is sitting. In the ancient world, a teacher giving formal teaching would sit, and his students would stand, out of deep respect. So we envision the disciples standing with heads bowed before Jesus, the Master, seated in full authority. And he says, “If anyone wants to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all” (9.35).

In teaching this passage to my “Sixteen” in Uganda, I made them stand up while I spoke Jesus’ words from my chair. It was a powerful moment for all of us. Whenever Jesus sits, it’s always a sign that we should take what follows with the utmost seriousness.

Now, this entire section of Mark (8.22–10.52)— often called the “Section on the ‘Way'”— has four parts, each having this pattern:

Jesus anounces his forthcoming passion,
One or more of the disciples spectacularly fails to get it,
Jesus rebukes and teaches him/them,
Jesus teaches all.

So, here, after Jesus rebukes and teaches the Twelve, there now follows a series of episodes and sayings on relationships— with the vulnerable (represented by a child) (9.36-37), with non-conforming disciples (9.38-41), with “little ones” (9.42-49), with each other (9.50), with wives (10.1-11), and with children (again) (10.13-16). In each case, Jesus emphasizes that the strong must yield to the weak, the privileged to the unprivileged, and the first to the last.

Finally, “one” arrives in breathless haste and immediately starts to flatter Jesus— “Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit the life of the [messianic] age?” (10.17). This is the only place in Mark where we find the expression zōē aiōnios, “life of the [messianic] age”. “Eternal life”, the translation found in your bible, is by the way simply not correct; the man is not asking about “eternity” and certainly not wondering how he can “go to heaven when he dies”; he is interested in the life characterized as aiōnios, that is, as belonging to the aiōn, the “aeon” or “age” in which God’s regime will be established once and for all.

Note also his interest in “inheritance”, that is, in social advantage. We’ll get to that.

Jesus rebuffs him by saying, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, God” (10.18).

This is quite consistent with everything that’s transpired since he cast out the epileptic demon at the end of the previous section. In stark contrast to the disciples’ concern about being the “greatest,” Jesus has emphasized that the first must be last and be servants of all. And all glory is to be ascribed to God, not taken advantage of.

Many people have agonized over the christological implications of Jesus’ apparent self-effacement here in 10.18. But the problem disappears once we see that he is simply rebuffing the man’s effort to ingratiate himself and to gain advantage by bestowing an honor which, if Jesus accepted it, he would somehow have to reciprocate. Deflecting such flattery, Jesus effectively rebukes the man: Only “the One God” is good. Now, about you, sir. . . .

At first glance, Jesus seems to do little more than to quote some generalities from the Decalogue, and not particularly hard ones at that— most people don’t commit murder or adultery or even go around stealing or bearing false witness in court. So, from the man’s own point of view, he must be looking pretty good!

And of course, as Mark’s audience, we recall that in the controversy on divorce just prior to this, Jesus intimated that parts of the Torah were given as concession to human “hardheartedness” (10.5b). So if all that’s required for “inheriting the life of the messianic age” is to have a general commitment to the Torah (give or take a few “human” rules)— well then, the man is set!

Except for one thing. One of the statutes that Jesus cites doesn’t in fact appear in the Ten Commandments: “Do not defraud”. In fact, both Matthew and Luke drop this phrase, because they want to have Jesus quoting only the Ten in their stories. But Mark’s insertion takes us right to the heart of the point he’s making: In the Septuagint, the verb “defraud” (apostereō) refers to holding back the wages of an employee. Hmmm. Where’s he going with this?

Well anyway, the man seems to have missed Jesus’ point that “no one is good”, and cheerfully claims that he’s “kept all these things from my youth up” (10.20). And to be sure, he probably didn’t commit murder, adultery, and so forth. Yet the Talmud reports that only Abraham, Moses, and Aaron kept all of the Torah. So this man seems to think he’s in pretty good company, and probably just the kind o’ guy Jesus is looking for, so he can bestow an important inheritance in that glorious oncoming Age!

Well, Jesus looks at the man and “loved him” (ēgapēsen, related to agapē). This is the only place where Mark says Jesus “loved” anyone, so it strikes us as a bit odd— until we come to his later conversation with the scribe in 12.28-34, where the issue once again is the commandments of the Torah, and the verb “love” makes its only other appearance in Mark— the greatest commandments are to “love” God and neighbor. Mark is just being careful to show in advance that Jesus practices the “greatest commandment” even as he sets forth what this man who would “inherit the life of the messianic age” must do.

The man embodies the seed that falls among thorns in the Parable of the Sower— those for whom “the deceitfulness of riches, and desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful” (4.18). That he loves wealth and advantage is obvious from the fact that he’s trying to get more of it from Jesus. But Jesus’ love for the man contrasts vividly with this. The man seeks his own flourishing— and Jesus seeks his flourishing too! But, since the guy is choking with “the deceitfulness of riches, and desires for other things”, Jesus must prescribe a remedy! However pious he may have been from his youth, this man “yet lacks one thing”, and Jesus concretizes it for him in four distinct imperatives:

  1. Go,
  2. sell what you have,
  3. give it to the poor (that’s where you’ll get the treasure in heaven), and
  4. come, follow me (10.21).

The first command usually appears in healing stories (1.44; 2.11; 5.19, 34; 7.29), and that’s part of what we must understand here: be healed of the sickness of accumulation. The fourth closely echoes the call of the first disciples (deuro, “come”, 10.21, is the singular of deute, “come” in 1.16). And in this light, the second is really not so exceptional; the demand that an owner (10.22) divest his assets is not different from asking a fisherman to leave his nets (1.18).

But the third imperative is striking, and it shows how the therapy must be applied, and the benefit. The Torah enjoins not “defrauding”, that is, not holding back the wages of employees. Jesus stipulates more than that. The man must not just not defraud; he must positively distribute all his wealth to the poor. And why are they poor? Not least because they have been exploited and defrauded.

At this word, the man departs, “appalled” (stygnasas) and “grieved” (lypoumenos) (10.22). Mark’s word stygnasas recalls Ezekiel’s judgment on the rich and powerful of Tyre— “All the inhabitants of the coastlands are appalled at you” (Ez 27.35). We should recall his “grief” (lypoumenos) when we read of how the twelve felt “grieved” (lypeisthai) later on when accused of betrayal (14.19). But we should also recall Jesus’ own “sympathetic grief” (syl-lypoumenos) at his would-be murderers’ hard-heartedness in 3.5.

And the reason for all this grief becomes clear as Mark reveals what’s been at stake all along: the man departs, “grieved” and “appalled”, because “he was one having many properties (ktēmata)”. Ah ha, just as we might have expected. A ktēma is a piece of land, a farm, field, or estate (cf Ac 5.1). So with this punchline, Mark reveals the man to be a wealthy landowner, and ends the episode abruptly. Note that Mark does not say that the man is “young”, Mt 19.20, 22, or a “ruler”, Lk 18.18!— only that he’s a landowner who came to Jesus, seeking to ingratiate himself and to obtain “inheritance” and (further) advantage.

In Mark’s Palestine, landowners were the most politically powerful social stratum. And Jesus’ point is obvious. The man’s wealth has been gained by “defrauding” the poor. He is actually trying to bring his attitudes and his practices into God’s regime. He has not “kept all these things” at all— and he must make restitution. In fact, assuming that at least some of his wealth was inherited, he must even make restitution for his ancestors. For Jesus, the Torah and its supreme commandment of “love” are kept only through concrete acts of justice. A facade of piety confers no advantage upon the powerful.

“No one is good but the One God” is not a general theological principle that we may abuse out of context to “prove” that Jesus is “not equal to God”, or to show that all people are “born sinners”. It has a specific meaning within the text and social context in which it was written. In Mark’s narrative, Jesus uses the phrase to deflect a flattering attempt to claim the inheritance and the life of the messianic age as a matter of personal privilege.

Recall now how the father of the epileptic demoniac cried, “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us!” and Jesus said, “This ‘If you can’!— All things are possible for one who trusts” (9.22-23). After the landowner departs, Jesus reflects on what has just happened, and returns to this theme:

10.23 . . . . looking around, Jesus said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for a rich person to enter God’s regime!”

24 But the disciples were astounded at his words.

But Jesus answered again and said to them, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter God’s regime.”

26 They were terribly shocked and said to him, “Who then can be saved?”

27 And gazing at them, Jesus said, “With people this is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.”

And the section ends where it began:

“Many who are first will be last, and the last, first” (10.31).

Gaining an “inheritance” in God’s regime has to do with the struggle for trust— for relationship— not for “faith”, if faith has to do with “believing” certain propositions— such nonsense is completely alien to Christianity. But are we actually willing to risk life and treasure— and certainly to surrender all unjust advantage— so that others may flourish?

Someone once said that love is “giving someone the power to destroy you and trusting they won’t use it”. But Jesus is teaching the disciples about giving someone the power to destroy you even knowing that they will use it— giving them that power when, by doing so, you can actually help them flourish in God’s regime.

Some of you may know that I have a degree in Buddhist Studies. So at this point I can’t help remembering the story of The Hungry Tigress, which is one of the Buddhist Játaka Tales:

While walking in the forest, three princes came upon a tigress and her seven cubs. Exhausted by hunger and thirst, the tigress was hardly able to move and looked as if she would soon die. The three brothers were greatly disturbed by the sight of this poor tigress and wondered what they could do. Of the three, the Bodhisattva Mahasattva (the future Buddha) was moved to great compassion and asked his brothers to leave him a while. When they were gone, Mahasattva laid himself down in front of the tigress, hoping she would eat his body and drink his blood. But she was too weak. Realizing this, Mahasattva slit his own throat, so the tigress could do so.

What we see here is that neither Jesus nor the Buddha are in competition with death. And compassion, even up to renunciation of one’s own life for another, is the supreme value even in cultures that have never even heard of Jesus, much less of the Torah and its “greatest commandment”.

So when Jesus said, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone” (10.18), was he saying he wasn’t divine? Does this prove that “all the great Teachers are the same”? No, not at all. This post is already too long to explore the reasons why that is— but one thing should be clear already:

We have to stop ransacking the Bible for “proof” of “non-traditional” theological theories, or for reinforcement of “traditional” but inhumane and cruel ideas about people’s “sin nature” and other such ideologies.

We need to start reading the story for what it is— God’s actual “good news”, shining out as clear as high noon.

From that reading we will get our answers about Jesus’ divinity and the other things that vex us in our postmodern age of pluralism. We will find, in fact, the place where the postmodern age and the messianic age intersect. Our only viable future starts there.

Is Mark Historically True?

As we find ourselves emerging from fundamentalism, we begin to see that a straightforwardly historical way of reading divine Scripture is fraught with problems. Yet we still hang on to the assumption that the Scriptures’ main purpose is to provide historical information about the persons and events narrated.

That’s just not the case. For instance, as I’ve already pointed out, in his story of Jesus’ transfiguration, we find that Mark has fashioned a powerful version of a literary trope that everyone in the ancient world would have recognized— the apotheosis of a hero. Only in Mark’s usage, just at the moment his reader would have expected Jesus to ascend to the heavens, there to be forever enshrined as a constellation like Heracles, or as a star like Caesar, Jesus refuses his apotheosis. And if he refuses to go up to the sky, then he will have to come back down the mountain to the valley below. And if he does that, it can only mean he really will die, just as he’s been telling his disciples. But now we know that he will do so willingly; and that he’s entirely in charge of what’s going to unfold.

So, did the transfiguration “really happen”? There is no way of telling, one way or the other. We have only this story— which as we’ve seen is deeply literary— and we have nothing more— to tell us about it. So we have to find the meaning inside the story, not outside it, in history. We have no access to the history.

Scholars have come to appreciate that our sacred texts are literary through and through— and that only in the most rare of instances can they really be resolved to “history” in any sense that we think of “history”. This means they were never intended to “prove” anything historically. Archaeology simply doesn’t back up the OT as we once assumed; and in fact for much of both Testaments, the nature of the story itself pretty much denies us any independent corroboration. Look at how much of the narrative is concerned with private, interpersonal conversations between historically insignificant people. Can anyone prove that Saul’s father told him to go looking for his father’s asses? (1Sm 9.3). Was the woman who came to Jesus in Sidon a Syro-Phoenician Greek (Mk 7.26), or a Canaanitess (Mt 15.22)? Did the events in Jerusalem before Jesus’ arrest take two days (Matthew), or three (Mark)? Did the Transfiguration even happen?— there’s just no evidence on which we could build a case, one way or the other. So apparently building that case is not the point. And that’s the point we forget.

For modern persons, whether something is “true” or not is often treated as a question about scientific verifiability. Do we have external evidence? Supporting documentation? Can modern devices and methods verify it? Yet even where we have mountains of documentation, we’ve come to realize that any historical account entails point of view and a choice. Choose a different vantage point, or different key moments, and we’d understand the whole “history” differently. We all know how black people, and women, and gays, and Nikola Tesla were written out of the histories we tell, and we’ve begun to realize that those voices need to be restored.

The Scriptures aren’t even trying to give us “history”. Rather, they seek to communicate an experience. Of the OT, the subject is not “ancient history”, but what Israel experienced in her walk with her Creator God through the desert of Empire (to paraphrase Ezekiel 20.35). The OT is definitely not a report of events in the Ancient Middle East, but Israel’s own huge, sprawling story of the meaning of the history of Empire(s) in which she was caught up. For the narrative, a few examples were selected and curated, from a certain point or points of view, in order to highlight and convey that experience of God. In telling about this, the Bible aims to communicate the meaning of history— but the meaning of history is not the same thing as history itself!

When it comes to Jesus, the Gospel of Mark is our earliest and only source. Oh (perhaps) there’s another source, which scholars call “Q”— Q being an abbreviation for the German word Quelle, meaning “source”; but we have no evidence of any actual source document; the term “Q” simply designates those stories and sayings that are common to both Matthew and Luke, but which are not found in Mark. Whether this material existed as a separate written or oral source, or whether Luke just used Matthew in the same way that both he and Matthew used Mark, is an issue of debate. But Mark and “Q” together comprise 90% of the content of the Synoptic Gospels— and Q is not a narrative, but a collection. So it’s Mark who supplies the narrative— that is, the basic Gospel story. And— we have no outside corroboration for any of it.

And as to Mark— it’s already a highly elaborate, carefully constructed narrative in which events happen in formal series, for instance in A-B-C-B-A order (“chiasm”) or in matching sets of five, four, and three episodes— all of them told in a very carefully crafted manner, with microscopic attention to wording, and so on. History doesn’t happen in ABCBA order— certainly not again and again and again— and not in ways that can be expressed only by loading the account with careful allusions to the Greek translation of the Old Testament! From both structure and content, it’s obvious that Mark is a literary work from its very conception.

This highly literary work is our earliest and only source for “what happened”— we simply can’t get behind it. We have no outside information about the “historical Jesus”. We have no choice but to take the story we have on its own terms and to see what Mark is attempting to convey by it— and he conveys something other than a “blow-by-blow account” of Jesus’ “ministry”. He tells a story of Jesus. He gives us a literary account in order to convey an experience of Jesus.

Of course every literary work seeks to convey an experience of some kind— not primarily objective knowledge, even if it uses objective data in telling its story. Mark wants to communicate something other than “objective data”— as any writer of narrative does. But what Mark seeks to give us is the apostles’ own experience of Jesus. I hope to show you at length another time how the original ending of the Gospel— Mark 16.8— shows that he is perfectly aware of what he’s doing, and in fact is astonishingly brilliant at it. But when it comes to “objective facts”, we have no other source from which we could corroborate ANY of the “data” in Mark. So the “history” of Jesus, as such, is mostly indeterminable. We can of course make very interesting observations about how Matthew and Luke each treat Mark’s episodes in their own ways, in view of their own audiences and literary goals— and why they, and Mark, treated the common stories the ways they did. But none of this tells us “what happened”, for its own sake. Each is trying to convey the apostolic experience of Jesus, in terms they deem important for their own distinct and particular 1st-century audiences to get. And each is doing so on the basis of Mark, which is already a literary work, not a straightforward historical chronicle.

So if we want to find out “who Jesus was, and how much we can even really know about him”, as one of my friends puts it— we have no choice but to take the only path available to us, which is this literary one. But we are not left in the dark; precisely this literary work conveys the apostles’ own experience of Jesus!

As to whether Mark’s main figure (Jesus) really existed (people have often asked me this question), well, we can read Ehrman or NT Wright or just about any other reputable scholar on that question; they will all tell you that we have more evidence for the (mere) “existence” of Jesus than we do for Caesar or Alexander the Great. And yet nobody has any problem with Caesar’s “existence”; we simply take it for granted. But of Jesus, it is claimed that he was the Messiah, Savior, Incarnate Son, and so forth, and our attitude toward him has to do with how we think of the ultimate meaning and destination of our lives. So, denying Caesar’s existence would be a meaningless waste of time, but denying Jesus’ existence would mean we refuse to accept that he embodies the ultimate meaning and destination of our lives. Well, let the arguments rage— why not?— but let’s be aware of what we’re doing, when we argue passionately against an existence for which we have more evidence than for any other in antiquity.

At the end of the day, the Gospels aren’t interested in the mere history or activities of a historical figure named Jesus, but in the apostles’ own earth-shattering experience of one whom they recognized as the Lord of their faith. They aim to show us why and how they recognized him as God’s unique Anointed One, and what that turned out to mean for them. And they seek to convey this in such a way that confronts us with the same choice they faced: Do I align myself with this Jesus? Are his priorities, my priorities? Was he right about the nature of the world, of religion, of Empire?— or was the High Priest right, or Pilate, or ultimately, Caesar the one who got it right?

It would of course be exceedingly foolish, even insane, to align ourselves with a crucified failure. Except for one thing— this crucified failure was “declared Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rm 1.4). In other words, God backed him up, and not Caesar. If you can believe it. And Mark has a really interesting way of showing that you do, in the last verse of his story (16.8). In a future post, I’ll explain that.

But that’s the meaning we are confronted with, in the Gospels. Their one and only purpose is to convey a challenge. And it’s a very practical one, with practical consequences:

“You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But— It. Is. Not. Thus among you” (Mk 10.42-43; the Greek is quite emphatic).

We have read the story as a story, and the story communicates the apostles’ experience of Jesus. And in entering into the story, we find ourselves asking, Do I trust this? Do I align myself with this “Jesus”?