Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

  12. See, e.g., Ps. 139:1–18.

  13. See my Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 1984), 188–89. Further evidence for the Jesus movement’s attitudes may be found in the Lucan infancy hymns, which are likely to have had their Sitz im Leben der alten Kirche in the Palestinian church and understand peace for Israel to be among the potential consequences of Jesus’s advent (Luke 1:79; 2:14). See H. L. MacNeill, “The Sitz im Leben of Lk. 1:5–2:20,” Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946): 123–30; Lloyd Gaston, No Stone on Another (Boston: Brill Academic, 1970), 256–76. That they have their origin in a Palestinian community does not depend on a linguistic argument for a Semitic origin; i.e., if one affirms with H. F. D. Sparks that the Semitisms are explicable as Lucan “Septuagintalisms,” this does not entail the view that the hymns are Lucan creations (“The Semitisms of St. Luke’s Gospel,” Journal of Theological Studies 44 [1943]: 129–38). Indeed, Sparks himself affirms that they are probably based on earlier tradition (135–36). Also affirming a Christian community origin for the hymns (as opposed to a Baptist or Lucan origin) are, among others, Walter Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 60–72; D. Jones, “The Background and Character of the Lukan Psalms,” Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968): 19–50.

  14. It seems that often what Jesus meant by it is determined on the basis of whether or not it can make sense as public policy in all periods of history. Since this would, it is argued, often involve the suffering of innocents against whom unjust aggression had occurred, it cannot be intended as public policy, but only for the Christian’s personal behavior, when he or she alone takes the consequences. For a statement of the dilemma, see James Wood, The Sermon on the Mount and Its Application (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963), 96–108. Whatever one says about its permanent application, one can say that, historically considered, it was intended as a collective posture at a particular time in history toward a particular state.

  15. See T. W. Manson, Servant-Messiah (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953), 70–71; Josef Blinzler, “Die Niedermetzelung von Galiläern durch Pilatus,” Novum Testamentum 2, no. 1 (1957): 43–47; H. Montefiore, “Revolt in the Desert? Mark 6:30ff.,” New Testament Studies 8 (1961–62): 135–41; C. H. Dodd, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), 212–17, and Founder of Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 131–34.

  16. It does not answer the broader question of what is the emperor’s and what is God’s. Moreover, it is inadequate as a basis for describing the politics of Jesus, as if this were the central political pronouncement of his ministry. The thrust of this study is that there is so much more that must be included under the “politics of Jesus.”

  17. Contra J. Spencer Kennard (Render to God [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950], passim) and S. G. F. Brandon (Jesus and the Zealots [New York: Scribner, 1967], 345–49), both of whom argue that “Give to God the things that are God’s” would have been understood to prohibit payment of tax to the emperor, since the wealth of the Holy Land was God’s, not the emperor’s. Yet in the context of handling a coin of the emperor’s, “Give to the emperor” must surely mean, “Go ahead and pay it.” See also, among others, Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 112–37; W. L. Knox, “Church and State in the New Testament,” Journal of Roman Studies 39 (1949): 23; M. Rist, “Caesar or God (Mark 12:13–17)? A Study in Formgeschichte,” Journal of Religion 16 (1936): 317–31; J. Duncan and M. Derrett, Law in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), 34–37. For research and bibliography, see C. H. Giblin, “‘The Things of God’ in the Question Concerning Tribute to Caesar,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 33 (1971): 510–14.

  18. See Mark 10:42–43 and parallels; cf. Luke 22:25–26.

  19. On “fox,” see Harold Hoehner, Herod Antipas (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), 220–21, 343–47.

  20. The recognition that Jesus’s message of repentance did not involve a turning from individual sins to individual virtues, but rather included national shortcomings, helps to explain the frequently cited problem of why Paul and other New Testament letter writers do not more often invoke the moral authority of Jesus when offering ethical instruction. The problem, identified by David L. Dungan (The Sayings of Jesus in the Churches of Paul [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971], xvii–xxix, with citation of literature), is largely resolved by the recognition that the specific ethical teaching of Jesus did not consist of generalized morality or universally applicable laws for living, but concerned the specific politico-religious crisis of Israel. What he did say was often so related to the particularities of the Palestinian crisis that it could be used in another milieu only by modification and transformation, a process that by no means needs to be viewed as illegitimate.

  21. See also Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), 77–87.

  22. R. C. Dentan, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. G. A. Buttrick (New York: Abingdon, 1962), 2:549.

  23. William D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, 3rd ed. (London: SPCK, 1970), 20–35; E. E. Urbach, The Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 471–83.

  24. Urbach, The Sages, 473.

  25. See also Luke 14:26–27; Matt. 10:37–38; and the closely related images of “drinking the cup” and being baptized with Jesus’s baptism in Mark 10:38.

  26. Presumably Luke added “daily” when he incorporated Mark’s text into his Gospel.

  27. The image seems closely related to the Johannine emphasis on being born again; see John 3:1–8.

  28. On two occasions, the context is self-exaltation through religious status: Luke 18:14, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector; Matt. 23:12, the honor enjoyed by religious teachers. On another occasion, the context is self-exaltation through social (or religious?) status as indicated by the seating arrangements at a banquet (Luke 14:7–11). The other context is teaching on greatness (Matt. 18:1–4).

  29. See, e.g., G. E. Mendenhall, Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 2:659.

  30. Cf. Phil. 2:5–11, where “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” is parallel to “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.” Many scholars have argued that these words are from a pre-Pauline hymn, suggesting a very early Christian tradition. In addition to the parallel between self-emptying and humbling, note the connection of both to servant/slave and death.

  31. See, e.g., Rom. 6:1–11; see esp. v. 3: “all of us.”

  32. Following the opening verse of the Gospel, which is really the title, Mark begins his Gospel with a Hebrew Bible quotation suggesting that his Gospel concerns “the way.” Each of the three occasions on which Jesus speaks of his impending death in Mark 8–10 is followed immediately by teaching directed to his followers concerning the way of death (8:31–35; 9:30–35; 10:32–40). The Gospel climaxes in the death of Jesus, which is understood as opening up access to the presence of God (15:38); i.e., the way into the presence of God is through death. That Mark’s Gospel may be used cautiously as evidence for the Jesus movement’s understanding flows out of the growing tendency among scholars to locate the composition of Mark’s Gospel in Syria, part of the area included within the Jesus movement’s activity; see, e.g., Howard C. Kee, Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark’s Gospel (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977), 100–105, esp. 105, where Kee speaks of “rural and small-town southern Syria.”

  33. Whether this may be used as evidence for the Jesus movement’s point of view depends upon how one views the tradition that Luke received. Is the “journey toward death” section a Lucan composition or was it already present in “proto-Luke”? For an extended argument that the pre-Lucan traditions reflect the missionary activity of the Palestinian church (the Jesus movement), see Gaston, No Stone, 244–369.

  34. According to I. M. Lewis, “The shaman’s initial crisis represents the healer’s passion, or, as the
Akawaio Indians themselves put it, ‘a man must die before he becomes a shaman’” ( Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971], 70).

  35. On the connection between the forms of Jesus’s teaching and the “end of world,” see esp. the work of William Beardslee and John Crossan, compactly reported in Norman Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 48–56.

  36. Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, 104–5; see also 79–80, 103–7.

  37. Theissen recognizes the connection between the particularities of the historical situation and this aspect of Jesus’s teaching. He notes that though it “certainly points far beyond the particular historical context in which it came into being,” it was initially “a contribution toward overcoming a deep-rooted crisis in Judaism” (Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, 107).

  CHAPTER 6: Awe, Wonder, and Jesus

  1. For an excellent introduction to the modern scholarly treatment of the miracle stories, see R. H. Fuller, Interpreting the Miracles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963). Somewhat more technical studies include D. L. Tiede, The Charismatic Figure as Miracle Worker (SBL Dissertation Series 1, 1972); H. C. Kee, Miracle and the Early Christian World: A Study in Socio-Historical Method (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1983); G. Theissen, The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).

  2. John’s question, “Are you the one who is to come?” did not inquire if Jesus were the Messiah, as is sometimes thought. Instead, the phrase “the one who is to come” is explicitly associated with the expectation of Elijah (see Mal. 3:1; 4:5), not the Messiah.

  3. For example, no less than two-thirds of Mark’s Gospel prior to the story of Jesus’s last week in Jerusalem concerns the miraculous.

  4. Matthew 12:27 (Luke 11:19); Mark 9:38–39; 6:7–13; 9:18; Matt. 10:1–8; Luke 9:1–6; 10:17.

  5. For studies of possession and exorcism, see I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971).

  6. See, for example, an account of a Jewish exorcist roughly contemporary with Jesus: “Eleazar put to the nose of the possessed man a ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to come back into him, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he had composed.” The episode is reported in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 8:46–48.

  7. The story contains many details that point to a symbolic meaning as well. The picture Mark paints in his narrative is full of images of impurity or “uncleanness,” which was believed to separate one from “the holy” (God). The demoniac lived in Gentile (“unclean”) territory; he also lived among tombs (proximity to death was seen as one of the most powerful sources of defilement); he lived near pigs, which were an “unclean” animal; and he was possessed by an “unclean spirit.” The scene is a picture of all that separated one from God within the framework of the religious beliefs of the time. The story makes the point that Jesus is one who overcomes the most potent and devastating sources of defilement and alienation, banishes the forces of evil from life, and restores their victims to both health and human community (the exorcism ends with the demoniac “clothed and in his right mind” and told to “go home”).

  8. The description of a seizure in this episode should not lead to an equation between possession and epilepsy; they are two quite different phenomena.

  9. The location of the story in the Gospel narrative shows the importance of Jesus’s exorcisms to Mark; this is the first public event of Jesus’s ministry reported by Mark, following immediately upon Jesus’s gathering of the nucleus of the disciples.

  10. For Gevurah as the “mouth of power” or Spirit, see E. E. Urbach, The Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 80–96; for his interpretation of this verse, see 85–86.

  11. See the provocative and illuminating discussion by M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 182–211. Peck, a practicing psychiatrist, began his study of possession and exorcism believing that a clinical diagnosis within the framework of current psychological understanding would be possible. However, he and a team of professionals eventually became involved in two cases of “possession” (and exorcism) that he could not account for within a purely psychological framework.

  12. See esp. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion.

  13. For a very illuminating description of the cosmology of such societies, see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon, 1970), viii–ix, 103, 107–24.

  14. For the complete account, see Mark 3:22–30; Matt. 12:22–37; Luke 11:14–23. Beelzebul is a name for Satan; its two variants, Beelzebul and Beelzebub, mean “lord of dung,” “lord of flies.”

  15. In societies that affirm possession and exorcism, accusations of witchcraft are commonly used “to express aggression between rivals and enemies” (Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, 33). For the rivalry between Jesus and his opponents as involving accusations of witchcraft, see Jerome Neyrey and Bruce Malina, Calling Jesus Names (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge, 1988), chap. 1.

  16. From the Babylonian Talmud, Sanh. 43a.

  17. The word “magician” is not used in its modern sense of an entertainer who performs magic tricks. Rather, it is used in its ancient sense of one who can manipulate the powers of the spirit world. See esp. the works of Morton Smith: Jesus the Magician (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978) and his earlier Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973). Smith basically affirms the perspective of Jesus’s opponents, amassing a great amount of evidence concerning magical practices in the ancient world as he does so. Walter Wink’s critical and yet appreciative review of Smith’s first volume is appropriate as an assessment of both. One senses, Wink writes, “subliminally that Smith’s interest is in discrediting Christianity through a debunking of Jesus,” and yet part of Smith’s work is “a stunning scholarly achievement. . . . The great value of Smith’s discussion of Jesus’s ‘magic’ is that he does place Jesus’s healings and exorcisms within a broader context of first-century ‘magical’ practices hitherto largely ignored” (“Jesus as Magician,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 30 [1974]: 3–14; quotes from 9–10).

  18. For example, Mark 1:34: “He cured many who were sick with various diseases”; 3:9–10: “And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crush him; for he had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him.”

  19. The list of types of healings (the blind see, deaf hear, lame walk, and so forth) is largely drawn from Old Testament passages that refer to the coming age (which is also referred to as the outpouring of the Spirit). Thus it is not clear whether the list was meant to be a citation of the categories of Jesus’s actual healings, or whether it was a way of saying that the coming age (the outpouring of the Spirit) had begun.

  20. See also Mark 8:22–26, which reports that Jesus applied spit to the eyes of a blind man.

  21. In the story of the catch of fish (Luke 5:1–11), Jesus functions as “game finder” for his fishermen disciples, even though that is not the point of the story (the point of the story is that the disciples are now to become “fishers of men”). One of the traditional functions of holy men in hunting and fishing societies is game finding; that is, they use their powers for the sake of “the tribe” (their people). In agricultural societies, the parallel function is rainmaking. The story of the cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25) is especially perplexing because it seems “out of character.” Scholars have often speculated that the story may have grown out of a parable about a fig tree that Jesus told (Luke 13:6–9). In any case, Mark’s placement of the fig-tree narrative suggests a symbolic meaning. The story is told in two parts, with the “clea
nsing of the Temple” separating the two halves. Mark apparently sees a connection between the fig tree (which is sometimes an image for Israel) having no fruit on it and the Temple not serving the purpose for which it was intended. The “withering” of the fig tree points to the future awaiting Jerusalem and the Temple.

  22. This is a different question from the question, “Are there limits to the power of God?” Our question is whether the mediation of that power through human beings is limited in any way. Illustrative here is the story of a Christian saint, St. Denis, who as bishop of Paris was martyred by the Romans in the third century. After his beheading, we are told, he picked up his severed head and walked several miles to his church where, still holding his severed head under his arm, he sang the Mass. Do things like that happen? “With God all things are possible,” one might say. But does that mean all things are possible to or through a Spirit-filled mediator? To express historical skepticism about such accounts does not imply doubting the power of God.

  23. The recognition that some of the miracle stories may be wholly symbolic and not historical is usually credited to David Friedrich Strauss, whose two-volume Life of Jesus was published in 1835 when Strauss was only twenty-seven. Prior to Strauss, scholars generally agreed that the miracle stories were to be read as historical narratives and differed on the question of whether a supernatural or natural explanation of the story was to be sought. An example of a “natural explanation” offered by one of Strauss’s contemporaries (and which I once heard in a sermon) argues that the feeding of the five thousand is to be explained as follows. Many in the crowd actually had brought food, and the action of the boy in “sharing” his five loaves and two fishes moved the rest of the crowd to act in a similarly generous fashion. Ironically, the explanation preserves the “happenedness” of the story, but destroys the miracle. Strauss cut through this preoccupation with treating the miracle stories as historical and suggested instead that many of the miracle stories are to be understood as literary creations of the early church that draw upon the rich imagery of the Old Testament: their meaning lies in their symbolism. Strauss’s book was radical in his day; a review called it the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the bowels of hell, and he was blackballed from the universities of Europe. With modification, his approach has now become the position of mainstream scholarship.