Friday Review: Hurtado 9, Chapter 5, Part 2

I've been procrastinating the rest of this chapter... sorry.

The remainder of chapter 5 deals with "Synoptic Renditions of Jesus" and it goes one by one through Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

Mark
Hurtado proceeds on the assumption that Mark was written first, used by Matthew and Luke, and that the text did in fact end at 16:8. I thought a couple times in this chapter of IWU's own David Smith's dissertation at Durham. I think Bauckham was his external examiner. Otherwise, I'd be suspicious that H had "caught the spirit" of Dr. Smith's dissertation.

"Several allied themes combine further to make the Markan Jesus a figure of power and transcendent significance" (283). "Jesus has shown godlike superiority over the elements" (286) as he walks on water and so forth. Or when Jesus calms the sea and pronounces on different occasions, "I am he," Joel Marcus suggests that "although Mark does not explicitly claim divinity for Jesus, 'he comes very close to doing so here' and Marcus rightly judges that 'the overwhelming impact made by our narrative is an impression of Jesus' divinity" (286).

Mark redefines what royal messiahship is. He does not reject it (289). He does not pit a "Son of Man" Christology against a Son of God one. Once again, Hurtado does not think that Son of Man was ever a confessional title (293). It was a way that Jesus referred to himself that never caused controversy. I am mostly with H here, although I do think some of the more Danielic uses of the phrase may have.

H goes through this debate again. He presents three basic positions on the issue among scholars:

1. The older perspective--it was an established title in pre-Christian Jewish tradition.

2. Not a title before Christianity but a title in the gospels.

3. It comes from an Aramaic expression that simply referred to "a man." No reference to Daniel 7:13 was implied.

H's position is:

1. The original readers of "the Son of the Man" would have recognized that it was not an ordinary Greek idiom but was similar to expressions in the Greek OT. It had a "scriptural ring" to it (304).

2. Jesus is the only one who uses it. It is his special way of referring to himself.

3. "Son of man" is not a christological title but in the gospels does take on a fixed, formulaic nature with an exclusive referent. "It functioned, thus, more in the way a name functions, to identify and distinguish a person, in this case Jesus" (305).

H thinks it would have been heard as a parallel to Son of God, the one expressing his divinity and the other his humanity. This was of course how second century Christians heard these titles apparently. I think there may be more to it in the gospels, however.

H thinks Mark 1:1 refers to the entire gospel. He sees a key to Mark's presentation in the idea of Jesus as an example for the disciples to follow and the emphasis on the disciples' failure as an encouragement to his readers.

Matthew
In one of the sections here, H looks at the two birth narratives. He points to the differences between the two stories as an indication that the story had been around in different verses at least a decade before they were written (the 60s). Further, he takes Mark 6:3's reference to Mary as his mother as a hint that slurs about Jesus may have been around even earlier.

Basically, H finds it ludicrous that someone would think it honored Jesus to depict him like a pagan "god impregnates woman" story. Further, he argues that any slurs against Mary probably came from claims about Jesus' birth rather than claims about Jesus' birth coming from the slurs.

"All this means that the most likely provenance for the idea that Jesus was conceived miraculously by God's Spirit is in circles of Jewish Christians and/or mixed Gentile and Jewish Christian circles that preferred to articulate their faith in Jesus in the idioms and conceptual categories of Jewish tradition" (328).

In another section, H treats Matthew's postresurrection narrative. He notes Jesus' cosmic authority in 28:18 (331). "The promise of continued presence 'till the close of the age' demands that Jesus be regarded as having divine power" (332). He then treats Matthew's 5 discourses. Jesus' lament over Jerusalem "reflects a view of him acting in capacities that are divine" (336).

The section of most interest to me, however, is his consideration of proskynein in Matthew, "to worship." "The verb designates a reverential posture that one adopts toward a social superior ... but it can also mean the worship one gives to a god" (337).

Luke
The section on Luke is shorter than the others, since much of the material of Luke is already in Mark and Matthew. Only about a paragraph on devotion to Jesus in this section. H notes that Luke uses "Lord" more than the other gospels. And the post resurrection use of proskyneo in Luke 24:52 "is certainly intended by the author as the full reverence given to a figure of divine status/significance" (345).

I found this chapter interesting, but full of extraneous discussions given what this book is supposed to be about. I even wondered if Hurtado had written it for another setting and then modified it for this book. It is a huge chapter (88 pages or so) with little pay off with regard to the topic of the book.