Mark 11:23, Seneca, and Earthquakes

For my write-up today on Robert Grant’s Miracle and Natural Law in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Thought, I’ll focus on Grant’s comments regarding Mark 11:23, which states (in the KJV): “For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.”

Grant reads Mark 11:23 in light of Zechariah 14:4, which states: “And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.”  Grant notes that the Hebrew word for “toward the west” is literally “to the sea”.  Grant’s point is that Jesus in Mark 11:23 is talking about the fulfillment of eschatological promises about the moving of mountains.  Presumably, in the same way that Jesus through his ministry was fulfilling eschatological promises in the Hebrew Bible about (say) the blind seeing, so likewise did Jesus believe that his disciples would carry out other eschatological promises through their faith.

Grant contrasts the attitude in Mark 11:23 with that of the first century Roman Stoic Seneca, who in Scientific Problems said: “Countless ‘miracles’ move and change the face of the earth in various places, bring down mountains, raise plains, swell valleys, raise up new islands in the deep.  It is worth while to investigate the causes from which these things happen.  You may ask, ‘What will the value of their endeavor be?’  The greatest value of all, to know nature.”

Grant believes that there is a difference between Seneca and Jesus: “The event, an earthquake, is presumably the same in each case.  Seneca sees in it an occasion for scientific investigation or philosophical speculation; Jesus looks forward to it as an event in which the hand of God will be revealed.”

I guess one could then ask the question: Could an earthquake (not all earthquakes, but an earthquake) be both a sign caused by God, and also something natural, since God can use nature?  In my opinion, if an earthquake is the result of natural causes that build up, that somewhat undermines the notion that God is simply causing earthquakes by snapping his fingers.

Jesus’ Halakah: Strict and Lenient

In my latest reading of volume 4 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Meier talks about the co-existence of strictness and leniency in Jesus’ approach to the Torah.

According to Meier, Jesus was stricter than the Judaisms of his day and thereafter on the issues of divorce and oaths.  Jesus prohibited divorce and remarriage, which set him apart from Second Temple and (later) rabbinic Judaism.  Whereas the Dead Sea Scrolls are concerned about people having more than one spouse, they do not contain a blanket prohibition of divorce.  And, while scholars have compared Jesus’ position on divorce in Matthew 19:9 (which has the exception clause for fornication) to the position of Shammai, Meier believes that Jesus and Shammai had different views on the subject.  Shammai believed that a man could divorce a woman if she shamed him, whereas Jesus prohibited divorce, period.

For Meier, Jesus was also revolutionary on the issue of oaths because he prohibited them altogether.  Even Jews who had issues with oaths, such as Philo, still believed that they were permissible on some level because they were commanded in the Torah.  Consequently, there was discontinuity between Jesus and Judaism, and Meier views that as a reason that Jesus historically held these positions on divorce and oaths.

But Jesus was lenient on the issue of the Sabbath.  Meier does not regard as historical the interactions in which Jesus gets in trouble for healing on the Sabbath, for rabbinic Judaism largely did not prohibit that.  Moreover, Meier does not believe that Jesus getting in trouble in Mark 2 for his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath is plausible.  While Meier acknowledges that there were voices in Second Temple Judaism (i.e., Philo) that considered plucking grain to be work, he does not think that the Pharisees would have popped out of nowhere near the grain-fields, accosting Jesus and his disciples for plucking grain on the Sabbath.  Moreover, according to Meier, had Jesus historically made the Scriptural bloopers he makes in Mark 2 (i.e., referring to Abiathar, when the priest in I Samuel 21 was Ahimelech), the Pharisees would have laughed at Jesus rather than taking him seriously and getting angry at him.

But Meier regards Jesus’ statements that people on the Sabbath could pull an ox or a man out of a ditch to be historical, even though they were later attached to “Sabbath controversies” contrived by the early Christians.  For Meier, Jesus had a common-sense halakah when it came to the Sabbath, one that sympathized with peasants who felt they needed to pull their ox or a person out of a ditch.  Meier speculates that Jesus was responding to the Essenes or stricter voices within Pharisaism.

Why Jesus was strict in some areas and lenient in others, I do not entirely know.  One point that Meier makes is that creation played a significant role in elements of Jesus’ halakah.  Jesus opposed divorce and believed that the Sabbath was less important than human well-being on the basis of the creation stories in Genesis, for example.

Meier on Christology: “In the Beginning Was the Grab Bag”

In my latest reading of volume 2 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Meier was talking about the Gospel story in which Jesus walks on water, and the one in which he stills the storm.

Meier believes that these miracles display a high Christology—-one that views Jesus either as God or as an epiphany of God.  Meier’s reason for this is that the Hebrew Bible ascribes to God the sorts of things that Jesus does in these stories: “ego eimi” (John 6:20), which means “I am” or “I am he” or “It is I”, calls to mind God’s words in Exodus 3:14-15 and Second Isaiah; Jesus says “fear not”, which God says in Second Isaiah; Habakkuk 3:15 and the Septuagint for Job 9:8 say that God walks on or tramples on the sea; Mark 6:48 says that Jesus wished to pass the disciples by, which recalls God passing before Moses in Exodus 33:19; and God in the Hebrew Bible calms the storms (i.e., the story of Jonah).

But do not Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a low Christology, one that regards Jesus as a prophet, teacher, and king, not as God?  Why do they present Jesus doing divine sorts of things?  Meier responds to this by saying, “In the beginning was the grab bag” (page 919).  According to Meier, after Jesus was believed to have risen from the dead, a variety of ideas circulated about him—-some of the ideas reflecting a high Christology, and some of them reflecting a low Christology.  Meier believes that the Gospel writers drew from these diverse ideas.  Mark, for instance, presents Jesus doing divine things, but he also “has no difficulty in speaking of Jesus’ inability to heal people because of their unbelief or of Jesus’ ignorance of the date of the parousia” (page 919).

Meier does not accept the model that Christianity started with a low Christology and that a higher Christology came later, for the hymn that Paul uses in Philippians 2:6-11 has a high Christology and is early, whereas Luke’s Gospel is late but has a low Christology that presents Jesus as “a good prayerful man through whom God’s power flows” (page 919).  (At the same time, it is interesting that Luke 7:16 presents people saying in response to Jesus’ miracle that God has visited the people.)

What is Meier’s stance regarding the historicity of Jesus walking on water and calming the storm?  My impression is that Meier believes that these stories were invented by the early church.  The story of Jesus walking on water appears close to the story of him multiplying the loaves, and Meier observes connections between Jesus’ multiplication of loaves and the Eucharist.  For Meier, the story of Jesus walking on water was told during the celebration of the Eucharist.  On page 923, Meier beautifully states:

“What I am suggesting is that, to a small church struggling in the night of a hostile world and feeling bereft of Christ’s presence, the walking on the water likewise symbolized the experience of Christ in the eucharist.  Once again, with all the power of Yahweh bestriding the chaos of a rebellious creation, Jesus reveals himself in a secret epiphany to his frightened, beleaguered disciples, telling them: ‘It is I; fear not.’  The story of the walking on the water reflects the fact that, for the early church, the eucharist was the ritualized experience of an epiphany of the risen Jesus, coming to a small group of believers laboring in the night of this present age; once again he gave courage and calmed fears simply by announcing his presence.”

Meier on Sabbath Controversies and Jesus’ Confusing Itinerary

I have two items for my write-up today on volume 2 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.

1.  Meier does not believe that the Sabbath controversy in Mark 3:1-6 happened, but he is open to the possibility that Jesus cured a man with a withered hand on a Sabbath and that the story about that “evolved through decades of controversy between Jews and Christians into the story we now have in Mark 3:1-6″ (page 683).

A reason that Meier does not believe that the Sabbath controversy is historical is that he does not think that the Pharisees would have had a problem with Jesus healing on the Sabbath.  He notes that there was pluralism regarding Sabbath observance in Second Temple and rabbinic Judaism, that “Galilean peasants who did not belong to any stringent pious group would probably not have been terribly upset over minor acts to aid the sick on the Sabbath”, and that the “Mishna itself gives evidence that some rabbis found ways of getting around the strict rule that medicine was not to be practiced on the Sabbath” (page 683).

Meier elaborates on what the Mishnah says about healing on the Sabbath.  M. Yoma 8:6 refers to the principle that a person can apply medical treatment on the Sabbath if one’s life is in danger.  Meier states: “If Rabbi Mattithiah ben Heresh is so lenient that he allows medicine to be dropped into a man’s mouth simply because the man was in danger in his throat—-all on the grounds that there is doubt whether life is in danger—-it is difficult to imagine that 1st-century Jews in Galilee would become very upset over Jesus’ healing with a mere word” (page 732).  Moreover, Jesus healed in Mark 3:1-6 by word, and, as E.P. Sanders states, there was no prohibition on talking on the Sabbath.

Meier raises valid points, but I have difficulty saying that the controversies about healing on the Sabbath are un-historical.  For one, they are so prominent in the four Gospels that they probably pass the test of multiple attestation.  Second, perhaps there were Jewish leaders who had problems with Jesus healing on the Sabbath, for they did not think that the people he was healing were in danger of losing their lives from their ailments on that day.  As the synagogue ruler in Luke 13:14 said, the sick could come on other days of the week to be healed.  But other rabbis held that we do not know if an ailment can become life-threatening, and so we should err on the side of caution by allowing medical treatment on the Sabbath, even for ailments that do not appear life-threatening.  Perhaps Jesus agreed with this sentiment.

2.  In my post here, I referred to Paul Achtemeier’s argument that Mark lived outside of Palestine because he gets details about Palestinian geography wrong.  Achtemeier states: “His confusion about Palestinian geography (the Greek of 7:31 shows the author assumes Sidon is south of Tyre, and that the Sea of Galilee is in the midst of the Decapolis, inaccurately in both cases) and his fluency in Greek make it likely he grew up in an area outside Palestine.”

On my BibleWorks, there are two Greek versions of Mark 7:31.  The KJV has: “And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis”.  It follows the Byzantine text, and it seems to present Jesus making a roundabout itinerary.  The New American Standard Version, however, has: “And again He went out from the region of Tyre, and came through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, within the region of Decapolis.”  The second is probably what Achtemeier is using, for it presents Sidon as south of Tyre and the Sea of Galilee as within the Decapolis.

Meier acknowledges that Jesus’ itinerary in Mark 7:31 is strange, and he appears to go with the Byzantine text (if I’m not mistaken).  Why would Jesus start at Galilee, go north to Tyre and Sidon, and then take a roundabout route through the Decapolis to get to the Sea of Galilee (see the bottom map here to look at the location of the Decapolis in relation to the Sea of Galilee)?  Meier states that “Mark may be combining various geographical designations from his sources, or betraying his ignorance of Palestinian geography, or both” (page 712).

Meier then speculates that there may be a theological reason for Jesus’ itinerary: Jesus in Mark 7:19 has just declared all foods clean and has thereby removed a barrier between Jews and Gentiles, and now Jesus is traveling to various Gentile regions, bringing healing.

The (Gentile) Demoniac

For my write-up today on volume 2 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I will talk some about Meier’s discussion of Jesus’ exorcism of the Gedarene demoniac.  This story appears in Mark 5, Luke 8, and Matthew 8 (only, there, the land is called the country of the Gergesenes, and there are two demoniacs).

Meier believes that the demoniac in the story was actually Gerasene, on the basis of many “early and excellent” ancient manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  But, according to Meier, there was a change to “Gedarenes” and “Gergesenes” because those particular areas are closer to the Sea of Galilee than Gerasa, which is not close to the Sea (see the map here).  For those who made the change, the city of the demoniac had to be close to the Sea of Galilee, for, in the story, the demons enter the pigs, who then jump off of a cliff into the Sea. 

But, for a variety of reasons, Meier believes that the part of the story about the pigs was added later.  (For example, Meier states that Jesus in the Gospels usually does not destroy other people’s property.)  Meier’s conclusion is that the story was originally about a Gerasene demoniac and did not have the part about the pigs, but that people altered the location to Gedar or Gerges after the pigs part was added.  That, for Meier, accounts for the present of Gerasa in ancient manuscripts.  And Meier is open to the possibility that the historical Jesus performed an exorcism in Gerasa and that “the unusual venue of the exorcism helped anchor it in the oral tradition” (page 651).  Why was the venue unusual?  Because it was part of the Decapolis, “a group of Hellenistic cities with mostly pagan populations in the region of southern Syria and northeastern Palestine” (page 651).  Ordinarily, Jesus ministered to fellow Jews.

This information actually answers a question I have had about the story: Why were there pigs in Israel, which regarded them as unclean?  It turns out that the pigs were in predominantly pagan areas.  And, when Jesus told the ex-demoniac to go home and testify to his family about what the Lord did for him, there’s a likelihood that the ex-demoniac’s family was pagan and did not worship the God of Israel, meaning that the ex-demoniac was witnessing to Gentiles.  Of course, as I noted, Meier does not believe that the story originally had the pigs.  But the information about the Decapolis helped me to understand the pigs’ presence in the story (at some stage).

Something else that interested me was Meier’s reference to Franz Annen’s view that the story was written by early Christians to justify the mission to the Gentiles against conservative Jewish-Christian detractors.  Jesus, after all, is visiting a Gentile area and is conducting an exorcism there.  Meier maintains that the story was historical, however, because the very appeal to it demonstrates that Jewish-Christians accepted its historicity as well, for why refer to a story that the Jewish-Christians could simply say was made-up?  This argument stood out to me because of the scholarly view that Jesus did not envision a mission to the Gentiles, for Paul would have spoken about that in his debates with Judaizers had Jesus given any indication of support for a Gentile mission.  Perhaps.  Or maybe Paul didn’t know about that story, or it didn’t come to his mind in his debates.

The World Below

At church this morning, the theme was Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark 9).  The pastor talked about how the disciples saw Jesus in a way that they had not seen him before, and he compared that to Madeleine Albright’s discovery that her parents were Jews who converted to Catholicism to escape the Holocaust.  He also contrasted the mountaintop experience of Peter, James, and John with an occasion in which God appeared to be absent: Jesus’ crucifixion.  And the pastor expressed hope that church services would transform us by helping us to see God and the world around us in new ways, and he encouraged us to see God in nature: the babbling stream, the sunset, the mountains, the cry of a newborn baby, etc.

I think that the pastor should have spoken more about the part of Mark 9 in which Peter, James, John, and Jesus come down from their mountaintop experience and see a demon-possessed person, whom his disciples could not exorcise.  Jesus criticized that generation for its lack of faith.  There’s the mountaintop experience, and then there’s the brokenness and harsh realities of the world below.

I’ll bring in my own experience, though it really doesn’t deserve to be in the same class as the harsh realities of the world, which include such things as hunger, poverty, war, devastation, natural disasters, diseases, people losing their families and loved ones, etc.  There have been times when I have had awesome quiet times (prayer and Bible study), and then I had to go out into the less-than-friendly world.  The result is my discouragement.  Nowadays, I hope I’m coming to grips with the fact that the world is not perfect, according to my own standards.

But it would be nice if my times with God strengthened me and inspired me to go out into the harsh world with a fresh and a positive perspective.  In a sense, church does that, especially the part of the service in which we share our joys and concerns and pray over them.  You have people rooting for your well-being.  You bring issues to God.  Hopefully, God answers, but, even if things don’t turn out well, there is a sense of comfort that comes from not being alone.

Mark and Peter

I’m still reading Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.

Bauckham argues that the Gospel of Mark contains eyewitness testimony that goes back to Peter.  Here are some reasons:

1.  Bauckham compares the Gospel of Mark with ancient biographies that came later: Lucian’s Alexander and Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus.  In these biographies, certain individuals frame the story and appear often in the course of it.  In the Gospel of Mark, that’s the case with Peter.  In Lucian’s Alexander, we see that with Rutilianus.  In Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, it’s somewhat the case with Amelius, but Porphyry’s work here—-similar to the Gospel of John and perhaps in imitation of it (according to Bauckham)—-ends with an affirmation of Porphyry’s own testimony which thus supersedes Amelius.  Similarly, in John, Peter is close to the end of the story, but the Gospel then goes on to affirm the Beloved Disciple and his testimony.

I do not recall if there is any place where these authors explicitly say that they are recording the eyewitness testimony of the people they mention, every time that they mention them.  On page 135, Bauckham says that “there is one obvious candidate for the source of much of Lucian’s account: the Roman aristocrat Rutilianus”, which tells me that there is no explicit statement that Lucian makes that he is drawing from Rutilianus’ eyewitness testimony.  On page 140, however, Bauckham says that Porphyry affirms that he received some information from Plotinus himself and from Amelius, so perhaps Bauckham’s argument is stronger when Porphyry’s work is considered.  Moreover, Bauckham refers to New Testament passages that highlight the importance of eyewitnesses “from the beginning”, so maybe he has a point that Peter is placed at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Mark’s Gospel to show that he was a valuable eyewitness and that the Gospel of Mark contains some of Peter’s testimony.  Why isn’t this explicitly stated in Mark?  Bauckham says on page 147 that ancient readers and hearers of these works expected for them to have eyewitness sources, and that they were alert to indications that the Gospels provided.

2.  There were some arguments that I did not entirely understand.  For example, Bauckham notes that, in various scenes in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ twelve disciples are presented as a group, and then there’s a focus on Jesus.  Bauckham refers favorably (it seems to me) to an argument that this is based on eyewitness testimony: that it is from an eyewitness account that was in the first person plural (“we”), and that, when it was recorded in Mark, the first person plural was changed into a third person plural.  That doesn’t strike me as an iron-clad argument.  Bauckham also notes that Mark discusses Peter’s impressions, and (sometimes) the impressions of other disciples, and he attributes that to Mark’s reliance on the testimony of Peter and (in some cases) others.  And Bauckham states that Mark’s Gospel contains Peter’s thoughts regarding his own denial of Jesus, which occurred when Peter was away from the other disciples and was followed by feelings of guilt, which Bauckham believes is reflected in the Gospel (on some level).

I heard some of these arguments when I listened to pastor and psychologist David Antion’s summary of the four Gospels.  When I told my New Testament professor about the argument that Mark was based on Peter’s testimony because it reflects Peter’s guilt about denying Jesus, she responded that this was speculative.  (And the response in my mind was, “And Q isn’t?”)  I think that there is some reason that Peter is emphasized in Mark’s Gospel.  It could be on account of Mark’s Gospel containing Peter’s eyewitness testimony.  I vaguely recall a scholarly argument that Mark’s Gospel was written in Rome, and so it highlighted Peter, who supposedly was there as a leader of the church, or had been there as leader of the church (before Mark was written).

Ben Witherington’s Critical Methodology and Apologetics

I finished Ben Witherington III’s Jesus the Sage.  I have two items:

1.  Are the Gospels fiction, or are they historical?  Witherington says on page 154:

“I have argued elsewhere that the ancient popular biography provides us with our closest analogies for the genre of the Gospels…There are certainly many other options besides pure fiction and photographic recall.  For instance, it is possible the Gospel writers have used material of some historical substance and a broad historical outline of the life of Jesus, coupled with their selection, editing, and arrangement of various pericopes according to their various theological purposes.”

On the TV program, Faith Under Fire, Witherington said that the Gospels contain eyewitness testimony, and that the testimony is reliable (even though the Gospels were written about forty years after the events that they clam to narrate) because the Mishnah states that disciples were able to remember vast amounts of material that their teacher taught them.  Witherington notes that Luke claims to draw from the testimony of eyewitnesses, and that both Matthew and Luke carefully use the sources that they have, such as Mark, showing that they were responsible historians.  For Witherington, there is a good chance that Mark wrote the Gospel of Mark and that Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke, even though these Gospels are formally anonymous, for the second century church would not attribute Gospels to non-eyewitnesses or to non-apostles unless those figures actually wrote them (and Mark and Luke were not apostles).  Regarding Matthew, Witherington does not claim that Matthew the apostle was responsible for the Gospel of Matthew’s final form, but he does suggest that the Gospel contains traditions going back to Matthew the apostle.  And, if my impression is correct, Witherington appears to believe that John wrote the Gospel of John, and he notes that the end of the Gospel says that it represents eyewitness testimony.  You can watch or listen to Witherington making his points here and here.

Is this consistent with what Witherington argues in Jesus the Sage?  I’d say yes and no.  In both, Witherington maintains that the Gospel authors used sources, and he is confident that these sources, on some level, reflect the historical Jesus.  At the same time, I think that Witherington in Jesus the Sage is more sensitive to the fact the the Gospel authors had ideological and theological agendas and were not simply recalling what actually happened.  He criticizes scholars for unjustifiably (at times) preferring Luke’s forms of sayings over how other Gospels’ present them, and he attributes that to the scholars’ attraction to Luke being less Jewish and apocalyptic in his presentation of the sayings (page 215).  Witherington also proposes to uncover what is authentically Q by peeling back the layers that obviously reflect Matthew and Luke (and one can see the characteristics of Matthean and Lukan interaction with sources by looking at their use of Mark).  Witherington affirms that Matthew softens Mark’s portrayal of the disciples as dense in their failure to understand Jesus, and he also discusses differences between the synoptic Gospels and James.  For example, Witherington notes that James does not really talk about the inbreaking Kingdom of God through Christ.

Regarding John, Witherington does not believe in Jesus the Sage that the Gospel of John goes back to John the Galilean son of Zebedee, for there is not much in that Gospel about Jesus’ Galilean ministry or the sons of Zebedee.  But Witherington does acknowledge that the Beloved Disciple could have been a Judean eyewitness to Jesus as well as the source of traditions that made their way into the Gospel of John (whose present form came from someone other than the Beloved Disciple, according to Witherington).  This is similar to what Witherington said about Matthew on Faith Under Fire.  Another point: In Jesus the Sage, Witherington says that Peter in the Gospel of Matthew is given a scribal authority to bind and to loose.  Does this imply that there were written sources going back to the original disciples of Jesus, according to Witherington?

I think that the passage with which I opened this item, the one from page 154, is a reasonable way to see the Gospels: they are not a photographic recall of events, but rather they are the result of a process of using sources and composing a work that accords with the ideologies of the Gospels’ writers.  Some, or even many, of these sources may go back to eyewitness testimony.  But a significant part of uncovering the historical Jesus is sifting what is ideological in the Gospels from what is historical—-though it is possible that the ideological can overlap with the historical, as Witherington seems to believe when he regards the Gospels of Matthew and John to be accurately depicting Jesus as one who claimed to be wisdom itself.

2.  On page 353, Witherington says: “Kings were often said to have miraculous births in antiquity, and Jesus is no different.”  In my opinion, this differs from Witherington’s defense of the historicity of the virgin birth in his blog post, The Virginal Conception—-Miracle on Nazareth Street, where he argues that the virgin birth is historical because (1.) Matthew and Luke had to get the idea from somewhere, and there were no true parallels in the ancient world, and (2.) the story was embarrassing within that honor and shame culture, so it was most likely not made-up.  Based on what Witherington says on page 353 of Jesus the Sage, I can argue that early Christians could have attributed to Jesus a miraculous birth to show that he was like other kings (even if other kings were not said to be the products of a virginal conception).

Son of Man in I Enoch

Source: Michael E. Stone, “Apocalyptic Literature,” Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. Michael E. Stone (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984) 399.

“One might add that an ancient date is implied by the use of ‘Son of Man’, an old Jewish title, although strangely, for Milik this is a sign of dependance on the New Testament. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive of a late, Christian work largely devoted to the prediction of a super-human Son of Man, existent in the thought of God before creation, which does not make the slightest hint as his (from Enoch’s view-point) future incarnation, earthly life and preaching, or crucifixion and their cosmic implications. Further, in chapter 71, admittedly an appendix to The Similitudes, the Son of Man is specifically identified as Enoch. In view of these considerations, then, there seems no reason to exclude The Similitudes from the discussion of Jewish Enoch literature.”

Michael Stone is talking about the Similitudes in I Enoch. For him, the existence of a super-human Son of Man in the Similitudes does not indicate that this section of I Enoch is Christian, even though Christians also believed in a messianic “Son of Man.”

N.T. Wright makes a similar argument in Jesus and the Victory of God. I don’t have the book with me, so I’m commenting on it from memory, and I read Wright’s book eight years ago. In my vague recollection, Wright argues that Jesus was crucified in part because he claimed to be a supernatural figure, which struck many Jewish leaders as blasphemy. In Mark 14:62-64, after all, the high priest rends his garments and calls Jesus a blasphemer, just because Jesus told him he’d see the Son of Man coming at the right hand of power. Wright quoted apocalyptic texts in which the “Son of Man” appears to be a semi-divine figure.

Was Jesus nourished at the well of apocalyptic texts, such as I Enoch? We know that Jude 1:14-15 quotes I Enoch as a source. Could such a regard for the book go back to Jesus? Was the Similitude‘s view on the Son of Man widely accepted within first century Judaism? Not according to Mark, since the high priest considered it to be blasphemy. Maybe some Jews expected the Messiah to be a Davidic figure rather than an enigmatic Son of Man, and Jesus disputed such a notion when he said that the Messiah is David’s lord, not his son (Mark 12:35-37). And “Son of Man” was more than Jesus’ term for a human being: it referred to a person with divine authority (Mark 2:10, 28).

Was Jesus acting in the flow of a Jewish tradition about a super-human Son of Man? If Jesus was not original in all of his conception of the Messiah, does that mean he was wrong, religiously speaking? Maybe God in his providence arranged for some Jews to anticipate a Messiah who was super-human, even semi-divine.