Jesus the Eternal Son by Michael F. Bird;

Author:Michael F. Bird;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Co.

Mark’s Divine Christology

A further chink in the armor of the view that Mark has an adoptionist Christology is the evidence from the wider Markan narrative that, even amidst the human realism of Jesus’s actions and emotions, ascribes transcendent qualities and a divine identity to Jesus. This transcendence means Jesus has a heavenly origin, while his divine identity is not acquired but is intrinsic to his person. Jesus does not become divine as he is already divine.

It should be granted that the Markan Jesus is undoubtedly a divine agent who speaks and acts for God, even while his precise relationship to Israel’s God is somewhat ambiguous. Howard Clark Kee asserts that Jesus’s identification as the Son of Man and Messiah shows “the implied kinship of Jesus with God.” Yet, what that kinship actually consists of is a mystery because, despite moments of revelation and public disclosures, Jesus’s relationship to God is “implied rather than defined.”43 Daniel Kirk believes that Mark’s Jesus has a “close proximity” to God, but there is also a “proximity in differentiation between Jesus and God” that is crucial for Mark’s narrative.44 Joel Marcus observes the dissonance in parts of the narrative like the prologue where there is “a strong impression of the relatedness of Jesus to God” and at the same time “a measure of acknowledgement of the distinction between them.” He resolves this dissonance by way of an implied “subordination,” which is true to the extent that Jesus is a divine agent of God’s reign and redemption. However, such a description is inadequate when we remember that Jesus is portrayed as sharing in God’s splendor and throne.45 It is probably better to say, as Boring does, that Jesus and God the Father are more “parallel” than “subordinate.”46

The nature of Jesus’s relationship with God in the Gospel of Mark can be understood in terms of there being a weak, moderate, or strong degree of identification between the two.

For a weak correlation of Jesus and God, Stephen Ahearne-Kroll thinks the Markan presentation of Jesus “is at once powerful and God-like, utterly human, and mediating between the divine and the human as a prophetic figure.”47 According to Kirk, Mark’s Jesus is an idealized human figure who embodies, mediates, and represents God and God’s reign. In this sense, Jesus is identified with God but not as God. Thus, Kirk detects no “Christology of Jesus’s ontological identity with YHWH” but more properly “a Christology of representation and even embodiment of the reality of YHWH’s actions.”48 The distinguishing trait here is divine agency rather than divine identity.

On the moderate side, Hays contends that “Mark’s Gospel suggests that Jesus is, in some way that defies comprehension, the embodiment of God’s presence.” Further to that, “His central character, Jesus, seems to be at the same time—if we may put it crudely—both the God of Israel and a human being not simply identical with the God of Israel. Thus, Mark’s story already poses the riddles that the church’s theologians later sought to solve in the Christological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries.

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