The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ by Brant Pitre

Author:Brant Pitre
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780770435486
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-02T07:00:00+00:00

10

The Secret of Jesus’s Divinity

If you’ve ever sat down and read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke from beginning to end, one of the most striking things you might have noticed is how Jesus often instructs the demons, his disciples, and others not to tell anyone who he is.

For example, during his many exorcisms, Jesus “would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). In one case, when the demons cry out, “You are the Son of God,” Jesus “strictly ordered them not to make him known” (Mark 3:11-12). After he heals a man of leprosy, he “sternly charged him” to “say nothing to any one” about what had happened (Mark 1:43-44). Likewise, when he heals the man with a speech impediment, he does so “aside from the multitude, privately,” and then afterward “charged them to tell no one” (Mark 7:36). When the apostle Peter confesses Jesus to be the Christ at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus charges the disciples “to tell no one about him” (Mark 8:30). And after the voice of God identifies Jesus as his beloved Son during the Transfiguration, Jesus commands the disciples “to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead” (Mark 9:9). This secrecy about Jesus’s identity is present in all three Synoptic Gospels (see Matthew 8:4; 12:16; 16:20; Luke 4:41; 9:21).

Why does Jesus do this? Why the secrecy?

The Messianic Secret

Whole books have been written attempting to explain what scholars have come to refer to as “the Messianic secret.”1 Some don’t know what to make of Jesus telling everybody to keep quiet. If we assume that Jesus came to bring the good news of who he is, then his insistence on silence about his identity and his most memorable miracles seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Others suggest Jesus may have been using “reverse psychology”—what he really wanted was for his disciples and those he healed to tell everybody. So, knowing human nature, he tells them not to tell anybody who he is. The result: “the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36).

But the best explanation is that he is biding his time. Because the truth about his identity is so potentially explosive, Jesus keeps it as secret as possible until the time is right to bring his mission to a climax. In the words of New Testament scholar Craig Keener:

[A]t least one important reason for allowing claims of his messiahship only toward the end of his ministry was a matter of practical strategy. Messianic acclamations could (and did) lead the authorities wrongly to classify Jesus as a revolutionary and seek his execution; thus Jesus presumably delays his martyrdom until the appropriate time and place (Passover in Jerusalem)…. If Jesus knew anything at all about the political situation in Jerusalem, he would know that a public messianic claim would lead to his almost immediate execution.2

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of this insight into Jesus’s practical strategy for revealing who he is.

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