BLog (2) Madelaine Crabtree

As I read the gospel of Mark I found myself drawn to the Markan Jesus. As we began to discuss in class, he is very human; he gets angry, he uses humor to appeal to those he preaches to. I began to wonder how much of what goes on and what is said in Mark’s gospel is from the sources he used, and how much is devised by Mark in order to evoke certain reactions form his audience. It would make sense to construct and image of Jesus with human-like characteristics in order to make him more accessible and easily relatable.

Mark had immense power when it came to depicting Jesus: language is so complicated in that even the slightest variation of a single word or phrase can change the meaning of a piece of writing immensely. And, the meanings of language are so different today than they were in antiquity that the connotations of any given phrase could have, and probably were, received completely differently than we would interpret them in modern times. For example, why does the Markan Jesus continually refer to himself as the “the Son of Man,” and why always in the third person? He never says “I am the Son of Man;” I don’t believe he ever says the word “I” at all. I recall an NPR broadcast I heard several years ago about a study conducted in order to determine the most commonly used word in the English language, and if I remember correctly the word “I” is up very high on the list. Although this was a modern study and is not necessarily relevant in the context of antiquity, there must be some significance to a Jesus who hardly refers to himself in the first person. It is almost as if Jesus is detaching himself from his human existence, even though part of his appeal is that he acts so human. Plus, the very fact that he refers to himself as “the Son of Man,” and not “the Son of God,” makes him seem all the more human.

To make sense of this contradiction, I turned to literary analyses of the Gospel of Mark and found some interesting theories. According to an article by Elizabeth Struthers Malbon of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the purpose of Jesus referring to himself in the third person is to “present [him] as having a unique point of view” and so that “the implied audience can be drawn into the story to take responsibility for applying ‘Son of Man’ to Jesus.”¹ I thus came to the conclusion that Mark’s intention in portraying Jesus in a certain way was to make him accessible and engage and interest his vast and growing audience.

1. E. S. Malbon, “Narrative Christology and the Son of Man: What the Markan Jesus Says Instead,” BI 11:3 (2003), 375.

Malbon, Elizabeth S., “Narrative Christology and the Son of Man: What the Markan Jesus Says Instead.” Biblical Interpritation 11:3 (2003): 373-385.