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Theology Notes Mark's Gospel Notes

Is There A Messianic Secret In Mark Notes

Updated Is There A Messianic Secret In Mark Notes

Mark's Gospel Notes

Mark's Gospel

Approximately 120 pages

These notes helped me get a scholarship in my prelim exams.
Notes are on:
Messianic secret in Mark,
Mark's Christology,
Mark's audience,
Short vs. Long ending,
Parables in Mark,
Miracles in Mark,
The title 'Son of Man',
Redaction Criticism....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Mark's Gospel Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Is there a messianic secret in Mark’s Gospel?

Hooker, Morna. The Gospel According to St Mark, pg. 66 – 69, A & C Publishers, London, 1991.

Pg. 66- not only Jesus’s identity which is kept secret, those who have been healed must also keep their cure secret.

Wrede saw ‘the messianic secret’ as reflecting ‘a tension between the belief of the early church in Jesus as Messiah and the unmessianic character of Jesus’s ministry.

‘Jesus’s commands to secrecy, he argued, cannot be taken as historical but are a dogmatic device to explain why he was not acknowledged as Messiah during his ministry’

Another view of the motif of secrecy is that the messianic secret was historical

  • ‘Jesus’s wish to conceal his messiahship from men and women during his ministry for fear that it would have been misunderstood as a claim to political kingship’

    • Thus choosing title ‘Son of Man’

  • CRITICISM- pg. 67 ‘the view which takes the secret to be historical fails to explain why Jesus should have chosen to confuse his disciples by using an enigmatic title’

  • What’s more, how could Jesus have given such unrealistic commands?

  • ‘leaves unsolved the problems of how the bystanders could ignore the confessions of Jesus’s identity made by the men and women who were possessed by these spirits’

CRITICISM of Wrede- ‘since Jesus was put to death as a messianic pretender, it seems that during his ministry questions about his messiahship were already being asked’

‘to describe the whole ministry of Jesus as ‘unmessianic’ is to ignore totally the plain evidence of the gospels’

Widely agreed by new testament scholars that Jesus ‘acted with authority and believed himself to have been commissioned by God: it is difficult not to use the term ‘messianic’ to describe such authority.’

Importance of Easter in recognition of Jesus’s messiahship.

The messianic secret functions in the opposite way; means of revelation, ‘yet no one in the story hears them, and the truth they utter remains hidden’

‘their words are intelligible only to those who already believe that Jesus is what they declare him to be – Son of God’

Secret occurs in 2 contexts: one is the command to secrecy after some declaration about who Jesus is has been made.

Second; 3 miracles (restoration of life, sight and hearing) which seem to be used in a symbolic way.

Jesus makes no secret of his healing, exorcisms widely known, crowds flock. Thus might conclude that (pg. 68) ‘commands to secrecy are largely artificial’

‘secrecy and disclosure are part of a theme which pervades the whole of Mark’s gospel, Jesus acts with supreme authority yet makes no open claims for himself’

Pg. 69 – ‘the truth about Jesus is at once hidden from view and yet spelt out on every page of the gospel’

possible ‘the so-called secret reflects not simply the tension between Jesus as he was perceived in his lifetime and as he was confessed after the resurrection but the reluctance of Jesus to make claims about himself’

his message centring on God and his Kingdom, not himself, ‘if he believed himself to be in any sense the Messiah, the last thing he would do was to claim the title for himself’

Kingsbury, J. The Christology of Mark’s Gospel, chapter 1. Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1983.

William Wrede’s theory of the Messianic Secret

3 contentions

  1. Related to context

  2. ‘within the NT, the place of Mark is between 2 poles.’

    1. First- Jesus as only becoming Messiah at his resurrection (thus his earthly life was non-messianic)

    2. Second- John’s gospel; Jesus portrayed as ‘being the Messiah already in the course of his historical existence’

  3. Mark portrays a Jesus in between these 2 poles; both as the Messiah but also keeping this messiahship secret.

Pg. 3 ‘Mark’s ‘messianic secret’ therefore, in in essence the product of the wedding of these two perspectives’

SECOND CONTENTION- the messianic secret pervades whole gospel, not just surrounding Jesus’s identity but also activity/teaching of miracle-working, suffering, death and resurrection.

THIRD CONTENTION- ‘contradictions’ in the narrative, ‘those places where the messianic secret is manifestly broken.’

Pg. 4, ‘they are ‘fissures’ in the all-pervasive messianic secret through which he permits the revelation of Jesus’s messiahship to shine forth.’

Wrede sees Mark’s gospel as written to describe the earthly Jesus as the Messiah

‘the non-messianic nature of the life and ministry of Jesus’ had not yet been forgotten, ‘increasingly, the notion was asserting itself that if the risen Jesus is the Messiah ‘now’, then he has always been the Messiah’

Promoting this view, Mark ‘gave a messianic cast to the non-messianic traditions of the sayings and deeds of Jesus by presenting the earthly Jesus as the Messiah who was intent on keeping his messiahship a secret’

CRITICISM OF WREDE

One of main attacks on Wrede’s theory saw the gospel as a reliable historical account of Jesus’s life

Schweitzer – pg. 5 ‘dismissed Wrede’s theory on the grounds that Mark admits to being read as genuine history and that the notion that Jesus is the Messiah originated, not with the resurrection appearances, but in Jesus’ own self-consciousness.’

Much criticism of Wrede from British scholars, insisting that ultimate source of ‘the notion that Jesus is the Messiah is not simply the resurrection but the historical Jesus himself’

Ernst Kasemann- ‘whether the earthly Jesus applied the category of Messiah to himself or not, it is nonetheless the only category that does justice to the unparalleled claim to authority that resides in his words.’

‘if Jesus’s claim to authority was messianic in nature if not in name, it follows that the notion that Jesus is the Messiah ultimately derives from Jesus himself’

Thus it would be mistaken to argue there ‘ever existed a ‘non-messianic’ tradition of the sayings and deeds of Jesus’

CRITICISM- dubious to treat Mark as ‘genuine history’

Counter- some see Mark as ‘’a conservative redactor’ who, in working with primitive traditions, did relatively little to change them.’

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