Introduction
I do not generally spend time on YouTube. I am subscribed to only a handful of channels, none of them on the topic of biblical academics (though I do occasionally pop over to watch friends’ videos when I find out about them). While I am deeply interested in the Bible, I find it difficult to meaningfully retain information I find in video form, and I am easily distracted from them as I do other work. I am even less interested in religious apologetics, a field for which my opinion is quite low.
Naturally, when a friend shared with me an apologetics video asserting that the Gospel of Mark declares Jesus to be God ‘in every chapter’, I was compelled to provide my own written commentary. The video is fairly short—less than seven minutes, well below the average for this sort of video—but its brevity is largely indebted to it being a Gish Gallop.
I have transcribed the video below (which is framed as a response to a Muslim debate opponent) as accurately as I could.
I’m going to go with your assumption that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest gospel. I’m fine with that for argument’s sake.
In regards to the four canonical gospels, Mark is the earliest. This is not something which should be accepted solely for the sake of the argument. While the nature of academics is that we should not be dogmatic, but open to honest challenge and inquiry for even foundational details, Mark being the first of the four gospels is effectively beyond dispute after two centuries of rigorous scholarship. This point is not the message of the apologist’s video nor my commentary, but it makes me immediately skeptical of his familiarity with the elementaries of New Testament studies outside the most stringently conservative literature, that he must ‘concede’ such a basic, nigh-universal point.
But you mentioned that you did not think that Jesus was portrayed as divine in Mark’s gospel, and that’s where I think you’re fundamentally incorrect. In fact, I would argue that Mark’s gospel portrays a more divine Jesus than even John’s gospel, which you said is the, like, development to the later gospels, where Jesus is really human early on and then he becomes this divine figure. I’m going to prove you wrong by going chapter by chapter through the Book of Mark.
Theology is, by its nature, subjective. It is largely confined to the realm of the abstract. It has no linear development, no end goal toward which it naturally progresses. We can trace its evolution across history, but also across continents, across isolated communities, even across individuals. Our primary evidence in this mess of intersecting webs are a relative few ancient texts which have survived into the present day. The authors are not alive to consult. The cultures they belonged to are long gone. The languages they spoke and wrote are full of ambiguities we may never solve. A person may cite examples as evidence in favor of a conclusion, but the uncertainty of our knowledge of the ancient past—specifically, an era when the literacy rate was incredibly low, and the object of our study was, within its context, a nearly invisible religious minority—requires a healthy degree of humility. That we could be mistaken in our understanding of an important detail due to the dearth of surviving evidence. Conversely, to speak so assertively that a brief catalog of examples, explored no deeper than their surface level, is ‘proof’ of anything… in my opinion, this requires a substantial lack of humility.
Mark 1
Okay, so. Mark chapter 1: John the baptist ‘makes straight the path for’ who? It’s Jesus. Right in Mark 1:3, it says: ‘As it was written in Isaiah the prophet, “Behold I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, a voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make his path straight.’ ” ’ If you go back to what he’s quoting, it’s Isaiah 40:3. It says: ‘A voice of one calling: “Prepare the way for Yahweh in the wilderness; make a straight highway for your God in the desert.” ’ Now when you hear Mark setting that up, and saying that Isaiah the prophet says, you know, ‘Behold I send a messenger before your face,’ you’re expecting Jesus to prepare the way for Yahweh. But that’s not what he says is happening. It’s John the baptist preparing the way for Jesus, who is he saying Jesus is—if he’s quoting Isaiah chapter 40:3, where a way is prepared for Yahweh, but John the baptist is preparing a way for Jesus—he’s saying that Jesus is Yahweh.
Anyone who already agrees with the apologist’s theology, but is not educated enough to dig into the train of thought behind his argumentation, may simply accept what he says without question. Yet, here the apologist mentally makes a textual replacement, which only works if his audience does not notice. He conflates his interpretation of the text, with the text itself, allowing him to freely replace what the text does say with his own beliefs. Without the exploration of any theological nuances known to us from a huge range of literature from the time period, without any survey of Mark’s wider theology or narrative arcs which might provide more texture and color to the gospel’s opening statement, the apologist calls his own bare assertion ‘proof’ of itself.
The text of Mark 1.2–3 does not say ‘Jesus is Yahweh’. It does not say Jesus is the one whom John prepares for. It does not even say that John is the one doing the preparing. While it is broadly accepted that Mark intends for the ‘messenger’ to be identified with John, this is not merely a popular assumption, but something substantiated by other parts of the text. Mark 1.3 parses Isa 40.3 so that the ‘messenger’ himself is
Mark was written in Greek. The author shows a little familiarity with Aramaic (5.41; 7.34; 14.36; 15.34), but his quotations from the Hebrew scriptures come from already-extant Greek translations (collectively called the Septuagint). Where the Hebrew text of Isa 40.3 uses the name of Israel’s god, ‘Yhwh’ (
Isaiah 40.3
Mark 1.2–3
Identity
Yhwh =
Lord =
Jesus
Therefore, Jesus is the incarnation of Yhwh.
There are plenty of examples in the NT of authors paraphrasing, misquoting, or even inventing passages from the Hebrew scriptures (notwithstanding their use of the LXX, which does not always agree with known forms of the Hebrew text). In this case, Mark combines a slightly-altered Isa 40.3 with Exo 23.20 (and possibly also Mal 3.1), but still misattributes the resulting amalgamation to ‘Isaiah’ alone. In Exo 23.20, the ‘messenger’ is explicitly an angel.
Exodus 23.20
Mark 1.2–3
Identity
angel =
messenger =
John
Therefore, John is the incarnation of an angel.
It is not at all likely that Mark intended his readers to come to this conclusion, but it leans on the exact same hermeneutic as the apologist’s reading. If ‘John is an angel’ cannot be attributed to Mark on this basis, then neither can ‘Jesus is Yahweh’. So what does Mark intend with his quotation of Isa 40.3?
One possible reading is that ‘Lord’ in Mark 1.2–3 does refer to Yhwh God (but not to Jesus). John is the messenger and his work is to prepare ‘the way of the Lord’, which John accomplished through his entire career, not the single event of his baptism of Jesus.
Another possibility is that Mark only knew the Greek version of Isaiah, and thus was unaware Isa 40.3 even mentioned ‘Yhwh’. Because
A third possibility draws attention to the similarities between John and Jesus. Although John foreshadows Jesus as his superior, he also says that Jesus will perform the same kind of work as himself, ‘baptism’ (1.8). After Jesus is baptized, he spends forty days
There are other interpretations, but I think these three are sufficient enough to show that Mark 1.2–3 is just ambiguous enough it may not be cited as ‘proof’ of such a contentious claim that ‘every chapter in Mark says Jesus is God’.
Mark 2
Mark chapter 2. No one can forgive sins, and yet that’s exactly what we see Jesus doing. In Mark chapter 2 verse 7, Jesus’ detractors see him heal someone and say, ‘Your sins are forgiven’. They say, ‘Why do you you talk like that? This is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ And Jesus, what does he do? Does he correct them saying, ‘No, I’m not God, I’m doing this by the power of God.’ No, he doubles down. He says, ‘No, it’s easier for me to say your sins are forgiven.’ He’s claiming to have that divine prerogative.
Where the apologist misrepresented Mark 1.2–3 with a flat equation of Yhwh = Lord = Jesus, it is interesting that he quotes Mark 2.7 essentially word for word, but immediately follows this by truncating Mark 2.9–10, compressing three sentences down into one, and—most importantly—changing it so that Jesus directly speaks about himself in the first person (‘it’s easier for me to say’). The actual text of Mark 2.9–10 is:
‘Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven”? Or to say, “Stand up and take your mat and walk”? But, so that you may know that the son of man has authority on the earth to forgive sins…’
An ongoing debate within New Testament studies is the history of interpretation of the phrase ‘son of man’.
In the majority of the Hebrew Bible, this phrase is no more than an idiom directly synonymous with the word ‘man’, as in, a human. (For example, Num 23.19, ‘God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind’, is a poetic way of saying, simply, ‘God is not dishonest or inconsistent like a human’.) The Book of Ezekiel calls the titular prophet ‘son of man’ dozens of times, perhaps an insistent reminder of his humanity as he comes face to the face with the divine world. A dream-vision in Dan 7 contrasts five symbolic characters: one ‘like a lion’, another ‘like a bear’, a third ‘like a leopard’, an indescribable fourth animal, and finally one ‘like a son of man’. Long before this chapter was reinterpreted over and over by Christian theologies across centuries, the original author described all five of these characters as ‘like’ some individual thing. They are later explained in the chapter to each represent the civilizations from a sequence of rising and falling kingdoms. The author of Dan 7 invokes the ‘son of man’ phrase as an analogy; he intends it to be understood in its general idiomatic sense (‘human’), not as any sort of messianic title. Four pagan empires are symbolized as beast-like entities, while the Israelites are symbolized not as an inhuman monster such as the others, but as a human-like being.
The earliest text where ‘son of man’ appears to be applied to a messianic figure is the Book of Parables, a section in 1 Enoch, which dates roughly to the same time period as Jesus himself. Yet even in this book, ‘son of man’ is not a title. It is here borrowed directly from Dan 7, with the Enochic author now intending it to be a literal description of a character seen in a series of visions: he had the physical appearance of a human. (He is eventually revealed to be Enoch himself, a mortal man.) When we read the NT gospels, including Mark, there are many occasions where ‘son of man’ is used essentially as a title synonymous with ‘Messiah’, and so refers to Jesus.
With this background information, someone reading Mark 2.9–10 may ask two questions. First, how is ‘son of man’ meant to be understood? Second, how did this son of man acquire his ‘authority’ to forgive sins?
There is an argument to be made that the Gospel of Mark was influenced by the Book of Parables. This leads to one of our potential answers to the first question: ‘son of man’ may be substituted with ‘Jesus’ without losing any meaning: ‘Jesus has authority’ to forgive sins, which is how the apologist understands the text. This is a valid interpretation so far, and likely what the author of Mark intended. Yet, to the second question, the apologist assumes Jesus always had his ‘authority’ to forgive sins by virtue of being God. He accepts the argument of Jesus’ opponents at face value: ‘who can forgive sins but God alone’. But this insistence that humans are incapable of forgiving sins—in order to maintain that Jesus is God because he performs an act only God is able to do—consequently is to deny what Jesus himself says later in Mark (and other gospels), telling his followers they should forgive others for their sins (11.25; cf. Matt 6.12, 14–15; 18.21–22, 35; Luke 6.37; 11.4; 17.3–4). Only God can forgive sins, and any human can forgive sins, therefore all humans are God.
Mark 2 contains a series of episodes in which Jesus is confronted by theological opponents. Each of these stories follows roughly the same format: Jesus interacts with a person or situation, his opponents wait for him to break a custom or rule or law, and Jesus responds. In each instance, Jesus’ response is not to blithely claim that, because he is God, he is above the rules they are bound to. Rather, Jesus’ responses are predicated on the criticism that his opponents are themselves wrong about the social order they think they’re enforcing: they’re wrong for excluding others (2.17), they’re wrong for requiring fasting (2.19–20), they’re wrong for their interpretation of the Sabbath law (2.27–28).
With this in mind, I suggest that although Mark intends ‘son of man’ to only function as a reference to Jesus as the Messiah, Mark has here incorporated intact a pre-Markan source, in which Jesus used the phrase according to its original idiomatic sense: a generic reference to any human. Read this way, Jesus’ response to the scribes in Mark 2.9–10 is actually a refutation to their claim that God alone can forgive sins: ‘the son of man (i.e. humans) have authority on the earth to forgive sins’. This is exactly how the author of Matthew, when copying and expanding Mark’s story, interprets what Jesus said (Matt 9.8), in direct contradiction to the apologist’s argument that this authority to forgive did not come ‘by the power of God’.
When the crowds saw it, they were filled with awe, and they glorified God, who had given such authority to humans.
Mark 3
Mark chapter 3. Jesus casts out demons by his own power. Chapter 3 verse 27, ‘no one can enter a strong man’s house without him first tying him up then he plunders the strong man’s house.’ He’s talking about having authority to do this to Satan. They’re accusing him of casting Satan out by Satan. He’s saying, ‘No, I have the power to both tie Satan up and plunder his house.’ That is a prerogative that only God has.’
I have no objections to the apologist’s summary of Mark 3.22–27 except for four words: he claims that Jesus performs exorcisms ‘by his own power’. Where does the text say this? Even granting his claim that exorcism is ‘a prerogative that only God has’ is a concept which Mark’s author may have agreed with, at no point does this passage say Jesus did this ‘by his own power’.
The author of Mark was knowledgeable enough of the Hebrew scriptures (in Greek translation, anyway), where God’s spirit is depicted as empowering humans to perform amazing acts, such as prophecy, unnatural strength, or instantaneous relocation (e.g. Judges 3.10; 6.34; 11.29; 14.6; 1 Sam 10.6; 16.13; 2 Sam 23.2; Ezek 3.12; Micah 3.8). Early Christians—which Mark’s author was—believed God’s holy spirit empowered them to do similar acts, as Paul spells out (1 Cor 3.16; 6.19; 12.4–11). It may well be that Mark’s author expected his readers to be familiar enough with these points that, when reading about Jesus performing exorcisms, it was only natural to deduce he accomplished this because God had empowered him so. After all, the Gospel of Mark begins with God’s holy spirit descending from the sky and coming to rest on Jesus (1.10). There would be no need to spell it out on every occasion; Jesus being chosen by God is the basis of the entire book.
The apologist assumes that Jesus did something which only God is able to do, but this assumption is his entire argument. It is valid to reject this assumption on the grounds that it requires inventing a detail found nowhere in the story, that Jesus did the impossible ‘of his own power’. Without this unsubstantiated claim, another plausible reading of the text remains available and, in my opinion, is much more plausible.
Mark 4
In Mark chapter 4, Jesus calms the storm. In verse 38 of chapter 4 it says, ‘and Jesus awoke and he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace, be still,” and the wind ceased and there was great calm and they were filled with great fear and said to one another, ‘Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?’ If you go to Psalm 107 verses 28 and 29, it says that when people cry out to God in the midst of the storm, it’s Yahweh who calms the storm to a whisper and the waves become quiet.
The apologist’s implied argument here is the same as the previous one: Jesus performs a supernatural act, only God can do this act, therefore Jesus is God. And the inherent flaw here is the same as the one above: the apologist assumes a detail nowhere stated in the text of Mark (that this act is ‘only’ available to God, not to any of his empowered agents). So, the assumption is justifiably disregarded.
At this point watching the video, I began to anticipate that this mere assumption will be the entire argument for most of the remaining twelve chapters. And this illustrates one of my primary concerns with religious apologetics: an apologist rarely, if ever, follows the evidence from the bottom up. They begin with their conclusion (Jesus is God, in this case), and attempt to filter all evidence through the assumption their conclusion is true, greatly exaggerating the evidence which did fit through the filter (effectively becoming a circular argument), while ignoring evidence which could not be forced through.
Mark 5
Mark 5 verses 35–43, you have the story of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead. If you go back and look at instances where prophets raised the dead in the Old Testament—you have examples like Elijah raising the widow’s son in 1 King 17—but it’s done by crying out to Yahweh to restore life because Yahweh has the ability to give life and take away life. But when Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, he merely tells her to ‘get up’. Why? Because he is the one that holds that authority of life and death.
Jesus ‘is the one that holds authority of life and death’ can be said of his depiction in the Revelation of John, because Rev 1.18 idiomatically says as much. The Gospel of Mark makes no such claim about Jesus, so without first assuming ‘Jesus is God’ is the only possible explanation, we still have the alternative: Jesus has been empowered by God’s spirit to do the things he does.
Many commentaries on the Gospel of Mark will go into detail on ancient conceptions of divine empowerment and how Mark’s author was influenced by this or that textual tradition relevant to the topic. For example, Adela Yarbro Collins, Hermeneia commentary on Mark, pages 39–40:
The events surrounding the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1.9–11 constitute Jesus’ call or installation as an agent of God, in which the endowment with the Spirit has both prophetic and messianic connotations. But from this point onward, Jesus, unlike David in the Story of David’s Rise, acts independently. His exorcisms, healings, and authoritative teachings are made possible, to be sure, by his endowment with the Spirit, but this endowment has become a permanent characteristic, as in the stories of Elijah and Elisha.
Mark 6
Mark chapter 6, Jesus walks on water. Chapter 6 verse 48: ‘He came to them walking on the sea.’ Now what’s interesting about that is that there’s a parallel in the Greek with the Greek translation of Job, and Job 9:8, it says that it is God alone who stretches out the heavens, and does what? Walks on the waves of the sea. You have an interesting parallel there in the Greek.
There are a few problems with this example. First, the parallel in Greek is weaker than implied. Mark says that Jesus
Second, there is a very significant cosmological difference between the context of the two passages which I suggest further weakens any meaningful connection between them. In Mark 6, ‘Jesus walked upon the sea’ describes his literal act of taking a stroll across the Sea of Galilee. In Job 9, ‘Yhwh walked upon the sea’ is an act of violence. Job 9.8–9 describes how Yhwh ‘alone’ created the universe: he stretched out the sky, he trampled on the sea, he crafted the constellations. These are not strictly poetic analogy, but a poetic presentation of how ancient Judeans literally understood the act of creation. Yhwh’s construction of the crystalline sky was like a tent being raised (cf. Psa 104.2). Before Yhwh created the universe, there were waters of chaos (Gen 1.1–2); Yhwh taming these waters to create the earth and sky was described like a violent act (Psa 104.6–7) because this idea derived from an older myth in which Yhwh literally battled the divine personification of the sea (Hab 3.8, 15). Allusions to this myth, called the chaoskampf, are scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible. In my opinion, a person walking on a local sea and a deity waging war against Father Sea are significantly distinct enough in purpose and scale that I would expect a theological interpretation of either text to take their large differences into account.
Third, as before, Mark does not say Jesus does something ‘only’ God is able to do. While Job does use the word ‘alone’ to specify Yhwh creating the cosmos, this is contrary to other biblical and parabiblical texts which give account that Yhwh was accompanied either by his created demiurge, Lady Wisdom, or by other gods who witnessed his actions. Biblical texts have continuity with one another except for when they don’t, which is often enough we cannot take for granted any given author agreed entirely with another, even when the former directly used the latter as a source. Different authors contradict one another regularly on purported ‘objective’ morals or facts. This lack of a clear theological continuity between documents, especially two written centuries apart from one another, makes a flat appeal to nothing more than an ‘interesting parallel’ extremely uncompelling.
Mark 7
Mark chapter 7: Jesus heals the deaf and the mute. In chapter 7 verses 31–47 you have Jesus healing a number of physically disabled people, among them the deaf, the mute, the blind. Exodus chapter 4 verse 11, when Yahweh is talking to Moses through the burning bush, he says ‘who has made man’s mouth, who makes him mute or deaf or seeing or blind, is it not I, is it not Yahweh’. Now Jesus is doing that.
And then I would argue that he then speaks to Moses in the past through the burning bush and declares his ability to do that, and then we see an example of that in Jesus’ earthly ministry in Mark chapter 7.
This is the same interpretation as the last several, and suffers the same inherent flaw as them. In this case, there are details which any ancient reader would immediately understand in a certain way which is contrary to the apologist’s entire argument. The apologist assumes that, unless Jesus or the narrator explicitly says something to the effect of ‘Jesus is doing this by God’s power in him’, it must then mean Jesus is doing it of his own power. Jesus does not implore to a power higher than himself, because as God he is the highest power there is. Yet in this occasion, the narrator informs the reader of two vital details.
He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’
First, Jesus must touch the body parts which are disabled; he must use his spit; and, he must speak the right words. My own perception is that Jesus being the omnipotent God should mean he is able to heal someone purely by will. Instead, he requires verbal, somatic, and material components. It is convenient that the tools Jesus relies on to heal someone are identical to what we see in contemporary exercises of magic. This is most evident in Mark 8.22–26, a healing story where Jesus not only rubs his spit into a man’s eyes to heal his blindness, but Jesus has to do this twice because the first attempt was not fully successful.
Second, the text specifies that Jesus ‘look[ed] up to heaven’. A reader may easily infer from this that Jesus is quietly appealing to the source of his power, to the one who gave him authority to perform miracles.
At this point, I again stress that the apologist has once more misrepresented what the text says. Mark 7.31–47 does not depict Jesus healing ‘a number of people’ who are deaf, mute and blind. Rather, the passage depicts Jesus healing a single person, a man (implied to have been born) deaf, after which spectators of the miracle comment that Jesus has thus far in his career healed people who are deaf and mute (with no mention of blind people). I generally avoid the debate scene because I do not personally find it essential. However, I respect the intellectual rigor which a debate requires to prepare, argue, and defend a position. I mean no offense to the apologist personally, but these repeated misrepresentations of what the Gospel of Mark actually says—adding details not found, skipping relevant details which are present, and offering interpretations based on nothing more than a single, circular assumption—would be shut down very quickly and brutally by a formal debate opponent. I do take into consideration I am commenting on a short, informal video, but if not enough care is being put into these summaries or quotations of the passages in question, why put the effort in at all?
Mark 8
Mark chapter 8: we have the story of the feeding of the 5000. In verses 1 to 10 we see what is essentially a repeat of Exodus chapter 16, where God’s people are in the wilderness, and they are without food and they’re hungry, and Yahweh provides for God’s people in Exodus chapter 8, supernaturally, for the people in order that they may be full. It’s Yahweh who is able to call down bread from heaven in Exodus; it is Jesus who does it in Mark.
There is nothing new to respond at this point. A miracle-worker performing miracles does not mean the miracle-worker is God.
Mark 9
Chapter 9, then, you have the transfiguration. Chapter 9 verses 2–5, Jesus takes Peter, James and John up on a mountain, and then he appears in a blinding white, and Mark says that white is whiter than any launderer would ever be able to bleach. And who is Jesus seen on the mountain with? It’s Moses and Elijah. Now there are only two people in the Hebrew scriptures who climb up on a mountain to commune with God: Moses in Exodus 24 and Elijah in 1 Kings 19. What if, when Moses and Elijah walked up on Mount Horeb, time collapsed, and when it says that they talked with Yahweh they were actually talking with Jesus? There are only two people who climb up on a mountain to talk to God. Those happen to be the two people who climb up on a mountain and talk with Jesus in Mark 9 in the transfiguration.
There were a wealth of traditions in the late Second Temple period which revolved around both Moses and Elijah, and there is one particularly relevant tradition which involves both of them. Rather than explore any of those, the apologist simply invents an explanation entirely ad hoc: what if there was time travel involved?
I have written on the textual and theological complexities of this pericope before, and there is a lot to be said, but I will summarize the relevant points. First, the text of Mark 9 does not say Moses and Elijah ‘climbed’ the mountain to talk to Jesus. They simply ‘appeared’ (
Second, it is very important to note that the vast majority of readers, including the apologist, gloss the story as saying ‘Moses and Elijah’ appeared to Jesus, when the text instead names Elijah first, then notes that Moses was ‘with’ him. The priority of Elijah is because the story partly originated to claim fulfillment for the prophecy about Elijah in Mal 4. This prophecy was being interpreted—at least in the tradition familiar to Mark’s community—as saying that the end times would begin with the return of Elijah, who had been taken into heaven by God. Hence, the very next passage, Mark 9.9–13, discusses this prophecy directly. So why, then, does Moses appear as well? The most likely explanation is that because, by this era, some Judeans believed Moses had also been taken into heaven. They suspected the story of his death in Deuteronomy was a pious fiction to prevent the Israelites from improperly exalting him. Consequently, because some believed Moses was in heaven, some further believed Moses would accompany Elijah in his fulfillment of Malachi’s prophecy.
I can respect a reader, unfamiliar with the wide range of diverse theological beliefs present in Judaism during the first century CE, being resistant to accepting an interpretation which appeals to an obscure concept like this one. Yet the point remains, this odd idea did exist at the time. It is tangible evidence found in ancient texts. In contrast, the scenario suggested by the apologist is purely his own imagination, a ‘what if’ invented for the sole purpose of opening the way to a pre-determined conclusion. How is that ‘proof’?
Mark 10
Now, I could go on chapter by chapter.
That was the whole point of the video, as he said at the very start:
I’m going to prove you wrong by going chapter by chapter through the Book of Mark.
Why begin by boldly stating this was his intention if, in fact, it wasn’t?
Mark 14
But what this all does is, it culminates at Mark 14 with Jesus and his trial. At Jesus’ trial, they ask, in Mark 14:61, ‘Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?’ And Jesus replies, ‘I am, and you will see the son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, coming from the clouds of heaven.’ He’s quoting Daniel chapter 7 verses 13–14, where it says the divine son of man who rides on the clouds of heaven, and is given dominion, glory, and kingship over all the nations, and it says that this reign of the son of man will last for an everlasting period of time, it will never pass away. And the high priest understands exactly what Jesus is saying. It says that the high priest then tears his robes and says, ‘Why do we need any more witnesses? We’ve heard the blasphemy.’ When Jesus calls himself the son of man and quotes Daniel chapter 7 about himself, he’s putting the exclamation mark on this whole ministry. There’s no ambiguity about it. Their verdict is blasphemy, because Jesus is doing that. He’s claiming to be God.
I outlined the broad strokes of Dan 7 in my response to the claim about Mark 2, but it is worth noting that the text of Dan 7 does not call the ‘one like a son of man’ by any such term as ‘divine’, nor describe him in any such fashion. The entire point of the symbolism is to stress his humanity, not to make any claim about divinity.
Asserting that son of man’s identity as the supreme deity naturally runs into a glaring problem: if he is the eternal almighty God, how is he given an authority which he previously did not have? What we instead have is a passage in Daniel which, at most, was interpreted messianically by some readers in the first century CE and which Jesus said was about himself. Claiming to be the Messiah was not ‘blasphemy’, because no one thought the Messiah was God. Succinctly: Mark does not have Jesus claiming to be God. (How did the high priest get away with sentencing Jesus to death for something which was not a crime? This gets away from the point, but asking this vital question opens the reader up to discovering the numerous historical problems with Mark’s account of the crucifixion.)
Conclusion
He’s already proven through Mark that he not only has the audacity to claim to be God, but he has the divine prerogative to do the things only God is able to do. It’s not just a claim. Jesus is Yahweh in every chapter.
It has been argued that the function of religious apologetics is not to win debates and change the minds of opponents. The purpose is to reassure people who already believe, but are broadly uneducated (or uninterested in being educated) on the more difficult details of their religion. The goal is to prevent them from leaving the religion by giving them answers to questions which may cause them to doubt their faith. The answers will be just sufficient enough to suppress the questions they already have, but not so detailed as to get them asking new questions.
While I cannot pretend to know the minds of every individual apologist, I think there is truth in this criticism. This is perhaps the chief reason why I, personally, find apologetics too frustrating to bother engaging with, even when I find the subject matter interesting. I do not think every apologist is necessarily aware they do this, but even a latent dishonesty about the biblical text (adding to it, removing from it, circular argumentation, ad hoc explanations without evidence, refusing to admit relevant evidence, especially when it is outside of their sect’s canonical scriptures) is so engrained into the field that it becomes nearly inescapable.
If we are dashing past four chapters (10–13) and stopping short of the final two (15–16), we cannot say we went through the Gospel of Mark ‘chapter by chapter’. Bluntly: I find it fundamentally dishonest to assert so definitively that ‘every chapter’ in Mark identifies Jesus as God when six chapters—more than one third of the book—have been skipped over.
Nowhere in any of this was Jesus ‘proven’ to have claimed to be God, nor to have claimed to be able to do things only God can do. The arguments were terribly insubstantial, most frequently based on assumptions and hypotheticals rather than anything material. In the New Testament, Jesus is God’s divine agent, but he is not himself God.
Five Days Later
Since writing this, I have learned that the person in this video is a professional apologist, who speaks at largescale events and has appeared on major, secular podcasts. This information makes the errors in the video much worse in hindsight. It is one thing to interpret the text in a way which begs exceptional treatment from its peers. But it is inexcusable, in my opinion, to misrepresent the text itself while having such a huge, impressionable audience.