Study of Mark Part 3: Jesus' Authority

This post will cover the remainder of Mark Chapter 1. Just as before, I encourage you to read the entire section of text, possibly from multiple translations so as not to lose the “flow” when I interrupt to comment on specifics within the text. When we last left Jesus, he had picked out his first four disciples: Peter, Andrew, James, and John.

²¹ Then they went to Capernaum. When the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. ²² The people there were amazed by his teaching, because he taught them like one who had authority, not like the experts in the law.

Last post, we saw how Jesus had the authority and presence to speak to fishermen and get them to (at least temporarily) put their professions on hold and follow him. Here he demonstrates authority in teaching. As an Old Testament allusion, this episode could place Jesus as a figure after the Moses archetype. Just as Moses brought a new teaching with authority, so does Jesus. Jesus surpasses John the Baptist in the prophet mold. Now he surpasses the experts in his teaching of the Law.

This episode also sets up what will become the major conflict within the narrative, the opposition by the religious authorities, what I will frequently call “religion vs. faith.” Mark goes out of his way to say that Jesus was not like the experts in the law, who apparently did not teach with authority, even though they supposedly were “experts.” Throughout Mark, we will see Jesus, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, contrasted with the civic religion and those who represent it. Here, the expertise of the religious teachers carries no authority, where the teaching of Jesus carries true authority. It is also important to note that the people inside the narrative notice this difference. In other words, they recognize the failures and corruption of the religious system. This is also why they were going out to John the Baptist: they were tired of the traditional system (be that the Jewish Temple or the Roman puppet government represented by Herod) and they were ready for something new, and something with authority.

²³ Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ²⁴ “Leave us alone, Jesus the Nazarene! Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” ²⁵ But Jesus rebuked him: “Silence! Come out of him!” ²⁶ After throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him. ²⁷ They were all amazed so that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He even commands the unclean spirits and they obey him.” ²⁸ So the news about him spread quickly throughout all the region around Galilee.

Hopefully by now you are noticing the themes of Immediacy and Authority as they occur. “Just then” in the synagogue something new happens, and it is action-oriented. Mark doesn’t want to get bogged down in slow moving teaching texts yet, because we are in Act 1, where action is key. Jesus now demonstrates authority over unclean spirits. And the unclean spirit also declares that Jesus has the power to destroy him/them. It is interesting that the text says the man had an unclean spirit (singular), but the spirit speaks in plural (“Leave us alone”; “have you come to destroy us”). The spirit seems to be speaking for the entire community of unclean spirits, and not just for himself. It is another interesting detail that Mark includes the demon throwing the man into convulsions before he leaves. From a literary standpoint, details like these serve to make the scene come to life more vividly for the audience. It is easier to imagine the encounter in the synagogue when you have details to picture in your mind. Also, this detail could serve to represent the spirit’s unwillingness to leave, but ultimate powerlessness in staying, since no resistance it offers can match the power that Jesus commands.

Another motif we will encounter multiple times throughout Mark is Recognition. Frequently, the people who “should” recognize Jesus’ identity and understand his teachings (e.g. the religious leaders, the disciples) fail to do so. Instead, those who declare Jesus’ identity are those whom we would not expect (e.g. a Roman centurion).  Notice that it is an unclean spirit that first recognizes Jesus for who he is within the narrative. Although the omniscient narrator of the story has given a declaration of Jesus’ identity, the narrator is not actually part of the action within the universe of the story, but rather a voice imposed over top of the narrative for the audience. Also recall that the voice at the baptism spoke only to Jesus and not to John or the crowd. Therefore, we know who Jesus is, Jesus knows who he is, but nobody within the story has actually heard any declaration about Jesus’ identity until now.

Coupled with this idea is a theme that scholars have termed the Messianic Secret. Several times in Mark, Jesus tells demons and people he has recently healed -- and the disciples in one case -- to be silent or say nothing about him to other people. On the surface, Jesus (or Mark writing Jesus) doesn’t seem to want anyone to know who he is. This term has become almost universally accepted as part of explaining the Gospel of Mark, and the vast majority of commentators and critical scholarship take this theme as a given. The two main explanations used to deal with this unique aspect of the Gospel are:

1.      That Mark writes this into the story as a literary or dramatic technique to heighten the contrast between the audience, who knows the truth about Jesus’ identity, and those inside the story, who don’t know who he is. In other words, because Jesus maintains silence about who he is within the story, we can laugh at the blindness of the Pharisees and the cluelessness of the disciples because we have the special inside knowledge of who Jesus is from the beginning, where the characters within the narrative are kept on the “outside” of the special revelation.

2.      That Jesus, when he was alive and teaching during his actual ministry, really didn’t want people to know who he was; that Mark, being the earliest written of the Gospels, most closely represents this true historical reality; and that the later Gospel writers changed the episodes to make Jesus more open with his identity.

While this will put me in the extreme minority in scholarship and commentary (I have only read one or two others who think this way), I don’t necessarily think there is a “Messianic Secret” in Mark. I think that Jesus (or Mark writing Jesus) does not want his identity to remain a secret, either as a dramatic device or within the universe of the narrative (or the historical Jesus, though the only proof I would have of that is from the Gospels themselves). Although I have argued that at this point nobody in the story actually knows who Jesus is yet except the audience, Jesus does not keep them in the dark. In fact, one of his first actions is to recruit four people to whom he will reveal inside information. If everyone inside the narrative were intentionally being kept in the dark about Jesus solely for dramatic contrast, then Jesus’ actions with the disciples such as revealing the interpretation of parables to them, bringing a few to witness the transfiguration, etc. make little sense. In fact, in Chapter 4, Jesus tells them that the secret of the Kingdom of God (i.e. his identity, his mission, and the fact that he has brought it near) has been revealed to them. They are not kept on the outside. Their cluelessness is less a factor of not being given the knowledge as it is their being stuck in a “traditional” mindset, and their lacking the perspective given by the resurrection and the Spirit to help them reinterpret his teachings.

Additionally, while Jesus does frequently tell others to say nothing about him, he does not do this in every instance. Most notably, to the man healed of the Legion of demons in chapter 5:19, Jesus instructs to go tell everyone at his home what the Lord did for him. This, interestingly, is the first time that Jesus tells someone to go preach on their own (although he does appoint the Twelve as apostles before Legion, he will not send them out alone until chapter 6). If Jesus were trying to keep his identity and mission a secret throughout, then why does he only call for silence in select instances but tell certain other people to speak? When we actually get to the episode of the Legion demoniac in chapter 5, I will argue that the man’s preaching is critical to propelling Jesus’ mission forward within the Decapolis region. So, if Jesus instructs a man to speak within the story when it will serve to forward his mission, it is not a large leap to posit that he would instruct silence when speaking would sidetrack or hinder his mission.

So if there is no overarching Messianic Secret theme, then we need to deal with each of the examples on a situational basis, looking at how each instance might hinder or sidetrack Jesus’ true mission and why Jesus might command silence in each individual scene. Thus, I think we need to recast the unclean spirit’s actions (here and the other demon confrontations) in terms of what it would have meant to someone hearing the story in the ancient world.

A Greco-Roman audience (and a Jewish one for that matter) would have been well familiar with the concept of personal names being used in curses and other magical incantations. If one knew the name of a person, special information about that person, or even the true (usually secret) name of a supernatural being/deity, then including that name in a magical spell would grant them power over that individual/being. This is present in Greco-Roman writings, but echoes of it also occur in the Old Testament, specifically when Moses asks to know God’s name at the burning bush (Exodus 3:13-14) and when the people on the boat with Jonah demand to know what god he serves and then when they find out, cry out to him, using his name twice within the prayer (Jonah 1:9, 14). Thus, by declaring Jesus’ name and identity, the unclean spirit is trying to gain power over him. This would be a serious attempt to try to hinder Jesus’ mission. Notice though, that the attempt is useless, and that Jesus does not need a name or identity to command the demon. He commands, the demon obeys; again, an emphasis on the authority that Jesus possesses.

An understated part of the subtext that needs attention here is that the demoniac is sitting in the synagogue on the Sabbath. A demon-possessed man is in church and the religious authorities have not recognized it, or if they have, they have done nothing about it! Mark calls no special attention to this, but it speaks volumes of confirmation to the people’s statement that the teachers and “experts” have no authority.