Clergy and Educators

ICJS Scripture Forum, 2003-2004
Session #5

Scripture Forum
Session #5
Goucher College
March 5, 2004

Introduction to the discussion:

   In the first four sessions of this year's Scripture Fo-rum, participants have been studying texts from the Tanakh that serve as a template for the Passion narra-tives in the New Testament.
   In this session, the group began a study of the Passion narrative in Mark's Gospel, beginning at 14:1.
   The process was loosely structured: The text was read aloud and the group stopped for discussion when-ever someone had something to say regarding the text. That discussion follows.

Mark 14:1: "It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread."

• Passover and the festival of unleavened bread are listed as two separate festivals, which indicates that the person writing this Gospel was either Jewish or Jewishly knowledgeable.
• Biblically these are in fact two separate festivals: Pesach, commemorating the redemption of the Israelite slaves from Egypt, was linked with an older agricul-
  tural festival (hag hamatzot) celebrating
  the spring barley harvest and the making
  of new flour.
• Pesach refers to the day on which the Passover lamb was sacrificed and is the beginning of the whole period, which lasts seven days in Israel and eight days in the diaspora.
• Technically, Jews don't celebrate Pesach any longer because there is no Temple in which to sacrifice the paschal lamb. During the Passover seder the matzah is raised but not the bone. This symbolizes the fact that Jews are fulfilling the commandment to eat the unleavened bread but are not fulfilling the commandment to eat the paschal lamb.
• Of course, "Passover" would signify the sacrifice of the paschal lamb to Jesus and his disciples.
• In some ways the Passover seder works like the Eucharist: It is both a remembrance of what hap-pened and the thing that's happening.
• Matthew, supposedly the most "Jewish" Gospel, doesn't demonstrate the same knowledge as Mark: "You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be handed over
  to be crucified" (Matthew 26:2).

Mark 14:3-9: (the story of the woman who anoints Jesus with costly ointment)

• This is a story from the oral tradition that has been inserted at this point in the narrative in
  the Gospels of Mark and Matthew.
• This story, with certain variations, is placed in Luke's Gospel during Jesus' ministry (Lk. 7:36-50). In Luke's account, Jesus is eat-
  ing at the house of Simon the Pharisee (not Simon the leper), the woman weeps on Jesus' feet and wipes the tears with her hair before anointing his feet with ointment. The disciples do not complain about wasting the ointment, but Simon the Pharisee protests inwardly that Jesus should allow a sinful woman to touch him.
• A similar story occurs in John's Gospel six days before the Passover (Jn. 12:1-8). The incident takes place in the house of Lazarus, who was raised by Jesus in the previous chapter. Lazarus's sister Mary is the one who anoints Jesus' feet with costly nard
  and wipes them with her hair. In this account, only Judas complains about the waste of costly ointment -- not because
  he cares about the poor (as in Mark and Matthew), but because he is a thief and is accustomed to removing the contents of
  the money box, which is in his charge.
• In Mark Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome take spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus for burial, but the tomb is empty when they get there. In Luke women who had come with Jesus from Galilee pre-pare spices and ointments with which to anoint Jesus after his death, but they must wait until the Sabbath is over, and Jesus is gone when they arrive at the tomb. In John Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus anoint Jesus' body with a mixture of myrrh and aloes in an amount worthy of the burial of
  a king. So John, at least, does not need a story of anointing at the point in the nar-rative where Mark and Matthew place this story. [A Jewish participant noted that, according to halakhah, preparation of a body for burial is gender-driven, so it would seem that only John actually gets it right.]
• In the accounts in Mark and Matthew, the woman pours the ointment on Jesus' head (Mark 14:3). After the disciples protest, Jesus tells them that the woman has anointed his body for burial.
• References to both the head and the body sug-gest that there are two stands mixed together
  in this part of the story: (1) the foreshadowing
  of Jesus' death with the anointing of his body for burial, and (2) an element of Davidic kingship signified by the anointing of his head.
• There was a brief discussion of the three compo-sitional layers in the Gospel narratives and the identification of this pericope, with its allusion to kingship, as part of the layer written after the destruction of the Temple. (It was also noted that the anti-Judaism in the Gospels is part of the same layer and that it mirrors the hostility between the followers of Jesus and proto-rabbinic Judaism.)
• The kingship alluded to in the anointing of Jesus' head is not political; this is a reference to the kingdom of heaven.
• There was a brief discussion of the nature of the messiah. It was stated that the idea of a spiritual messiah arises after the destruction of the Temple and becomes a polemic after the revolt of 135 C.E. There was some question about the accuracy of the second half of this statement.
• Mark 14:3-9 is an important text for Christian feminists: This text and Mark 15:40-41 create a frame of women who did what they could for Jesus.
  [Mark 15:40-41: There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.]
• There was also a discussion of the way in which John Dominic Crossan reads this pericope. Crossan contends that Mark contrasts the failure of the women who come to the tomb in Mark 16:1-8 with the faith of the woman in 14:3-9:
  Think about women and anointings for burial. In Mark's story Jesus had told the disciples three times and very clearly that he would be executed in Jerusalem and that
  he would rise after three days. If one believed those prophecies, to come with ointments is certainly an act of love but hardly of faith. It is, for Mark, a failure in belief.
  But before he tells of that failure by named women in
  16:1-8, he tells the above story of stunning faith. This unnamed woman believes Jesus and knows that, if she
  does not anoint him for burial now, she will never be able to do it later. That is why she gets that astonishing statement of praise, one unparalleled in the entire gospel: "wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her." That accolade is given because, in Mark's gospel, this is the first complete and unequivocal act of faith in Jesus' suffering and rising destiny. It is the only such full act before that of the equally unnamed centurion beneath the cross in 14:39b: "Truly this man was God's Son!" [John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?, p. 185]



• The discussion turned at this point to what Jesus says when the disciples complain about wasting costly ointment: "You always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them when-ever you wish; but you will not always have me."
• A Jewish participant felt these words were callous and uncharacteristic of Jesus, but it was explained that there are two strands of tradition here -- Jesus' teaching about the poor, and his words about what people are supposed to do when the bridegroom is present -- and these two strands collide at this point.
  [Mark 2:19-20: Jesus said to them, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day" (parallel passages in Matthew 9:14-15 and Luke 5:33-35).]
• Jesus is telling his disciples that there will always be people who are poor and Jesus' followers will always have an obligation to take care of them. Jesus, on the other hand, will not always be with them, so they have an obligation to rejoice in his presence and that obligation takes precedence over caring for the poor. Jesus' absence is only temporary, however, since after the resurrection he promises that he will always be with them ("I am with you always, to the end of the age," Matthew 28:20). This promise removes the con-flict between taking care of the poor and rejoicing in the presence of the bridegroom: Jesus is always present, so the obligation to the poor is always binding.
• The discussion took a slight detour at this point to the question of who would have been allowed to be present at a crucifixion.
• The object of crucifixion, as far as the Romans were concerned, was to terrorize the people into behaving themselves, so crucifixions were carried out in public.
• According to the purity laws, a priest would be forbidden to be present at a crucifixion unless no one else would be there to take care of the body. Taking care of the body is a mitzvah. (A priest cannot attend a funeral unless there is an obligation to a family member; neither can he enter a cemetery
  or be part of a burial society.)
• To be outside the walls of Jerusalem would be dangerous, but there was no halakhic problem involved in being present at a crucifixion for anyone other than a priest.
• One reason for Jesus' followers not to attend his crucifixion was the fear of being associ-ated with him and perhaps sharing his fate.
• If the name "Iscariot" had something to do with the Sicarii, or if the disciples were connected in any way with the Zealots, then getting away would have been that much more important.

Mark 14:10-11: (Judas betrays Jesus to the chief priests)

• A question was asked about Judas: He seems to be a loyal follower of Jesus. Where is the motive for his betrayal of Jesus?
• Mark's treatment of the events of the crucifixion centers around abandonment. Judas is simply the first disciple to abandon Jesus. Otherwise, neither Mark nor Matthew gives a reason for Judas's betrayal. [Note that the process of betrayal and abandon-ment begins in Mark 14:1 with the chief priests and the scribes "looking for a way
  to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him."]
• In Luke's Gospel, Satan enters Judas and
  he goes to confer with the chief priests
  and officers of the temple police.
• In John's Gospel, the devil puts it into Judas's heart to betray Jesus and Satan enters into him at the Last Supper.
• The next question was: Why do the priests need Judas to identify Jesus, who taught so openly?
• Jerusalem was packed with people who had come for Passover. The priests needed someone who knew Jesus to pick him out from this teeming mass of people.
• It was necessary to arrest Jesus by stealth; there couldn't be a lot of people in the party sent to bring Jesus in.
• A Christian participant remarked that if it was God's plan that things were going to happen the way they did, then Judas was an instrument of God, just like Pharaoh and the Babylonians.
• A Jewish participant responded that there is no disconnect between Tanakh and the New Testa-ment because, even though Pharaoh and the Babylonians were acting as God's instruments, they were still held responsible and were punished for their deeds.
• Another participant remarked that the passion predictions are a really important counter-theme to the theme in Mark's Gospel that nobody understands who Jesus is and what's going on.
• One explanation of the "Messianic secret" in Mark's Gospel is that people would have asked the disci-ples after Jesus' death and resurrection why they hadn't known what was going to happen. The "secret" allowed them to respond that they did know but their rabbi told them not to say anything.

Mark 14:12-17: (preparations for the Passover meal)

• The direction in Mark 14:13 to find and follow a man carrying a jar of water suggested to one participant an allusion to the meeting between Eliezer and Rebekah, in the sense that God had
  set this up.
• In that society, a "man carrying a jar of water" would have been quite conspicuous because carrying water was a woman's job. The disciples would certainly not have been able to miss the man they were supposed to follow.
• One Jewish participant suggested that nobody waits until the morning before Passover to start making preparations for the feast, so perhaps the disciples were expecting something apocalyptic to happen before they could eat the meal. A com-parison was made with the Lubavitch Hasidim, who wait until just before Tish'ah be-'Av to buy a copy of Lamentations, just in case the Messiah comes in the interval and they don't need to buy a copy. But another Jewish participant responded that lots of Jews don't think about preparations for Pass-over until the last minute, and there must have been public places in Jerusalem in which the Passover could be eaten.

Mark 14:18-25: (the Passover meal)

• The comment was made that the bread eaten at the Last Supper in Gibson's movie was clearly not matzah; it looked like pita bread. So the question was asked if it wasn't supposed to be Passover in the film, or if Gibson wanted to remove the Jewish context. Someone else pointed out, however, that apparently matzah in the time of Jesus and the disciples looked more like pita bread than what it looks like today.
• The discussion then turned to Jesus' words, "Take; this is my body." Some participants expressed sur-prise that Mark's Gospel omits the words, "Do this in remembrance of me."
• Matthew's account (26:26) is almost identi-cal with Mark's: "Take, eat; this is my body."
• Luke's account (22:19) -- "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remem-brance of me." -- is nearly the same as the earliest version, which appears in Paul's first Corinthian letter.
• 1 Corinthians 11:24: "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."
• In regard to the words "Do this in remembrance of me," it was suggested that Jesus might have been telling his disciples that he was not going to be around for the next Passover, so when they would be together the next time to eat the Passover meal, he wanted them to remember him.
• A Jewish participant pointed out that the purpose of the seder is a remembrance of the exodus from Egypt and a reenactment of the event. Part of the motivation at least is to remind God that He had freed the people of Israel once, so He should free them again.



• The final subject under discussion was the phrase "blood of the covenant," which appears in both Mark and Matthew (Luke and Paul speak of "the new covenant in my blood").
• In Judaism the phrase "blood of the cove-nant" is a reference to circumcision. No one drinks this blood, although the mohel does touch the blood with his lips.
• A Christian participant remarked that the phrase became a boundary marker between the followers of Jesus and other Jews.
• In Judaism the taboos surrounding blood are profound. Drinking blood would be repugnant to Jews, and they would never cross this boundary.
• The idea of drinking blood would have been repugnant to Romans and Greeks as well.
• The mystery religions used blood but not for drinking.
• The words fit better with a messiah who was killed.
• It was suggested that the notion of drinking Christ's blood might have served the same sort
  of boundary-marking purpose as the birkat ha-minim: Just as the birkat made Jewish Christians uncomfortable in the synagogue, drinking "Christ's blood" would make non-Christian Jews uncomfort-able in the presence of the followers of Jesus.
• A Jewish participant remarked that, although the Passion narratives are based on Tanakh, the notion of bread as Christ's body and wine as Christ's blood is an import.
• Another Jewish participant spoke of Jesus as a "dissident Pharisee" who, like other Pharisees, treated the table as an altar but included things other Pharisees wouldn't include. He asked when this idea would have come into Christianity.
• A Christian participant pointed out that the shocking nature of drinking blood makes this passage historically reliable. She then wondered how the early Christians would have reacted to it.
• Based on the assumption that Mark's Gospel was written/redacted around 75 C.E., one participant said that if drinking Christ's blood was a boundary marker as early as 75, then the split between Jews and Christians came much earlier than he had thought.
• Given the evidence of the Gospels, Jesus was in conflict with the Pharisees over issues of purity, kashrut, and Shabbat. These were surely points of contention and important boundary issues in first-century Jewish life and law, but they did not necessarily separate Jesus out of Judaism.
• The words "the new covenant in my blood" or "my blood of the covenant" are attested to very early, within twenty years of Jesus death [the first Corinthian letter is variously dated by scholars as having been written no earlier than 49 and no later than 56 C.E.]. There was no parting of the ways at that time and the words were apparently still acceptable within a Jewish context.



• In his book Rabbi Jesus, Bruce Chilton offers an extended hypothesis about the words Jesus speaks at the Last Supper. Chilton believes the words derived in part from the "holy feasts" that Jesus conducted everywhere he went during his ministry. Chilton suggests, however, that Jesus began to speak of sharing his "blood" and his "flesh" as Passover approached.
• Chilton says that the "Eucharist's Jewish meaning" came to him after he had spent years working with Aramaic sources and anthropological studies of sacrifice, and that this "Jewish meaning" had to do with "the essential conflict between Caiaphas' prerogatives as high priest and Jesus' vision."
• Chilton writes: "[W]hen Jesus spoke of his 'blood' and 'flesh,' he did not refer to himself personally at all. He meant his meal really had become a sacri-fice. When Israelites shared wine and bread in celebration of their own purity and the presence of the Kingdom, God delighted in that more than in the blood and flesh on the altar in the Temple. . . . Jesus was not talking the language of a new religion or a personal cult; he was insisting on God's approval of his own vision of sacrifice in
  the Temple" (p. 254).
• In other words, according to Chilton's reading, Caiaphas would look upon the sacrifice offered in the Temple under his supervision as "his" body and blood -- i.e., the proper body and blood to offer to God, which he was responsible for offering. But Jesus looked on his "holy feast" as the sacrifice that God really desired. In Jesus' sacrifice, bread and wine were the proper "body" and "blood" to offer to God. Since the vision was his, the body and blood became "his" as well: Caiaphas has "his" body and blood over there in the Temple, but this bread is "my" body and this wine is "my" blood.

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