In the words of that famous English gentleman, Samuel Johnson, ‘I refute you thus’:

(Your words in italics, my refutations in bold)

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, and hears a voice in his head telling him he is now God’s son. It doesn’t say who hears the voice, but the implication is that it was not just Jesus or JTB

For the rest of the story, hardly anyone realizes Jesus is the chosen (not born) Messiah.  It’s only after the (implied) resurrection that they begin to understand and truly believe.

I think this is hugely over-stated view of the Messianic secret.  The only way to prove it is to quote chapter and verse.  Forgive me:

[Mar 8 selected verses]

11 And the Pharisees came forth, and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him.

23 And he took the blind man by the hand, …. This is a messianic miracle

27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? 28 And they answered, John the Baptist: but some [say], Elias; and others, One of the prophets. 29 And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him. 31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and [of] the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

32 And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him….. if he hadn’t said what he had said Peter wouldn’t have rebuked him

35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.

38 Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Mar 9:41 For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name, because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.

Mar 12:35 And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How say the scribes that Christ is the Son of David?

[Mar 13: KJV]

6 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am [Christ]; and shall deceive many.

9 ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them

13 And ye shall be hated of all [men] for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

21 And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here [is] Christ; or, lo, [he is] there; believe [him] not: 22 For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect.

23 But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things.

31 Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.

32 But of that day and [that] hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

34 [For the Son of man is] as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.

I have thus refuted you

In John’s gospel, the Baptist tells his own followers Jesus is the one they’ve all been waiting for, and we don’t see Jesus get baptized by him (the author of John hated that story, wanted to erase it steady on! maybe it was just something John or his community found difficult to explain and hence didn’t include it).  His own followers then become followers of Jesus. Agreed

Problem: The John cult was still very much around when the gospels were written, and they believed John was Messiah.   Actually, I think John repeatedly denied he was the Messiah or the Son of Man – that was supposed to be the bloke coming next, whom I agree,  JTB did expect to bring a baptism of apocalyptic fire

Clearly Mark’s account is partly factual, and John’s is completely made up.  Not clearly at all.  The 2 gospels  are from very different perspectives and understanding, yes, but you do not have sufficient evidence to accuse John of fiction.  Were you there?!

The stories about the Baptist in all four gospels are an attempt to make John subordinate to Jesus (in response to the greater popularity of the Baptist among Jews), when in fact it was the other way around until Jesus formed his own ministry–and even then he seems to have been quite deferential to his former master, while still pursuing his own course.  Yes, I am sure there is an element of the gospels trying to make it plain that JTB (who was initially much more of a celebrity especially in Judea) was subordinate to Jesus. However, just on the turn of events (miracles, teaching, and resurrection), it became plain for all to see that JTB was indeed subordinate to Jesus.  Just because the Gospels wanted to emphasise this it doesn’t mean they were straying into fiction.

I don’t see how that can possibly be reconciled.  It depends on what we you mean by reconciled.   There are contradictions as there are between good witnesses in a court of law.   Isn’t our job to try and see what really happened, without assuming that the witnesses were either hostile or dishonest.

What we need to recognize about the author of John’s Gospel is, he doesn’t WANT to be reconciled to the other gospels.  because the Maybe he read some of the other gospels, maybe not.  You are ‘on a sticky wicket’ here  (as we say in the England): I understand that most NT scholars don’t think John had access to other gospels  

I think the reason his gospel is so different is that he wants to replace all the earlier versions of the story with his own.  He wants his gospel to be the only gospel, his Jesus to be the only Jesus.  I think all this is wild conjecture

It is not a conciliatory book.  I never said it was, but its not the other Gospel writers he’s fighting against ???? 

Samuel Johnson just kicked a stone to refute Bishop Berkeley’s claim that matter didn’t exist.  Which didn’t really refute it, since Berkeley wasn’t saying matter didn’t SEEM to exist, but it got the point across well, all the same.  As Hume would say later, maybe we can’t prove reality is real, but it is awfully convincing, all the same.

I’m impressed that you have such a good understanding of philosophy and here we are in full agreement about the Berkeley-Johnson altercation – Johnson did indeed a fail to refute idealism ????

You haven’t made any arguments here that address my points.  I know there are miracles in the gospels that are meant to prove Jesus is Messiah.  The gospel authors all believe he is, though they all also disagree over exactly what that means.  Mark’s Jesus is a man chosen by God.  Matthew and Luke’s are semi-divine sons of virgins.  John’s is the incarnate word of God, and not a man in any sense.

So are you really saying John was a Docetist?  Surely not!

Kick all the stones you like, but you’re just reinforcing your own self-willed beliefs. 

Et tu Brutus 

You are the Bishop Berkeley here, dreaming up castles in the air.  I’m Dr. Johnson, kicking them down.  But unlike Dr. Johnson, I don’t have to tread carefully in the face of a very powerful church that can do me all kinds of harm if I twit it.

You’ve picked the wrong protagonist!   We now know from quantum mechanics that matter is just mathematics & information which our consciousness perceives via the bodily senses (also made up of maths & info) as rocks and other stuff.   

Talking of Dr. Johnson’s unwillingness to believe extraordinary things, I ventured to say, “Sir, you come near to Hume’s argument against miracles, ‘That it is more probable witnesses should lie, or be mistaken, than that they should happen.’” Johnson: “Why, Sir, Hume, taking the proposition simply, is right. But the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles alone, but as connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.”

Boswell: Life 

Translation: Yes, of course the miracles didn’t HAPPEN, but what’s that got to do with what we believe?

Nice ????

You can’t refute something that isn’t reality-based.  You can’t prove it either.  This is the problem.  Johnson was making that point precisely.  He kicks a stone and the stone moves.  That happened.  If you choose to believe it didn’t, there’s nothing he can do about it.  He can feel and see and hear that it did happen, and as Hume said, that’s all the proof one needs.  Reality is pervasive, therefore persuasive–but some people want to deny it.

The point I was making is that reality it sense-based and mind-dependent.  Even without going down to the very small scale, our sense organs only transmit trains of electrical impulses to our brains which only operate on this basis (in total darkness and with no direct contact with the world out there).  I’m not following Berkeley’s idealism here, I’m saying there is something ‘out there’, it’s just not what it seems to our senses.  Taking it further by going down to the very small scale, atoms are not solid ball-bearing like structures, they are 99.99999999% empty even counting the nucleus and electrons as solid.  However, the nucleus and the electrons are not solid like ball bearings, instead, they are made of quantum entities which can be considered as probability distributions (probabilities ‘of being there’ ie of interacting).  Solidity itself is just an emergent property of Pauli’s exclusion principle.  Our bodies and sense organs as well as ‘the world out’ there are made of probability distributions, rules and mathematics.  Even energy itself is just a set of rules.  The rock only seems to us to be what it is and movement is only a sense-based perspective on a deeper reality!  Linking back to theology, Heraclitus and the Stoics were right about the Logos!

Like some people want to deny virgins don’t have babies.  But in fairness, neither Mark nor John do that.  That’s one of the few things they do agree on.  Jesus wasn’t the son of a virgin.

Pure conjecture.  John and Mark make no direct comments about whether Jesus was born of a virgin because neither of them contain a birth narrative, probably because they had no access to sources for this information.  However, both confirm Jesus is the Son of God.  In John, this is clearly not adoption, so how else do you think the writer of John’s Gospel (who was anti-docetic) conceived of Jesus becoming flesh and dwelling among us?   As for Mark, I don’t believe he says anything directly about Jesus being an adopted Son of God.   My conjecture, which I think is better founded than yours, is that they both took it for granted the Jesus was born of a virgin. Everybody knew and, according to John, the pharisees taunted Jesus about him being a bastard!

But in John’s case, I think that’s because he finds the story a bit offensive and distasteful.

Utter conjecture

His Jesus is above such fleshy origins.  No afterbirth on the Incarnate Word of God.  I’m sure John thought Jesus never even took a crap.  But he sure as hell did. 

Where do you get all this conjecture from?,  Of course John thought Jesus was fully human, but no biographies that I know of (ancient or modern) discuss their subjects’ toilet activities

This is a reasonable set of conjectures, I can see as fair, even though I beleive that I have reasonable historic / logical grounds for holding to an alternative set of conjectures (it was the conjectures about John finding ‘the story a bit offensive and distasteful’ and the ‘no afterbirth’ and no defecating that I was really objecting to).  

The question of why Paul never mentioned the virgin birth is additional to the question of why Mark and John never mentioned it.  To be fair, Paul didn’t mention anything much about the life or even teachings of Jesus which raises even bigger questions.  For me at least, there is enough in the writings of all three authors about Jesus being the Son of God, sent by God etc (and in Paul and John, pre-existent in some form), to be consistent with him being the product of a virgin birth, but I accept there is still a pretty bigh question mark over the lack of mention.  

Actually, the virgin birth is not even a deal-breaker for me, just as many other problematic issues are not, such as Matthew’s use of OT scripture, contradictions in the Gospels / Acts / Paul letters, evolving Christologies, the apparent error in Jesus’s immanent apocalytic predictions as recorded in Mark and Matthew etc etc. 

What is important to me is

1. I beleive God exists. 

2. I beleive in the Messianic secret in its various practical and theological ramifications. (I’d have a much shorter creed if I was the Pope )   

Yes

Gosh.  That’s a lot to reply to ????.  Here goes:

Well let it not be said I have never brought joy to a human heart.  Hallelujah, Hallelujah etc (sung as in Handel’s Messiah).  Amen

Now could we focus on one thing?  Yes, I say again

Why does Mark have John baptizing Jesus, with zero indication that John thinks Jesus is anything special?  (With the clear implication Jesus was John’s disciple.)  Probably because it happened just as you describe.  He probably was a JTB disciple temporarily and John was in the dark.  Remember, it’s a secret, a messianic one ???? his glory was veiled etc.  Maybe John was a bit taken aback if doves and voices showed up.  Maybe only others saw the signs and wonders, maybe the gospel writers are basing their accounts on exaggerated retrospectively embellished oral tradition.

Then Matthew spackles in John saying Jesus should baptize him, and Jesus comes up with a rather lame jury-rigged explanation for why John should baptize him, not that he needs baptism, being the son of a virgin and all.   Maybe Jesus did think he was sinful prior to the start of his ministry.  Maybe he saw baptism as an opportunity to be commissioned for the start of his ministry.  Maybe he wanted to identify himself with John and his teaching.  Maybe it was a way of meeting John and having a chin wag.

Then Luke has the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus in the form of a dove, and he sort of skirts around the fact that John baptized Jesus, since he’s just explained how Herod Antipas locked John up.  Forgive my slowness, but I’m not clear on the point you are making here.

Then the fourth gospel basically takes it the final step, also refusing to say in so many words that John baptized Jesus (not depicting the baptism at all), saying (as Luke doesn’t) John attested that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus, and essentially declaring himself Jesus’ follower, even though John’s cult continued long after both men were dead, which is probably why all four gospels mention John the Baptist, and go to such pains to show Jesus was greater.  Yes, I agree, this seems the most likely explanation.  The author of John’s Gospel must have known Jesus was baptised and found it difficult to fit into his theology, hence omitted mentioning it.  That doesn’t mean his theology was completely wrong, but just incomplete.

Only Mark is willing to say Jesus was baptized by John without trying to explain away or obfuscate that fact–merely to imply Jesus is the one John was prophesying would come after him.  Yes, I think JTB was expecting an apocalyptic ‘baptism of fire’ from a heavenly, Enochian / Danielian Son of man, bringing judgmental fire etc.  In other words, Jesus’s glory was veiled even to JTB.  JTB was not in on the messianic secret – at least initially, possibly never.

To me, this show’s Mark’s understanding of who Jesus was differed very greatly from the other three gospel authors.  He did not think Jesus was a divine being before his baptism.  Maybe so.  Maybe this was why he emphasizes the messianic secret so much.  I have no problem with evolving and differing Christologies, even among the apostles after the resurrection.  Bart’s book ‘How Jesus became God’ is a masterpiece on this subject, even though I disagree with his own personal Christological conclusion.

Just an ordinary man who was somehow elevated to something higher by the baptism, due to his exceptional faith. Yes, certainly a man – a mere man, a fleshy man who uses the lavatory and was born of a woman (of course, ‘a mere man’ is by coincidence (?) another Hebrew meaning of the Son of Man), but I believe he was more than this.  At the end of the day, if one believes in God, then arguably our consciousness (that is our souls or spirits) all came from God and we all have a purpose.  Maybe we were all part of the Logos?   Whatever the case, Jesus is seemed to fulfil a special role and I believe he did it without faltering or sin (whether sinlessness extends pre-baptismally or pre-pubertally or whatever).  That role was one of divine identification with man, divine experience of being a man and suffering as a man (maybe there is some of this being fulfilled in all of us  – bearing in mind God is omniscient).  However, Jesus did it with style, obedience, grace, perfection, selflessness etc etc.  His glory was veiled, not even JTB was convinced he was the messiah / lamb of God (even if John’s gospel was right about JTB proclaiming prophetically ‘behold the lamb of God’ at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry).   Isaiah 53 makes it clear that there was a secret to the identity of the suffering servant:‘Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?’  ‘he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, [there is] no beauty that we should desire him’  ‘He is despised and rejected of men’  ‘we hid as it were [our] faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not’  ‘yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted’

Matthew and Luke think Jesus is divine because of the circumstances of his birth.  They may be right, but as I said the virgin birth is not a deal-breaker for me at least

John thinks he’s a pre-existing divine being–if not equal to God, than at least somehow consubstantial with Him, and has existed at least since the dawn of creation, waiting for this moment to take human form.  Yes, I have always struggled with this Johanine super high Christology, but I find it easier to swallow if I consider that we must have all have been at least a twinkle in God’s eye before the creation of the universe.  Alternatively, maybe John did  wax lyrical and over-cook his Christology a little.  The Logos poem is not a deal-breaker for me at least.

Close to Paul’s idea of him being an angel who was briefly clothed in mortal flesh, possibly derived from that. Yes, Bart thinks Paul thinks that Jesus was a pre-existent archangel.  But what is an angel and an archangel?  Are they really any different from us if we get ‘exalted’ to a heavenly (God willing ????) when we die and maybe we were in such an exalted state before we were rendered amnestic as we descended to our incarnation in the flesh.  Who knows?

Pretty large differences there.  The truth?  Well, who says any of them were right?  The point is, they don’t agree.   Yes, I agree with you, but maybe they all contain aspects and perspectives on the reality / the truth.

I’m still failing to see why a secret and a revelation are the same thing, but let’s put that aside for the moment.  A secret is a secret until it is revealed.  If it wasn’t a secret in the first place, then there would be no need for it to be revealed.  A secret can be revealed to some (to whom it becomes a revelation) and not to others (to whom it remains a secret).  A secret can be kept secret (‘veiled’) initially, then later revealed as in a revelation or apocalypse ????.  I think all of these apply to the messianic secret – to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?  Who has believed our report?  Who do you say that I am?  Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you Peter….  Nevertheless, when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away (2 Cor 3:16). So, the secret and the revelation are two sides of the same coin.  I pulled Bart’s leg in a recent post by saying that like the rabbis Paul was referring to in 2 Cor 3, the scriptures might even be veiled to NT scholars today ????  ** you do not have permission to see this link ** . He hasn’t responded to this ????

For the record, I don’t assume it happened just as Mark describes–I think Jesus was known to have been baptized by John, with the logical implication that Jesus was a follower of John’s, but decades later, this was hard for newly minted Christians to accept.  Yes, I agree

I do of course think Jesus believed he was a sinner, as are we all, but Matthew’s Jesus is the son of a virgin, born without sin, and Matthew is concerned by Jesus needing baptism at all, let alone from someone who is (as he sees it) subordinate to Jesus.  (Mark avoids that issue, and really avoids any verbal interaction between the two).  OK, I don’t have any quibbles here except that I personally tend to think that Jesus was ‘sinless’ in the sense of being perfectly obedient to his conscience and to ‘his Father’ some stage – either post-baptismally, or post-pubertally rather than just post-exaltation – though I wouldn’t even say this is a deal-breaker.   The definition of sin (‘falling short of the target’), I accept, is problematic, but I tend to view sin as requiring both consciousness and free will (which are closely linked) in order to be able to consciously go against what one ‘knows’ as ‘right’ from either conscience or an inner sense of God’s direction.  The ability to have consciousness must develop in utero and the ability to have free will in its fullest sense gradually evolves as the frontal cortex develops in late childhood and adolescence, so this places some temporal constraints on the ability to sin and to be sinless.  A zygote can’t sin and I doubt a child of less than 5 years of age can.  The reason I think Jesus was sinless is that it would make theological sense for one person to have hit the target and been a spotless Passover lamb and in some ways it makes cosmological sense that we can have one figure in the whole of human history to really really look up to as the perfect model and thus worship.   It’s sometimes difficult to worship YHVH, the great I am from which all things proceed, the all in all etc etc – he is just too big (or as Maimonides would perhaps have us say apophatically, ‘he/she/it is not without bigness’).   Jesus kind of makes God imaginable and thus worshipable.

My point is that Luke, unlike Mark and Matthew, suggests that all assembled saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descend on Jesus.  (Which begs the question why all those people didn’t become followers of Jesus right then and then).  Maybe this story is exaggerated oral tradition / incorrectly remembered events etc or maybe only certain people saw something, certain others heard something, and others thought that they saw something or thought that they heard something which morphed into greater certainty over time or when they spoke to others who had similar experiences etc etc.  Bart deals with all these theories in his ‘Jesus before the Gospels’ but I think he takes a far too cynical view.  Actually, it doesn’t matter to me.

John was wrong about a hell of a lot of things, ahem…. 

but most of all in using a gospel of love to preach hatred towards all unconveted Jews, when only a handful of temple priests had any role in Jesus’ death, and Pilate was equally responsible.  I agree that some of John’s Gospel was used as an inspiration to sow the seeds of anti-Semitism, but we have to be aware of our tendency to presentism – the ‘retrospectoscope’ is a wonderful tool and I don’t think the writer of John’s Gospel could have had any conception of what would happen during the later history of the church.   Also, I think there is a case for a very large crowd of Jewish people in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, as well as the Sanhedrin as a whole and the key representatives of the nation, ‘turning’ on Jesus rather than just a handful of priests – the same crowd of Jewish people that had made Jesus’s entry to Jerusalem so triumphal.  They, like Judas, had hoped that he would be the expected messianic king who would liberate Judah and Israel from the Romans, but then their disappointment turned to disgust, derision and ultimately murderous intention.  The veil was pulled down, so that ‘in hearing they did not hear and in seeing they did not see’.  ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.

Angels are not recycled humans.  They are, in Jewish belief (and mainly in Christian belief) beings created before God created Adam and Eve, with enormous power, second only to God’s.  Satan was an angel (and in Job, still is).  That is one theology of angels with its set of definitions, but others, including ancient Jewish theologians have said that angels can be said to be anyone with a heavenly ‘shining one’ appearance who come with a ‘message’ from God (I think that Bart gives some examples of this in ‘How Jesus became God’) .  If there is an afterlife, which I believe there is and if it is true that sometimes deceased relatives appear to their loved ones (which I believe they do sometimes) – they are often described as glowing and exuding love etc.  So, is there really such a close definitional distinction between a pre-incarnate or post-incarnate humans and angels?

Yes, a man can be exalted by God, but that’s not what Paul or any gospel author but Mark is saying happened with Jesus.  The others are saying he was divine from the time of his conception, or ages before it.  Mark’s idea of the Messiah is closer to the original idea, that a man would be born who would lead Israel to freedom, but Mark has greatly expanded the parameters of the mission.  I agree there are differing Christologies between different NT authors.  I say: Vive la difference

I would like to think any deeply held belief contains aspects and perspectives on the truth, but reality is objective, and we can’t all be right about that.  Not all philosophers would agree with you on that, but I sort of do ????.  Actually, true objectivity can only be possessed by an omniscient being.  What we call objectivity is only what I like to call ‘shared subjectivity’.   What we can all agree on!  The problem is that none of us are perfect observers or perfect recorders of the full reality or truth – certainly not the disciples, certainly not the Gospel writers who wrote 30 to 60 years later.  I think this is part of the mystery of the messianic secret – the veiled glory that we have glimpses of through our human subjectivity.