Was Jesus in Mark Indignant to the Leper, or Compassionate?
In Mark we read:
Jesus Heals a Man With Leprosy
40 A man with leprosy[** you do not have permission to see this link **] came to him and begged him on his knees, “If you are willing, you can make me clean.”
41 Jesus was indignant.[** you do not have permission to see this link **] He reached out his hand and touched the man. “I am willing,” he said. “Be clean!” 42 Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed.
43 Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: 44 “See that you don’t tell this to anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest and offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing, as a testimony to them.” 45 Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere. Mark 1:40-45 New International Version (NIV)
Footnotes:
- ** you do not have permission to see this link ** The Greek word traditionally translated leprosy was used for various diseases affecting the skin.
- ** you do not have permission to see this link ** Many manuscripts Jesus was filled with compassion
So was Jesus indignant toward the leper, or was he filled with compassion?
POSSIBLITY 1: As Bart Ehrman pointed out in a 2005 article in Bible Review, “one factor in favor of the ‘angry’ reading is that it sounds wrong.” It is much easier to believe that early scribes were troubled by Jesus’ anger and changed it to his feeling compassion, rather than the other way around. Later scribes also would have preferred the easier “compassion” reading and copied it until it became the more popular reading. (As Ehrman explains, there are other passages in the Gospel of Mark that seem to support the reading conveying Jesus’ anger.)
POSSIBILITY 2: On the other hand, one can construct a reasonable hypothesis as to why an editor may have changed “compassion” to “indignant.” Regarding the possibility of one manuscript changing “compassion” to “indignant,” part of the theme of Mark 1:40-45 is “keeping the secret.” We read that “43 Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: 44 ‘See that you don’t tell this to anyone.’” One possibility is that one manuscript changed “Jesus was compassionate” to “Jesus was indignant” because that redactor wanted to emphasize the theme of “the secret.” In that case, maybe Jesus was portrayed indignant at the leper asking for help because he knew he had to heal him, but he really didn’t want the secret getting out. In this case, “compassion” may have been the original reading.
Does anyone have any thoughts?
Bart has covered this on the blog as well so maybe he’s described it differently here than in the article you reference. I think he’s also talked about something similar (Jesus showing anger) in a blog post (I think there were two of them) covering a pericope found in a non-canonical gospel.
That said, Bart’s contention, I believe, is that the bit about Jesus being “indignant” is likely true since it meets the criterion of embarrassment which is to say that the author of Mark would have been unlikely to include a story showing a “weakness” (anger) in Jesus unless the author felt it was accurate. I have a hard time believing a later editor would change “compassion” to “indignant”. While I’ve never heard of a redactor going the opposite way (editing something to emphasize a weakness in Jesus) I’m certainly not a scholar.
gmatthews said
Bart has covered this on the blog as well so maybe he’s described it differently here than in the article you reference. I think he’s also talked about something similar (Jesus showing anger) in a blog post (I think there were two of them) covering a pericope found in a non-canonical gospel.That said, Bart’s contention, I believe, is that the bit about Jesus being “indignant” is likely true since it meets the criterion of embarrassment which is to say that the author of Mark would have been unlikely to include a story showing a “weakness” (anger) in Jesus unless the author felt it was accurate. I have a hard time believing a later editor would change “compassion” to “indignant”. While I’ve never heard of a redactor going the opposite way (editing something to emphasize a weakness in Jesus) I’m certainly not a scholar.
It is incredible that Jesus deals with the leper at all. Leviticus 13:45-46 says 45 “Anyone with such a defiling disease must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt,[a] cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ 46 As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside the camp.”
But anyway, I think the point is that Jesus, even though he might have had some understandable revulsion toward the leper, immediately reaches out and touches the leper. If this is not a compassionate ethics in the sense of caring for widow, orphan, and alien, I don’t know what is.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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