Loading...In previous posts I have given some of the reasons for thinking that Luke did not write the account of Jesus “sweating blood” in his prayer before his arrest. A lot more could obviously be said, but anyone who wants more can just look up the discussion in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. For the purposes of the blog, two BIG questions remain: why does Luke change Mark’s portrayal of Jesus going to his death so that now he is so clearly calm and collected? And why did later scribes change Luke’s portrayal by adding the two verses in question? I’ll answer the first question in this post and the next, the second in a third post in a couple of days.
The first thing to stress is that Luke’s emphasis can be found not only in this passage but in others as well, as a redactional comparison with Mark shows (i.e., seeing what Luke has edited – or “redacted” — in Mark’s version, by what he has added, omitted, and changed)
FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN NOW!!
In his commentary on Mark, Joel Marcus says that the loud cry in verse 37 probably does not denote a second shout but is a back-reference to the cry of dereliction in verse 34. Unfortunately Marcus doesn’t explain his reasoning. Can you explain the reason in your next post?
On balance I share your view the cry of dereliction is best understood to reflect Jesus’ genuine sense of abandonment, even by God. However, I would not rule out if he has the strength to say more, he could have proceeded with rest of the psalms, not least to comfort himself, to shake himself out of the feeling of despair.
I think this verse is exegetically under-determined and lends itself to a range of interpretation. The problem with Mark is that his gospel is quite raw, he sometimes says things that are striking and counter-intuitive to the beliefs of the early church who had an elevated view of Jesus, and he doesn’t explain himself fully.
It is interesting that conservative evangelicals are particularly adamant that not only Jesus “felt” abandoned, he was genuinely abandoned by God, because God was angry with Jesus and punishing Jesus who took on the sins of the world (it’s all part of the evangelical doctrine of penal substitution).
I agree there are major thematic differences in the presentation of the passion and the crucifixion in Mark and Luke, and one cannot avoid tackling the question of why there are differences of emphasis. As a rule, it is bad exegesis to mesh different accounts together on the a priori principle that all differences must be harmonised. However, I think it is to fall into the opposite mistake of never attempting to reconcile different accounts of the same event, when trying to piece together the fuller historical picture. Surely differences of emphasis can reflect the authors’ selectiveness from a wider set of available stories and underlying historical accounts? It is possible the historical Jesus went through a range of emotions – both despair and sense of mission accomplished – during the passion and the crucifixion.
Can we be certain Jesus was reciting from Psalms 22:1, and it wasn’t just a coincidence?
An Eastern Orthodox acquaintance of mine pointed out that Mark uses the word ‘boaô’ only one other time: the voice that ‘shouts’ in the wilderness (Mk 1.3), hence Mark wants to convey the idea that Jesus was “shouting out” the Psalm in the Isaiah context. When the centurion saw that he shouted like that, and breathed out, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son’. The centurion would not have done that, if the cry were merely pitiable. He would have despised it. What would have been more common than for a condemned criminal to cry out in agony. But no, for Mark, Christ regally stood on the cross, shouting the Psalm 22, and then he breathed out. The centurion was stunned by what he saw, and his remark amounts to a full redefinition of the expression ‘son of God’.
In your next post, can say what do you make of this interpretation? Could Mark 15 be using “shout” in the same regal sense as in Mark 1:3? Could the regal triumphant shout be the reason why the centurion proclaimed Jesus as the son of God? Luke may have deleted the cry of dereliction because he took it to mean something negative about Jesus. But this may not be Mark’s intent. What was Matthew trying to convey by preserving the cry of dereliction?
Answers in a future post are much appreciated.
Too many questoins (and hard ones!) to answer here. But briefly: I’m not sure what leads my friend Joel Marcus to that conclusion, off hand. I think Jesus must indeed be quoting Ps. 22: it’s a word-for-word parallel. The comment on BOAO is interesting and probably significant, but I’ve never looked into it, I’m sorry to say. (1:3 is another quotation from scripture, not mark’s composition, for what it’s worth)