In my previous posts I have pointed out that the Gospel of Mark  (unlike the other Gospels) portrays Jesus as trying to keep his messiahship a secret.  He doesn’t allow the demons to identify him when he casts them out; when he heals people he strictly instructs them not to tell anyone; he teaches his disciples the “secret of the Kingdom” privately when no one else is around; he teaches the crowds only using parables precisely (Mark indicates) so no one can understand what he means.  And he never publicly teaches about his own identity.

This last point should be emphasized. Unlike other Gospels (see John 4:25-26!) Jesus never tells anyone publicly that he is the messiah.  When he is acknowledged as the messiah by Peter in a private conversation with the disciples in Mark 8:29-30, Jesus orders them not to let anyone know.  And then he starts teaching that as the messiah he has to be rejected and executed.  That seems to be a complete contradiction of terms for Peter, who has just made the acknowledgment; Peter rebukes him for thinking so.  Obviously the messiah doesn’t face rejection and execution – the messiah is supposed to rule Israel as the powerful leader sent from God!  Jesus in turn rebukes Peter and calls him Satan.  For Jesus (and Mark) Peter understands only in part.  Yes Jesus is the messiah, but not the one anyone expects.  So he keeps it secret.

But William Wrede, in his classic The Messianic Secret, did not think that this could be a historical reality.  It’s not really what happened in the life of Jesus.  As I pointed out yesterday, the “secrecy” actually doesn’t make any good sense in a number of ways, even in Mark’s Gospel, as a plausible historical event.  So what’s going on?

Wrede devised the idea of Mark’s messianic secret to explain it.  For Wrede the early Christians in Mark’s community were trying to explain why they themselves thought Jesus was the messiah if there were no stories about Jesus during his life advertising the fact.  Why wasn’t he known as the messiah while he was alive, if we think (if we know!) he is the messiah now?  The secrecy motif explains it.  It is a fictionalized aspect of the Jesus story.  No one in Jesus’ own time knew that he was a messiah – Mark’s community explained – because he hushed it up.   The hush-up then becomes a central part of Mark’s own Gospel.  It’s a non-historical idea.  Didn’t really happen that way.

The result is profound.  Mark’s Gospel is not a straightforward historical narrative that simply tells it like it was, as scholars had been arguing for a very long time, writing entire books about the life of Jesus with that very premise.  No, just like the other Gospels, Mark’s was a theological account of Jesus’ life, one that has altered the facts of history in order to convey important theological points.  You can’t simply trust that it narrates what actually happened.

To get to this conclusion, Wrede thought one passage of Mark was particularly important.  Halfway through Jesus’ ministry, almost right in the middle of the narrative, after Peter has confessed that Jesus is the messiah and Jesus then reveals to the disciples for the first time that he has to suffer and die, comes the account of Jesus’ Transfiguration (Mark  9:1-9).  Three of the disciples see with their own eyes that Jesus is no mere mortal but a heavenly being.

Jesus takes the three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, alone up to a mountain top, where he suddenly is transformed before them.  His garments become radiantly white, and Elijah and Moses come to speak with him.  Peter proposes they build three tents for the three heavenly beings, when suddenly a cloud descends and a voice comes from the cloud (the voice of God, obviously), declaring to the disciples “This is my beloved Son.  Listen to him!”

Another secret revelation, only the true insiders see, of Jesus’ unique identity.  But then comes the key verse, Mark  9:9.  Jesus tells the three of them that they are not to tell anyone what they have seen, “until the son of man rises from the dead.”  Again, why does it have to be kept a secret?  And why can the secret be revealed after Jesus’ resurrection?

For Wrede the verse revealed that the nature of Jesus’ identity was, according to Mark himself, not known during Jesus’ life,  but only after the resurrection.

Wrede put this together with one other historical reality that can be surmised from various passages of the New Testament: the very first believers in Jesus after his death believed that it was precisely at the resurrection that Jesus had *become* the Son of God.  This was the earliest Christology.  Jesus was made the Son of God when God raised him from the dead.

This is a view that continues to be held widely today about the beginnings of Christianity.  (It’s my own view, as I lay it out in How Jesus Became God.) During his life Jesus was revered by his followers as a great teacher and prophet.  But it was the resurrection that made them think he was more than that, the actual Son of God, a being made divine and taken up to heaven.   There is good evidence for this view in the speeches that the apostles are said to have made in the book of Acts.  Read Acts 2:36 and Acts 13:32-33 carefully.  They seem to embody the oldest Christian belief, that he man Jesus was made a divine being at the resurrection.

For Wrede then there are three important facts:  the first Christians thought Jesus became the messiah/Son of God at the resurrection; but the later Christians of Mark’s community thought he had been the messiah/Son of God already during his public ministry; and in Mark’s retelling of the Jesus’ stories, Jesus explicitly indicates that no one will know his divine identity until after the resurrection.

Conclusion?  Before Mark wrote his account, the Christians in his community made sense of it all by claiming that even though he had been messiah during his ministry (as they believed), the reason no one knew about it until after the resurrection (which was the historical truth), is because Jesus must have made it a secret during his life (as indicated ultimately in Mark’s Gospel itself).  Thus the “messianic secret” is a later invention put on Jesus’ lips, that then came into Mark’s Gospel.

The other Gospels don’t have this view, except in a few places in Matthew and Luke where Mark’s version has not been fully altered by these later editor/authors.  But they get rid of most of the secrecy motif, and it’s completely gone in John.  It is distinctive of Mark.

And that shows that Mark’s narrative, like the others, is, at least in part, driven by theological, rather than purely historical, interests.