 |
| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
This passage, Mark 3:11-12, dove tails quite neatly with Mark 1:21-28, which we looked at in posting #13 of this series. In both of these passages, people possessed by evil spirits declare Jesus to be either God's holy messenger (TEV wording) or the Son of God. In both, Jesus orders the demons to keep their mouths shut about who he is.
From a strictly historiographical perspective, all of this is problematical and outside the bounds of the historian's competence. Assuming Jesus didn't carry on public conversations with the demons (since he was ordering them to silence, it would be a silly contradiction to think he did so in public), we can't verify that he actually did order demons to silence. Demons, in any event, are a phenomenon historians can't study. The best we can do is to say that either the author of Mark had sources that believed Jesus did such a thing, or he made up this theme for his own gospel purposes. This theme does, however, highlight the fact that Jesus was seen to be an unusually powerful exorcist, a man who could converse with and exercise authority over evil spirits. Beyond that fact, it still seems that Mark is using this theme to reflect one other fact, namely that Jesus wasn't obviously the divine Second Person of the Trinity and he never declared himself to be holy or divine. The crowd is testimony to the fact that Jesus' compassion, authority, and power were evident to his contemporaries. The demons are testimony to the fact that other people didn't see in him an essential divine-ness. It takes even his disciples all the way to the end of Mark 8 to figure out that Jesus is something beyond the average human, and even there Peter declares Jesus to be only the Messiah, that is God's agent, not God (8:27-30).
I think we have to take Mark's gospel interpretation seriously. In other ways the author is apparently sensitive to historical themes, such as the growth in the size and complexity of the crowd and the growing antipathy of the over class to Jesus. It seems likely that the empirical Jesus didn't strike most of those who knew him as anything other than an unusual, powerful individual.
