Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Israel Knohl on the Historicity of Mark 12:35-37 (cf. Matthew 22:42-45; Luke 20:41-44)

  

Jesus was referring to the opening verse of Psalm 110: “The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool.” He was pointing out that according to this text, when David addresses the king-Messiah who is invited to sit on the right hand of God, David calls him “Lord.” Then, Jesus commented, “David himself calls him Lord, so how is he his son?” In other words, if the Messiah was in fact from the house of David, David would have addressed him as “my son.” With the support of this verse, Jesus was making an extraordinary claim: the Messiah described there, whose arrival the people was awaiting, was not a descendant of David!

 

Scholars have suggested that Jesus used this verse from the book of Psalms to show that although he did not descend genealogically from the house of David, he was the Messiah nevertheless. (See Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 141) If that was the case, this tradition concerning Jesus’s sermon assumed that he did not belong to the house of David, which contradicts the contention of the gospels of Matthew and Luke that Jesus was in fact descended from this line (see Matt .1:1; Luke 2:4). The very existence of this contradiction makes all the more likely the authenticity of the tradition that Jesus was not of the Davidic line and that he offered an extraordinary interpretation to support his claim to messiahship. It is hard to believe that New Testament authors would later fabricate a tradition opposed to the one in the gospels of Luke and Matthew.

 

And, in fact, in Jesus’s own words, as related in the Gospels, he himself never claimed to be a descendant of the house of David. Some of the people around him did say that hew as in the Davidic line—the beggar in Jericho called him “son of David,” the people at the Mount of Olives pronounced “Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that is coming!” (Mark 10:46-48 and 11:10, and parallels)—but Jesus himself never confirmed it.

 

Yet there’s more here. Jesus’s sermon denying that the Messiah would be descended from the house of David also represented an ideological rejection of Davidic messianism, which expected the arrival of a fighting Messiah who would liberate the Jews from Roman rule. To Jesus, the Messiah was not case in the mold of the warlike David, but was the son of God. As such, the Messiah was higher than David, which is why David had addressed him as “my Lord.” The divine voice Jesus heard when he was baptized in the River Jordan had addressed him as “my son,” and that is how he saw himself. Jesus would confirm this a few days later when he stood before the High Priest at his trial and asserted that he was “the Son of the Blessed one” (Mark 14:61-62). (Israel Knohl, The Messiah Confrontation: Pharisees Versus Sadducees and the Death of Jesus [trans. David Maisel; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2022], 148-49)