Dale Tuggy has revisited a discussion that took place between myself and Michael Kruger about the Christology of the Gospel of Mark. One nice thing about blogging is that discussions can take place over extended periods of time, as one finds the time to chime in, assuming the topic is engaging enough to sustain interest – as this one surely is. Click through to see what he has to say. James Dowden has also joined in the ongoing conversation. UPDATE: Dale now has a second post related to the topic, and Mike Kok posted on whether Mark knows of anything unusual related to Jesus’ birth.
Also related to this topic, Ian Paul has a post which concludes with a quote from someone else saying that Jesus “said he was God.” Do any readers of this blog actually think that is a fair representation of what Jesus says even in the Gospel of John? As C. K. Barrett pointed out many years ago, it is simply intolerable to understand Jesus’ “I Am” statement in John 8 to mean “I am Yahweh, the God of the Jewish Scriptures, and as such I do exactly as I am told. It makes better sense of the passage to understand it to be saying that Jesus bears the divine name as God’s principal agent, a concept known from other early Christian literature as well as its broader Jewish context.
But even if Jesus were depicted as saying “I am God” in the Gospel of John, the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John are historically problematic, and he clearly does not say anything of the sort elsewhere in the New Testament.
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