by Reza Aslan
Despite their relative success, however, Jesus and his disciples have for the most part restricted their activities to the northern provinces of Galilee, Phoenicia, and Gaulanitis, wisely keeping a safe distance from Judea and the seat of the Roman occupation in Jerusalem. They have cut a circuitous route through the Galilean countryside, altogether bypassing the royal cities of Sepphoris and Tiberias, lest they confront the tetrarch’s forces. Although they’ve approached the prosperous ports of Tyre and Sidon, they have refrained from actually entering either. They have rambled along the edge of the Decapolis, yet strictly avoided the Greek cities themselves and the heathen populations therein. In place of the region’s wealthy cosmopoleis, Jesus has focused his attention on poorer villages such as Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Nain, where his promise of a new world order has been eagerly received, as well as on the coastal towns that rim the Sea of Galilee, save for Tiberias, of course, where Herod Antipas stews on his throne.
After two years, word of Jesus and his band of followers has finally reached Antipas’s court. Certainly, Jesus has not been shy in condemning “that Fox” who claims the tetrarchy of Galilee and Peraea, nor has he ceased pouring contempt upon the hypocrite priests and scribes—the “brood of vipers”—who he claims will be displaced in the coming Kingdom of God by harlots and toll collectors. Not only has he healed those whom the Temple cast out as sinners beyond salvation, he has cleansed them of their sins, thus rendering irrelevant the entire priestly establishment and their costly, exclusivist rituals. His healings and exorcisms have drawn crowds too large for the tetrarch in Tiberias to ignore, though, at least for now, the fickle masses seem less interested in Jesus’s teachings than in his “tricks,” so much so that when they keep asking for a sign so that they may believe his message, Jesus seems finally to have had enough. “It is an evil and adulterous generation that seeks a sign; no sign shall be given to it” (Matthew 12:38).
All of this activity has the sycophants at Antipas’s court chattering about who this Galilean preacher may be. Some think he is Elijah reborn, or perhaps one of the other “prophets of old.” That is not a wholly unreasonable conclusion. Elijah, who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel in the ninth century B.C.E., was the paradigm of the wonder-working prophet. A fearsome and uncompromising warrior for Yahweh, Elijah strove to root out the worship of the Canaanite god Baal among the Israelites. “How long will you continue limping along with two opinions?” Elijah asked the people. “If Yahweh is god, then follow him; if Baal is god, then follow him” (1 Kings 18:21).
To prove Yahweh’s superiority, Elijah challenged four hundred and fifty priests of Baal to a contest. They would prepare two altars, each with a bull placed on a pillar of wood. The priests would pray to Baal for fire to consume the offering, while Elijah prayed to Yahweh.
Day and night the priests of Baal prayed. They shouted aloud and cut themselves with swords and lances until they were awash in blood. They cried and begged and pleaded with Baal to bring down fire, but nothing happened.
Elijah then poured twelve jars of water on his pyre, took a step back, and called upon the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel to show his might. At once a great ball of fire fell down from heaven and consumed the bull, the wood, the stones, the dust on the ground, and the pools of water surrounding the sacrifice. When the Israelites saw the work of Yahweh, they fell down on their knees and worshipped him as God. But Elijah was not finished. He seized the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal, forced them down into the valley of Wadi Kishon, and, according to the scriptures, slaughtered every last one of them with his own hands, for he was “zealous for the Lord God Almighty” (1 Kings 18:20–40, 19:10).
So great was Elijah’s faithfulness that he was not allowed to die but was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind to sit beside God’s throne (2 Kings 2:11). His return at the end of time, when he would gather together the twelve tribes of Israel and sweep in the messianic age, was predicted by the prophet Malachi: “Behold, I am sending the prophet Elijah to you before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of fathers to their sons, and the hearts of sons to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse” (Malachi 4:5–6).
Malachi’s prophecy explains why the courtiers at Tiberias see in Jesus the reincarnation of Israel’s quintessential end-times prophet. Jesus has done little to discourage such comparisons, consciously taking upon himself the symbols of the prophet Elijah—the itinerant ministry, the peremptory calling of disciples, the mission to reconstitute the twelve tribes, the strict focus on the northern regions of Israel, and the signs and wonders he performs everywhere he goes.
Antipas, however, is unconvinced by the mutterings of his courtiers. He believes that the preacher from Nazareth is not Elijah but John the Baptist, whom he killed, risen from the dead. Blinded by guilt over John’s execution, he is incapable of conceiving Jesus’s true identity (Matthew 14:1–2; Mark 6:14–16; Luke 9:7–9).
Meanwhile, Jesus and his disciples continue their slow journey toward Judea and Jerusalem. Leaving behind the village of Bethsaida, where, according to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus fed five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish (Mark 6:30–44), the disciples begin traveling along the outskirts of Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city north of the Sea of Galilee that serves as the seat of the tetrarchy of Herod the Great’s other son, Philip. As they walk, Jesus casually asks his followers, “Who do the people say I am?”
The disciples’ response reflects the speculations at Tiberias: “Some say you are John the Baptist. Others say Elijah. Still others say you are Jeremiah or one of the other prophets risen from the dead.”
Jesus stops and turns to his disciples. “But who do you say I am?”
It falls upon Simon Peter, the nominal leader of the Twelve, to answer for the rest: “You are messiah,” Peter says, inferring at this fateful juncture in the gospel story the mystery that the tetrarch in Tiberias could not possibly comprehend (Matthew 16:13–16; Mark 8:27–29; Luke 9:18–20).
Six days later, Jesus takes Peter and the brothers James and John—the sons of Zebedee—to a high mountain, where he is miraculously transformed before their eyes. “His clothes became dazzling white, like snow,” Mark writes, “whiter than any fuller on earth could whiten them.” Suddenly Elijah, the prophet and precursor to the messiah, appears on the mountain. With him is Moses, the great liberator and lawgiver of Israel, the man who broke the bonds of the Israelites and shepherded the people of God back to the Promised Land.
Elijah’s presence on the mountain has already been primed by the speculations in Tiberias and by the ruminations of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi. But Moses’s appearance is something else entirely. The parallels between the so-called transfiguration story and the Exodus account of Moses receiving the law on Mount Sinai are hard to miss. Moses also took three companions with him up the mountain—Aaron, Nadab and Abihu—and he, too, was physically transformed by the experience. Yet whereas Moses’s transformation was the result of his coming into contact with God’s glory, Jesus is transformed by his own glory. Indeed, the scene is written in such a way so that Moses and Elijah—the Law and the Prophets—are clearly made subordinate to Jesus.
The disciples are terrified by the vision, and rightly so. Peter tries to ease the disquiet by offering to build three tabernacles at the site: one for Jesus, one for Elijah, and one for Moses. As he speaks, a cloud consumes the mountain—just as it did centuries ago on Mount Sinai—and a voice from within echoes the words that were uttered from on high the day that Jesus began his ministry at the Jordan River: “This is my son. The Beloved. Listen to him,” God says, bestowing upon Jesus the same sobriquet (ho Agapitos, “the Beloved”) that God had given to King David. Thus, what Antipas’s court could not conceive, and Simon Peter could only surmise, is now divinely confirmed in a voice from a cloud atop a mountain: Jesus of Nazareth is the anointed messiah, the King of the Jews (Matthew 17:1–8; Mark 9:2–8; Luke 9:28–36).
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What makes these three clearly interconnected scenes so significant is that up to this point in Jesus’s ministry, particularly as it has been presented in the earliest gospel, Mark, Jesus has made no statement whatsoever about his messianic identity. In fact, he has repeatedly tried to conceal whatever messianic aspirations he may or may not have had. He silences the demons that recognize him (Mark 1:23–25, 34, 3:11–12). He swears those he heals to secrecy (Mark 1:43–45, 5:40–43, 7:32–36, 8:22–26). He veils himself in incomprehensible parables and goes out of his way to obscure his identity and mission from the crowds that gather around him (Mark 7:24). Over and over again Jesus rebuffs, avoids, eludes, and sometimes downright rejects the title of messiah bestowed upon him by others.
There is a term for this strange phenomenon, which has its origins in the gospel of Mark but which can be traced throughout the gospels. It is called the “messianic secret.”
Some believe that the messianic secret is the evangelist’s own invention, that it is either a literary device to slowly reveal Jesus’s true identity or a clever ploy to emphasize just how wondrous and compelling Jesus’s messianic presence was; despite his many attempts to hide his identity from the crowds, it simply could not be concealed. “The more he ordered them [not to tell anyone about him],” Mark writes, “the more excessively they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36).
Yet that assumes a level of literary skill in the gospel of Mark for which no evidence exists (Mark’s gospel is written in a coarse, elementary Greek that betrays the author’s limited education). The notion that the messianic secret may have been Mark’s way of slowly revealing Jesus’s identity belies the fundamental theological assertion that launches the gospel in the first place: “This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Christ” (Mark 1:1). Regardless, even at the moment in which Jesus’s messianic identity is first surmised by Simon Peter in his dramatic confession outside Caesarea Philippi—indeed, even when his identity is spectacularly revealed by God upon the mountaintop—Jesus still commands his disciples to secrecy, sternly ordering them not to tell anyone what Peter confessed (Mark 8:30), and forbidding the three witnesses to his transfiguration to utter a word about what they saw (Mark 9:9).
It is more likely that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus, though it may have been embellished and reconstructed in Mark’s gospel before being adopted haphazardly and with obvious reservations by Matthew and Luke. That the messianic secret may be historical helps explain why Mark’s redactors went to such lengths to compensate for their predecessor’s portrayal of a messiah who seems to want nothing to do with the title. For example, while Mark’s account of Simon Peter’s confession ends with Jesus neither accepting nor rejecting the title but simply ordering the disciples “not to tell anyone about him,” Matthew’s account of the same story, which took shape twenty years later, has Jesus responding to Peter with a resounding confirmation of his messianic identity: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” Jesus exclaims. “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you; it was my father in heaven who did so” (Matthew 16:17).
In Mark, the miraculous moment on the mountaintop ends without comment from Jesus, only a firm reminder not to tell anyone what had happened. But in Matthew, the transfiguration ends with a lengthy discourse by Jesus in which he identifies John the Baptist as Elijah reborn, thereby explicitly claiming for himself, as the successor to John/Elijah, the mantle of the messiah (Matthew 17:9–13). And yet, despite these apologetic elaborations, even Matthew and Luke conclude both Peter’s confession and the transfiguration with strict commands by Jesus to, in Matthew’s words, “not tell anyone that he was the messiah” (Matthew 16:20).
If it is true that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus, then it could very well be the key to unlocking, not who the early church thought Jesus was, but who Jesus himself thought he was. Admittedly, this is no easy task. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to rely on the gospels to access Jesus’s self-consciousness. As has been repeatedly noted, the gospels are not about a man known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago; they are about a messiah whom the gospel writers viewed as an eternal being sitting at the right hand of God. The firstcentury Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.
Still, there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself. Obviously, the disciples who followed Jesus recognized him as messiah, either during his lifetime or immediately after his death. But one should not forget that messianic expectations were by no means uniformly defined in first-century Palestine. Even those Jews who agreed that Jesus was the messiah did not agree about what being the messiah actually meant. When they scoured the smattering of prophecies in the scriptures, they discovered a confusing, often contradictory, array of views and opinions about the messiah’s mission and identity. He would be an eschatological prophet who will usher in the End of Days (Daniel 7:13–14; Jeremiah 31:31–34). He would be a liberator who will release the Jews from bondage (Deuteronomy 18:15–19; Isaiah 49:1–7). He would be a royal claimant who will recreate the Kingdom of David (Micah 5:1–5; Zechariah 9:1–10).
In first-century Palestine, nearly every claimant to the mantle of the messiah neatly fit one of these messianic paradigms. Hezekiah the bandit chief, Judas the Galilean, Simon of Peraea, and Athronges the shepherd all modeled themselves after the Davidic ideal, as did Menahem and Simon son of Giora during the Jewish War. These were king-messiahs whose royal aspirations were clearly defined in their revolutionary actions against Rome and its clients in Jerusalem. Others, such as Theudas the wonder worker, the Egyptian, and the Samaritan cast themselves as liberator-messiahs in the mold of Moses, each would-be messiah promising to free his followers from the yoke of Roman occupation through some miraculous deed. Oracular prophets such as John the Baptist and the holy man Jesus ben Ananias may not have overtly assumed any messianic ambitions, but their prophecies about the End Times and the coming judgment of God clearly conformed to the prophet-messiah archetype one finds both in the Hebrew Scripture and in the rabbinic traditions and commentaries known as the Targum.
The problem for the early church is that Jesus did not fit any of the messianic paradigms offered in the Hebrew Bible, nor did he fulfill a single requirement expected of the messiah. Jesus spoke about the end of days, but it did not come to pass, not even after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and defiled God’s Temple. He promised that God would liberate the Jews from bondage, but God did no such thing. He vowed that the twelve tribes of Israel would be reconstituted and the nation restored; instead, the Romans expropriated the Promised Land, slaughtered its inhabitants, and exiled the survivors. The Kingdom of God that Jesus predicted never arrived; the new world order he described never took shape. According to the standards of the Jewish cult and the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was as successful in his messianic aspirations as any of the other would-be messiahs.
The early church obviously recognized this dilemma and, as will become apparent, made a conscious decision to change those messianic standards. They mixed and matched the different depictions of the messiah found in the Hebrew Bible to create a candidate that transcended any particular messianic model or expectation. Jesus may not have been prophet, liberator, or king. But that is because he rose above such simple messianic paradigms. As the transfiguration proved, Jesus was greater than Elijah (the prophet), greater than Moses (the liberator), even greater than David (the king).
That may have been how the early church understood Jesus’s identity. But it does not appear to be how Jesus himself understood it. After all, in the entire first gospel there exists not a single definitive messianic statement from Jesus himself, not even at the very end when he stands before the high priest Caiaphas and somewhat passively a
ccepts the title that others keep foisting upon him (Mark 14:62). The same is true for the early Q source material, which also contains not a single messianic statement by Jesus.
Perhaps Jesus was loath to take on the multiple expectations the Jews had of the messiah. Perhaps he rejected the designation outright. Either way, the fact remains that, especially in Mark, every time someone tries to ascribe the title of messiah to him—whether a demon, or a supplicant, or one of the disciples, or even God himself—Jesus brushes it off or, at best, accepts it reluctantly and always with a caveat.
However Jesus understood his mission and identity—whether he himself believed he was the messiah—what the evidence from the earliest gospel suggests is that, for whatever reason, Jesus of Nazareth did not openly refer to himself as messiah. Nor, by the way, did Jesus call himself “Son of God,” another title that others seem to have ascribed to him. (Contrary to Christian conceptions, the title “Son of God” was not a description of Jesus’s filial connection to God but rather the traditional designation for Israel’s kings. Numerous figures are called “Son of God” in the Bible, none more often than David, the greatest king—2 Samuel 7:14; Psalms 2:7, 89:26; Isaiah 42:1). Rather, when it came to referring to himself, Jesus used an altogether different title, one so enigmatic and unique that for centuries scholars have been desperately trying to figure out what he could have possibly meant by it. Jesus called himself “the Son of Man.”
