Reading the Bible again for the First Time

by Marcus J. Borg

  Then, in language that Mark almost certainly understood to refer to the second coming of Jesus, the Jesus of Mark speaks of “the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory”:

  But in those days, after that suffering,

  the sun will be darkened,

  and the moon will not give its light,

  and the stars will be falling from heaven,

  and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

  Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with

  great power and glory. Then he will send out his angels to

  gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the

  earth to the ends of heaven.

  When will all of this happen? Soon. A few verses later, the Jesus of Mark says, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.”18 Thus Mark viewed the events of 70—the suffering of the final stages of the war, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple—as signs that “the end” was at hand.

  In short, Mark’s gospel has an apocalyptic eschatology.19 Apocalyptic eschatology appears earlier in his gospel as well, in a “kingdom of God” saying. In the middle of Mark, immediately after a passage about the Son of Man coming in glory with his angels, the Jesus of Mark speaks of the imminence of the kingdom: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God coming with power.”20 In other words, some of those still alive will see this.

  Jesus’ Inaugural Scene The imminence of the kingdom of God is the theme of Jesus’ brief inaugural address in Mark:

  The time is fulfilled,

  and the kingdom of God is at hand.

  Repent and believe in the good news.

  Though Jesus often spoke about the kingdom of God, this passage is Mark’s thematic construction, announcing a major emphasis of his gospel. “The time is fulfilled”; the kingdom of which Jesus spoke is now “at hand.”

  Yet though the events of 70 account for Mark’s emphasis on the imminence of the kingdom, they account for surprisingly little of his gospel’s contents. The rest of Mark does not often use the phrase “the kingdom of God.”21 Instead, much of his gospel is about another major theme: the way—that is, the “way” or “path” or “road” of following Jesus.22

  In what is virtually the title of the gospel, Mark opens with a citation from Isaiah 40: “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord.”23 The language takes us back to the exile: the gospel of Mark is about a way of return from exile. The way of return is the way of Jesus, as the pivotal central section of the gospel emphasizes. The story of Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is filled with teaching about the “way” of discipleship, which means “following” Jesus on his “way.” That way leads to Jerusalem, the place of confrontation with the domination system, death, and resurrection. As Jesus journeys on his way, he solemnly speaks three times of his own impending death and resurrection and after each invites his disciples to follow him.24 For Mark, the “way” of Jesus is the path of death and resurrection.

  The emphasis on a way of return connects to the final element in Jesus’ inaugural address in Mark: “Repent.” Repentance here does not mean contrition for sin, as it often has in later Christian theology. Rather, its meaning is rooted in the exile story: to repent is to return from exile. To connect that concept back to kingdom of God language: to repent—to embark on the journey of return—is to enter the kingdom of God.25

  Thus, for Mark, the canonical Jesus calls his followers to the way of the cross, the path of death and resurrection. The way of Jesus—the way of repentance and return from exile—involves dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being. Taken literally, it is the path of martyrdom, which may have been an issue when Mark was written.26 Taken metaphorically, it refers to the internal process at the center of the way of Jesus and the life of discipleship.

  Matthew

  Matthew’s gospel is written about ten to twenty years later than Mark’s. Its content points to a late-first-century community of Christian Jews in conflict with other Jews. Of the synoptic gospels, Matthew is both the most Jewish and the most hostile to Judaism.

  Hostility to Judaism Jews are referred to as if separate from Matthew’s community. Synagogues are “their” synagogues, for example.27

  Matthew intensifies Jesus’ criticism of scribes and Pharisees by turning it into invective. In a lengthy chapter of condemnation, the formula “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” is used six times, and scribes and Pharisees are called “blind guides, “blind fools,” “serpents,” and “brood of vipers.”28

  To Mark’s version of the parable of the wicked tenants, Matthew adds a verse addressed to the leaders of the Jewish people: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation [or people] producing the fruits of it.”29

  He adds to Mark’s account of the trial of Jesus the scene of Pilate washing his hands of the blood of Jesus and thus declares Pilate to be innocent of Jesus’ death. Instead, he assigns responsibility for Jesus’ condemnation to the Jewish crowd and their descendants: “All the people answered, ‘His blood be on us and our children.’ ”30 Ever since Christianity became the dominant religion of Western culture, the words have been a text of terror for Jewish people.

  The intensity of the conflict with Judaism in Matthew reflects the situation of his community. After the Roman reconquest of the Jewish homeland, the survivors sought to consolidate and preserve Jewish identity in spite of the loss of the temple. Along with the Torah, the temple had been one of the two centers of Jewish practice and identity. Soon after the temple’s destruction, the Jewish community began to ostracize Jews who followed Jesus as the messiah, claiming that they were no longer true Jews. One of Matthew’s central concerns is to claim the opposite: that his community of Christian Jews is faithful to the traditions of Israel.

  Continuity with Judaism Matthew does this by emphasizing continuity with Jewish tradition. He quotes the Hebrew Bible more than any other gospel-writer. Not counting allusions or echoes, he quotes forty times with an explicit phrase such as “It is written” and another twenty-one times without such a phrase.31

  He traces Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. He reports that Jesus during his lifetime restricted his mission to Jews and ordered his disciples to do the same: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”32

  In a saying found in Matthew alone, Jesus is said to affirm the enduring validity of the Law and the Prophets, the two divisions of the Hebrew Bible regarded as sacred by Jews by the first century:

  Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.33

  In addition, Matthew uses a Moses typology to construct his gospel. Matthew uses ninety percent of Mark as he writes, and to Mark’s narrative he adds the teachings of Jesus as collected in Q, as well as some material not found in either Mark or Q. But he does so in a distinctive way. Namely, he gathers the teaching of Jesus into five major blocks of material and concludes each with a similar formula: “When Jesus had finished saying these things. . . . “34 The arrangement of Jesus’ teaching into five blocks calls to mind the five books of the Pentateuch.

  In presenting the story of Jesus’ birth, Matthew echoes the story of Moses’ birth. Just as the life of Moses was threatened by Pharaoh’s command that all male Hebrew babies be killed, so Jesus’ life as an infant is threatened by King Herod’s command that all male infants in the area of Bethlehem are to be killed. Matthew’s meaning is clear. Jesus is like Moses, Herod is like Pharaoh, and what is happening in and through Jesus is like a new exodus.

  Jesus’ Inaugural Scene The Moses typology is also ref
lected in Jesus’ inaugural address. On a superficial level, Jesus’ first public words in Matthew are virtually the same as those in Mark. Matthew condenses and slightly changes Mark’s advance summary of Jesus’ message to “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”35

  But we encounter what is distinctive about Jesus’ inaugural address in Matthew in the next scene: the famous “Sermon on the Mount.” Three chapters long, it is the first of the five blocks of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew. It begins with the beatitudes (“Blessed are the . . .”) and concludes with a parable contrasting two ways: one way is the wisdom of building your house on rock; the other way is the folly of building your house on sand.36 In between, the sermon describes the “way” of Matthew’s community, sometimes contrasting it with “what was said to those of ancient times.”37 These three chapters contain some of the most striking and radical teachings of Jesus.

  They are called “the Sermon on the Mount” because of Matthew’s narrative introduction: “Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain and taught them.”38 Matthew is responsible for locating this teaching on a mountain; some of it is also found in Luke, where it is spoken “on a level place” and commonly called “the Sermon on the Plain.”39 Why does Matthew set this teaching on a mountain? Doing so fits his Moses typology: just as Moses ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah, so Jesus now goes up on a mountain to deliver his teaching.

  Thus Matthew constructs the inaugural scene of Jesus’ public activity to disclose one of the central themes in his portrait of Jesus: Jesus is one like Moses.40 Together with Matthew’s frequent quotation of the Hebrew Bible and his structuring of Jesus’ teaching into five blocks like the five books of Moses, the inaugural scene suggests that his gospel functioned like the Pentateuch for his community. It was their foundational document, combining their primal narrative (the story of Jesus) with teachings about the way of life that flowed out of taking Jesus seriously. This is the way Matthew and his community told and understood the story of Jesus.

  Yet though the gospel of Matthew functioned for that community like the Pentateuch, it did not replace the Pentateuch. As mentioned earlier, according to Matthew 5.17–20, every letter and stroke of the Law and the Prophets remained valid. Matthew was not a supercessionist.41 Rather, by presenting Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy and as one like Moses, Matthew claimed the traditions of Israel for his community. He did not set out to prove that Jesus was the messiah; he and his community already believed that. Instead, in a late-first-century setting of conflict with other Jews, he claimed that the traditions of Israel belonged to his Christian Jewish community, not to “the scribes and Pharisees.” In Matthew, we see an early stage of “the parting of the ways” that ultimately led to Judaism and Christianity as separate religions. But for Matthew and his community, it was still an intra-Jewish struggle.

  Luke-Acts

  Like Matthew, Luke was most likely written a decade or two after Mark and includes material from both Mark and Q. Unlike Matthew (and unlike any other gospel), the gospel of Luke is the first volume of a two-volume work, the second of which is the book of Acts. The two volumes together are an intricately integrated thematic construction.

  Luke’s gospel narrates Jesus’ mission to the Jewish people in the Jewish homeland; Acts describes the spread of early Christianity into the Roman Empire beyond the Jewish homeland, beginning with Jews of the Diaspora and soon including a mission to Gentiles as well. The gospel begins and ends in Jerusalem; Acts begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome.42 The movement of Luke’s two volumes is thus from Jerusalem to Rome.

  The Spirit: Promise and Fulfillment Central to Luke’s thematic construction is repeated emphasis on the Spirit of God. Though Matthew and Mark also frequently speak of the Spirit, Luke does so even more often. The first two chapters of Luke not only narrate Jesus’ conception by the Spirit, but also report that Elizabeth and Zechariah (the parents of John the Baptizer) are filled with the Holy Spirit, as is the aged Simeon, who praises God after he sees the infant Jesus in the temple.43

  Like Matthew and Mark, Luke reports that the Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism and led him into the wilderness. Then Luke adds another reference to the Spirit as Jesus begins his public activity: “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee.”44 Near the end of the gospel, the final words of the dying Jesus are, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”45 The gospel ends with the risen Jesus promising to send the Spirit upon his followers: “I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city [Jerusalem] until you have been clothed with power from on high.”46

  Acts opens with a twofold repetition of Jesus’ promise of the Spirit.47 And that promise is soon fulfilled. In Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost (the Jewish “Festival of Weeks,” held fifty days after Passover), the Spirit descends on the community:

  They were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.48

  The gift of “other languages” enabled Jews from many nations and languages who were living in Jerusalem to understand the speakers.49

  This text is full of rich symbolism. “Wind” and “fire” are classic images for the Spirit in the Hebrew Bible. The gift of universally intelligible language deliberately echoes the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, in which humanity was fragmented into language groups. The coming of the Spirit is the reversal of Babel, the beginning of the reunion of the human community. Then Peter speaks and interprets the descent of the Spirit as the fulfillment of God’s promise for “the last days”: “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”50

  In the rest of Acts, the Spirit is so central that it is virtually the book’s main character. Not only does the Spirit give birth to the community at Pentecost, but the Spirit directs significant advances in the community’s mission: Philip’s conversion of an Ethiopian eunuch, Paul’s conversion, Peter’s conversion of a Roman centurion named Cornelius, Paul and Barnabas’s commissioning for their first missionary journey, the directive to Paul to take the gospel to Europe, and more.51

  The Spirit also guides the decision of the Jerusalem council about whether to impose conditions on Gentiles who are joining the movement. In words that have been the envy of church committees ever since, the council concludes, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. . . .”52 In addition, Luke frequently writes about the community and individuals as filled with the Spirit.53 Thus in Acts, the same Spirit that conceived, empowered, and guided Jesus now does the same within the Christian community as it spreads from Jerusalem (the center of the Jewish world) to Rome (the center of the Gentile world).

  Jesus’ Inaugural Scene The centrality of the Spirit and a foreshadowing of the Gentile mission are crystallized in the inaugural scene of Jesus’ public activity in Luke. Luke replaces Mark’s inaugural text (“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent . . .”) with the story of Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth, his hometown.54

  The scene begins with Jesus reading a passage from the book of Isaiah, the first words of Jesus’ public activity in Luke:

  The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

  because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,

  and has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

  and recovery of sight to the blind,

  to let the oppressed go free,

  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.55

  This is a remarkably apt summary portrait of Luke’s Jesus: in the rest of the gospel, he is a Spirit-anointed social prophet whose activity is directed especially to the poor and oppressed.

  As the inaugural scene continues, Jesus speaks about two prophe
ts from the Hebrew Bible who were sent to Gentiles: Elijah to a widow at Zarepath in Sidon, and Elisha to a Syrian leper named Naaman. The crowd in the synagogue who a few verses earlier had heard him gladly now turns on him and the people seek to kill him by hurling him off a cliff. But Jesus “passed through their midst and went on his way.”

  This is not history, of course. We are not to think that Jesus’ mission began with his neighbors in Nazareth trying to kill him—an attempt that anticipates his eventual execution. Rather, like the inaugural addresses in Matthew and Mark, the whole scene is a thematic construction created by Luke.56 It announces in advance the theme of Luke-Acts as a whole: the mission of Jesus to Israel in the gospel and the extension of that mission to Gentiles by the early Christian movement in Acts. All of this is the work of the Spirit: the same Spirit that anoints Jesus at the beginning of his mission goes on to anoint the Christian community at Pentecost at the beginning of its mission. For Luke, the Spirit active in Jesus continues in the mission of the community. By implication, then, the community is to continue Jesus’ activity in the world.

  John

  The awareness that John (also called “the Fourth Gospel”) is very different from the synoptic gospels is a foundation of modern study of the gospels. But the awareness itself is not modern. Clement of Alexandria, an early Christian theologian writing around the year 200, distinguished John from the other gospels and called it “the spiritual gospel.”