As the New Testament clearly shows, this process of Christology-building started in the early years of the movement, even before followers were called “Christians.”10 One of the first, and perhaps most influential “Christologists,”11 was indeed the Apostle Paul. Furthermore, this process can also be found in the Markan community, as its members struggled to find their place as followers of Jesus of Nazareth in a conflicting and changing world. But I would argue that in Mark’s community, the Christology that developed was less exalted, and certainly less apocalyptic, than the one manifested in and by the Pauline communities.
The essence of my argument is that of trying to find support for a Christology that sees in Jesus the disciple par excellence (chapters 3 and 4). This is not going to be an easy task, for Jesus is usually seen as the teacher, the Messiah, the Son of God, etc., rather than as a disciple. I would contend that this might be precisely one of the reasons the church has often failed in its work of proclamation of the good news, namely a mistaken understanding of Jesus’ identity and mission, which in turn impacted the way the church has understood itself and its own mission. If we can get back to a pre-Christian, or pre-canonical understanding of Jesus ministry,12 as preserved by one community, Mark’s, then perhaps we can find a way of being the church that is more in tune with God’s redemptive mission in the world.
Since this is more a socio-rhetorical13 than a historical-critical investigation my search for a discipleship model is done at the level of the text.14 This means that historical insights into the possibility of seeing Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom are limited to a general background. Rather, the text is explored, looking for clues that may help us build the proposed model. But insights from the historical-critical methods, especially those of redaction and source criticism, are brought into the discussion in order to clarify and interpret the world of the NT writers in general and Mark in particular.
The Need for a New Model
According to Philip F. Esler,15 a model is “a heuristic tool, allowing comparisons to be made with the texts for the purpose of posing new questions to them. The texts must supply the answers, not the model. . . . For this reason, it is inappropriate to debate whether a model is ‘true’ or ‘false,’ or ‘valid’ or ‘invalid.’ What matters is whether it is useful or not.” Therefore, Christologies are more relevant for their consequences, their social repercussions, than for their content. For example, Mark’s Christology may have seemed flawed to some (especially Matthew and Luke, who added to it!) but it was useful to the community that produced it. The same could be said about Paul’s Christology and ours.
The traditional, and I would say orthodox,16 descriptions (or models) of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Savior tend to confine him to ethnical, religious and metaphysical descriptions that alienate those who want to find in him an example for Christian living and praxis.17 Something similar happens with the roles of prophet and servant. The first one could be interpreted too narrowly in terms of gender (most of Israel’s prophets were men), and the second may send the wrong message to those people in society who already have a secondary position, such as women and ethnic minorities. For people whose lives are defined by continuous and ill-rewarded service, the description of Jesus as the ideal servant is not very comforting.18
We need a more inclusive and liberating model, one that can speak to people who have always felt that the Jesus proclaimed by the kerygma is too divine, too out of touch with reality. Often this Jesus seems to be playing a game called “Now I’m human, now I’m not.” For just when one begins to identify with a down-to-earth Jesus, the one who eats with sinners and publicans, who is thirsty and asks water from a woman in Samaria, who cries in front of the tomb of his friend Lazarus, the game changes. Now Jesus is divine, the Son of God, the agent of God’s final kingdom, an almost unreachable character who predicts his death to the last detail, forewarns his followers of the impending coming of the last days, and ascends to heaven in a cloud, as two heavenly figures tell the perplexed disciples that one day he will return in the same way as he now ascends. The game of biblical chess ends in a tie when the Orthodox Church, meeting at Chalcedon in 451 CE proclaims that Jesus was “fully human and fully divine.” That may have worked in the fifth century. but not so well in the twenty-first century. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth is made into this impossible entity who can only inhabit the world of theological and abstract thought, but never (or seldom) the real world of contemporary women and men, who have a difficult time identifying with someone who is not completely one of them.19
The Jesus who has been proclaimed by the various historical-Jesus researchers has also alienated people both in the church and in society at large, for this Jesus seems to be the product of liberal Christianity (Jesus the charismatic genius and great hero), or of scientific, and thus positivist, investigation that sees in Jesus a healer, preacher of renewal, cynic, and so on, who is at odds with the Judaism of his time. The problematic images of Jesus coming from these different quests have been addressed in depth by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her book, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation. She advocates for an ethics of interpretation that recognizes that any presentation of Jesus, whether religious or scientific, is really a reconstruction done with the tools available to the researcher that condition the results of the investigation. She says:
[An] ethics of interpretation seeks to analyze the nexus between reconstructions of the Historical-Jesus and those theoretical, historical, cultural, and political conceptual frameworks that determine Jesus research. Hence biblical scholarship . . . must learn to understand itself as a critical rhetorical practice which carefully explores and assesses its own impregnation with hegemonic knowledge and discursive frameworks that made “sense” of the world and produce what counts as “reality” or as “common sense.”20
Yes, we need a new model, and I would like to suggest that this model is one that sees in Jesus the ideal disciple of the kingdom.21 What would it mean to see Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark primarily, but also in the other gospels, as the supreme example of discipleship? Among other things, it requires a rereading of the titles and roles traditionally associated with him—Son of man, Son of God, Son of David, Messiah, prophet, etc.—from the perspective of Jesus’ own sense of discipleship as interpreted by Mark. What would be the implications of such a reading for Christology, theology, ecclesiology and, especially, for Christian praxis? How would the Jesus that comes out of such a reading be regarded by the institutionalized church, by the guild of Biblical Studies, by everyday, real flesh-and-blood Christians,22 and by those outside of the church? In the present work, I concentrate mainly on exploring the possibility23 of constructing such a model given the textual data of the Gospel of Mark and I hint briefly