Wrede Club: Some Recent Examples of “Wredegeheimnis” (1)

This post isn’t part of the series, “Reading Wrede Again for the First Time,” but is more or less an excursus on the state of deficient scholarship surrounding William Wrede and the Messianic Secret (das Messiasgeheimnis). I’m trying out the term Wredegeheimnis to describe the hidden or “Secret Wrede” in modern NT studies.

We’ll take a closer look at some recent examples. By the way, I don’t expect things to improve in Wrede Club. I’m not a scholar, just a guy who reads.

Reigning Champion: Wikipedia

Yes, I fully support the concept of Wikipedia, but I recognize that its execution often falls short of its potential. Wikimedia is part of the overall universe of free and open discourse, which is important now more than ever. However, the article on the Messianic Secret is a complete dog’s breakfast. I will highlight some of the more egregious mistakes below.

♦ How Did the Secrecy Motif Originate?

Wrede suggested that this theme was not historical but was an addition by the author of Mark. [Main topic, para. 2] 

No. Wrede held that the author of Mark is not responsible for the theme. It was present in the sources that he had at his disposal. I must point out here that the German Wikipedia page on the Gospel of Mark gets it right.

Das Messiasgeheimnis ist eine von William Wrede erstmals als dogmatisches Konstrukt erkannte Theorie des Markusevangeliums. Er schrieb dieses jedoch der vormarkinischen Tradition zu und benannte drei Elemente dieser Theorie: Schweigegebote an Dämonen, Geheilte und Jünger, Unverständnis und Unglaube der Jünger und die Parabelbelehrung.

The Messianic Secret is a theory of the Gospel of Mark first recognized as a dogmatic construct by William Wrede. However, he attributed it to the pre-Markan tradition. He named three elements of this theory: commands of silence to demons, healed people, and disciples; the disciples’ lack of understanding and their unbelief; and his teaching in parables. (My translation, emphasis mine)

As an aside, the Encyclopaedia Britannica also gets it wrong.

According to Wrede, Mark’s solution was: Jesus always knew it but kept it a secret for the inner group. (emphasis mine)

That’s incorrect. It was never “Mark’s solution.” According to Wrede, there were at least two strands of tradition available to the author of Mark: one in which Jesus keeps his Messiahship a secret, and another in which everyone knows he’s the anointed Son of God. (Wrede also points to another source of tension against the Messianic Secret tradition, namely the fact that the author’s purpose for writing the Gospel is to prove Jesus was the Messiah! We’ll look at this point more closely in a future post.)

♦ Did Wrede Renounce Markan Priority?

The Wikipedia authors declare:

Wrede’s theory had an inherent inter-relationship with the hypothesis of Markan priority, which Wrede eventually abandoned, but some of his followers accepted. [Main topic, para. 3] 

Wrede never abandoned the concept of Markan priority. The authors of this paragraph on Wikipedia have misread and cited Christology and the Synoptic Problem by Peter M. Head. They may have been confused by this sentence:

W. Wrede himself, looking back on his investigation of Mark’s secrecy material, could write: ‘those who find essentially convincing the view of Mark here expounded will probably be easily led to doubt the priority of Mark in relation to Matthew and Luke’. He went on to comment that it would be ‘most highly desirable’ if such a gospel as Mark were not the oldest gospel (Wünschenswert wäre es in der That im höchsten Grade. . .’). (Head 1997, p. 233)

One only has to read a bit further to understand what Wrede meant. The strangeness of Mark can be quite unsettling. For Christians especially, the priority of Matthew would be much more appealing. But Wrede could not and would not ignore the evidence.

[N]otwithstanding the comment cited above and Wrede’s dependence upon Griesbachian scholars, Wrede gives no impression of an uncritical acceptance of Markan priority: ‘Certain supports for according priority to Mark … have shown themselves unsound. But even if these collapse sufficient props of better timber remain.” (Head 1997, p. 233, emphasis original)

Wrede accepted Markan priority after having examined the evidence thoroughly. True, Wrede happily cited many scholars who argued for Matthean priority, but he did so because they pointed out the oddities and inconsistencies in Mark’s Gospel with candor and honesty. Since for the followers of Griesbach, Mark was secondary and derivative, they had no reason to treat it with kid gloves. On the other hand, scholars who had come to believe Mark wrote the first Gospel tended to regard it with awe and reverence, often insisting that it must contain real history. They sanded off the rough edges and minimized many of the characteristics that make Mark unique.

We have further proof that Wrede never abandoned Markan priority in his lectures from Liegnitz (Die Entstehung der Schriften des Neuen Testaments), which were published in 1907, shortly after his death.

Of course, there is no question of absolute agreement among researchers, but the vast majority agree on at least a few fundamental points, and these can indeed be regarded as a real achievement of their long work.

The first of these findings is that Mark was the source for Luke and Matthew. There are indeed very strong reasons for this. I will mention a few. If Mark had used the other Gospels, it would be impossible to understand why he omitted so much of their material; if, on the other hand, Mark is the basis, then the two successors incorporated almost his entire Gospel; why they omitted a few pieces can be easily explained. Furthermore, it appears that the order of Mark’s accounts forms the basis for the others. They often deviate from this order, but then always return to it. The fact that Mark does not offer any childhood stories also speaks in its favor. The childhood stories of Matthew and Luke, as poetic as they are and precisely because they have this poetic charm, are to be regarded as legends — the appearance of angels alone marks them as such, and they certainly belong, as free research generally assumes, to the most recent part of the Gospel tradition. (Wrede 1907, p. 49, translated with the assistance of Deepl)

♦ Who Invented What?

The authors of the Wikipedia page repeat their errors directly under the heading Wrede’s theory:

Wrede proposed that the author of Mark invented the notion of secrecy to explain a question early Christians might have raised about Jesus: if Jesus was the Messiah, as they believed, then why did he not proclaim and make it part of his ministry? [emphasis mine]

I find it ironic that the authors have invented Wrede’s conclusion that Mark invented the secrecy motif. And once again, they confidently cite the entire text of Das Messiasgeheimnis as a footnote here. They offer not a single page number from the book they have never read.

Let’s break the first rule of Wrede Club and actually read what he wrote. In the original German text, we find these helpful paragraphs:

Ist die Anschauung vom Messiasgeheimnis die Erfindung des Markus? Das ist eine ganz unmögliche Vorstellung.

Schon aus Markus selbst lässt sich das bestimmt erkennen. Das ganze Leben Jesu ist bei ihm mit den verschiedenen Momenten dieser Anschauung übersponnen. Die einzehien Vorstellungen liegen in mancherlei Varianten vor. Es ist viel Unausgeglichenes in ihnen. Dergleichen ist nicht das Werk eines Einzelnen. (Wrede 1901, p. 145, emphasis mine)

Is the concept of the Messianic Secret Mark’s invention? That is a completely impossible idea.

This can be clearly discerned from the Gospel of Mark itself. Jesus’s entire life is intertwined with the different aspects of this perspective. The individual ideas are presented in many different variations. There is a great deal of inconsistency in them. Such a thing is not the work of a single individual. (my translation, emphasis added)

♦ Was Secrecy a “Literary Strategy”?

Our authors next claim that:

In Wrede’s theory, the secrecy is a literary strategy meant to head off this objection while steering a middle course between two points of view in early Christianity about Jesus’s role as messiah: that Jesus only became the messiah starting at the crucifixion (Phillipians 2:6-11), or that his role had been fully filled and preordained since the beginning of time (John 1:1).

No. According to Wrede, Mark was chiefly a compiler of tradition. Secrecy existed in the traditions he was writing down. The reason secrecy existed in the tradition, Wrede argued, was to explain why people remembered Jesus as a healer, exorcist, and teacher, but not as the Messiah. However, as Wrede demonstrated again and again, these traditions existed alongside other traditions that said the opposite.

Concealment and revelation stand side by side in the text.

♦ Would Secrecy “Work Best” If Markan Priority Were False?

The blunders continue. The Wikipedia authors continue:

Wrede recognized the inherent inter-relationship of his approach with the hypothesis of Markan priority – namely that Mark was written first and influenced the other Gospels. However, after re-examining his initial theory, Wrede suggested that his theory would work best if the Markan priority hypothesis turned out to be false and wrote: “it would be ‘most highly desirable’ if such a gospel as Mark were not the oldest gospel“. Yet, the followers of the Messianic Secret hypothesis were later forced to assume Markan priority – an issue that has resulted in various forms of criticism by other scholars. (emphasis added)

This is a mess. As I pointed out earlier, Wrede never said his theory would work best if Markan priority turned out to be false. They have completely misunderstood the text. If Mark actually came after Matthew and Luke, then Wrede’s explanation of the Messianic Secret does not work at all. It would be a peculiar redactional element, a mere curiosity.

Because they have never read Wrede (as loyal members of Wrede Club), the authors of the entry have never seen the preceding and following sentences:

Those who find essentially convincing the view of Mark here expounded will probably be easily led to doubt the priority of Mark in relation to Matthew and Luke. Wishful thinking may support them in this. It would indeed be most highly desirable that such a Gospel should not be the oldest. But wishes never amount to arguments. Here I cannot essay a proof; I am only expressing my view. This much, but only this much, is correct. Certain supports for according priority to Mark, and in particular the idea that the line of development taken by the public life of Jesus is still discernible there, have shown themselves unsound. But even if these collapse sufficient props of better timber still remain. To be specific, I agree with Holtzmann — and I may add also with Wernle — when Holtzmann remarks “that the strength of the Markan hypothesis really lies in the fact that the sequence of the narratives in Mark underlies the sequence in Matthew and Luke. Our investigation has done nothing to alter this at all. Moreover, the next section will perhaps give us the opportunity to show here and there that the perplexing character of the Markan presentation is no reason for regarding it as later than the Matthaean one. (Wrede 1901/1970, pp. 148-149, emphasis mine)

When writers go quote-fishing they may catch their fish, but they usually miss the boat.

We should always avoid using a secondary work like Peter Head’s book in a necessarily brief and concise encyclopedia article. If, for example, you were writing about natural selection you would not ignore Darwin entirely and rely solely on works by obscure authors in which the subject is of minor importance.

But even so, the authors here obviously did not read Head’s book. To his credit, Head carefully compared Markan priority against Matthean priority with respect to the messianic secret, and concluded that the former explains the secrecy material much better. At the end of section 3.2, “Markan priority evaluated,” in which he lists several key redactions of Mark by Matthew, he concludes:

In short, while these passages can be understood as Matthean redaction of Mark (especially in terms of vocabulary preferences, it seems likely that ‘the idea of the messianic secret no longer has the importance for Matthew that it has for Mark’. (Head 1997, p. 249)

Head was quoting Wrede here, giving us page numbers for both the English translation and the German original. Notice that both Head and Wrede argued that the secrecy motif was a temporary phenomenon that existed in Mark, but eventually retreated from view. By the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, it had outlived is usefulness.

♦ Did Wrede Propose a Theological Explanation of the Messianic Secret?

As I have written elsewhere, I contend that Wrede’s ultimate solution to the problem of secrecy is that it was introduced at the level of tradition and that it is an apologetic motif. In the last paragraph of the Wikipedia article, we find this strange claim:

The theological explanation was proposed by Wrede:[1] it was not yet the proper time for him to be revealed as such. He knew when he had to go to the court and then be crucified. In Mark 8:30 Jesus, “Then strictly warned them that they should tell no one about Him.” Jesus’ messianic mission cannot be understood apart from the cross, which the disciples did not yet understand (vs. 31–33 and ch. 9 vs. 30–32). [emphasis mine]

The footnote (the [1] above) points to the authors’ first reference, which is Wrede’s book, and of course, they give us no page numbers. I suspect this incorrect claim comes from the misreading of a work cited in the previous paragraph, viz. William R. Telford’s The New Testament: A Short Introduction: A Guide to Early Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels.

The early church first looked on Jesus as Messiah after the resurrection. The earliest traditions about him (i.e. those that go back to his lifetime) were non-Messianic therefore. To explain what was a later development in their thought about him, it was claimed by the early church, and subsequently by Mark, that he had actually kept his Messiahship a secret during his lifetime, divulging it only to his disciples. This was the view of W. Wrede. (Telford 2002, p. 140, italics original, bold emphasis mine)

Telford calls this a “traditional explanation.” I take that to mean Wrede believed the secrecy motif entered not at the historical level or at the narrative level (i.e., Mark himself), but rather during the formation of the tradition.

But what about the Wikipedia authors’ reference to a “theological explanation” in which Jesus can only reveal his true nature at “the proper time”? First, we need to ask at what layer does this explanation fit? Can we discern this interpretation from the story Mark is weaving? Not according to Wrede. He wrote:

First of all, it is clear that a lot of things have to be read between the lines if we want to demonstrate any truly intelligible progression in Mark.

Why does Jesus continually forbid people from talking about his messianic dignity and his miraculous deeds? Why does he remain silent toward his disciples? The motive —  that he wants them to arrive at the right attitude toward him on their own — is neither intimated nor self-evident. Why should the secret be kept from the people even after the event at Caesarea Philippi? Mark remains silent. (Wrede 1901, p. 13, my translation, emphasis mine)

This so-called theological explanation does exist in the first few pages of the Messianic Secret, wherein Wrede summarizes the typical critical view of the Gospel of Mark. He finds it lacking and uses it as the launching point for his overall discussion. In any case, this theological explanation only holds water if we ignore large parts of Mark and smuggle in ideas from elsewhere (either from the other Gospels or from scholarly imagination).

[T]he impression that Mark has an internally consistent and historically comprehensible overall picture will stand examination only as long as we ignore items of evidence pointing in other directions.

Of course, such items of evidence must not be imported from without — from ready-made opinions on the life of Jesus or from other sources. Otherwise there is a confusion of the issues. We are concerned only with Mark’s own view and with a critical analysis of what is to be found in the Gospel. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 14)

Ramifications

Standing on its own, the Wikepedia article is certainly dreadful, but recently, thanks to the overuse (plundering) of open text by large language model-driven artificial intelligence programs, the Wikipedia mess is starting to show up in AI slop. For example, some of it appears in the auto-generated description field in the MythVision Podcast video “The Hidden Agenda of Jesus’ Most Mysterious Order!” (That’s his exclamation point, not mine.)

In this podcast, Derek’s guest, Ian Mills makes a number of common mistakes regarding Wrede and the Messianic Secret, and I was about to write a post about it; however, the description field was terribly distracting, and I had to take a deep dive into the Wikipedia pile. Next time, we’ll take a closer look at this video, because the mistakes are so common in modern NT Studies and in Christian apologetics, that it deserves its own post.

Head, Peter M. (1997) Christology and the Synoptic Problem: An Argument for Markan Priority. Cambridge University Press.

Telford, W. (2002). The New Testament: A Short Introduction : A Guide to Early Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels. Oxford: Oneworld.

Wrede, William. (1901). Das Messiasgeheimnis in Den Evangelien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Wrede, William. (1901/1971). The Messianic Secret. J. C. G. Greig, Cambridge and London: James Clarke & Co. Ltd.

Wrede, William. (1907) Die Entstehung der Schriften des Neuen Testaments Vorträge, Tübingen: Mohr

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