Wrede Club: Some Recent Examples of “Wredegeheimnis” (3)

This post will conclude our analysis of Ian Mills’s arguments against Wrede, presented on Derek Lambert’s MythVision Podcast.

“Faithful” translations

Before we get to Wrede, I’d like to quote from the Acts of the Apostles. First, from the Contemporary English Version, which proudly claims to be accurate and “faithful to the meaning of the original”:

Acts 5:30 (CEV) You killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. But the God our ancestors worshiped raised him to life.

The New International Version, which is the most popular English translation in the world, has a somewhat different take on the same verse. Their team claims to translate scrupulously from the original Greek using word-for-word along with thought-for-thought methods.

Acts 5:30 (NIV) The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.

Readers will no doubt remember this line from Peter’s speech before the Sanhedrin. Here’s another example from Acts 10:39. First, from the Good News Translation, which is still extremely popular. (The CEV and GNT both came from the American Bible Society.)

Acts 10:39 (GNT) We are witnesses of everything that he did in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem. Then they put him to death by nailing him to a cross.

And now the NIV:

Acts 10:39 (NIV) “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross . . .”

Peter is speaking here again. Curiously, the Jews disappear from the GNT and the CEV. We see minor differences, but one thing these verses have in common is the word “cross,” which does not exist in the original Greek. There are no nails or crosses here, only trees. These translations aren’t outliers, either. The New American Standard Bible (“Accuracy you can trust, in the English you speak!”) does it, too:

Acts 10:39 (NASB) “We are witnesses of all the things He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They also put Him to death by hanging Him on a cross . . .”

What’s going on here? The translators have decided in these cases to substitute the word-for-word method with thought-for-thought. They presume to know what the author was really thinking, so they’re “fixing” (amplifying?) the text for modern English readers.

Acts 10:39 (SBLGNT) καὶ ἡμεῖς μάρτυρες πάντων ὧν ἐποίησεν ἔν τε τῇ χώρᾳ τῶν Ἰουδαίων καὶ Ἰερουσαλήμ· ὃν καὶ ἀνεῖλαν κρεμάσαντες ἐπὶ ξύλου.

And we [are] witness of all [the] things he did in both the region of the Jews and [in] Jerusalem, whom also they put to death having hanged [him] on a tree.

I bring all this up, because a great deal of New Testament oddness remains hidden by our “accurate” English translations. The faithful translators will, of course, insist that tree is just a poetic synonym for cross. Do we really know that?

Diversity of Thought in the New Testament

They see themselves as faithful to the text, but they are faithful first to their conception of the Bible. That conception starts from the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God. Here in the rural Midwest, we see billboards that ask “What does the Bible say about . . . ?” These questions reveal the foundational dogma that the Bible has a unified message at its core. The unspoken question for the faithful is “What is the Bible supposed to say?”

The translators of the NIV and CEV feel free to add “missing” words. In the Gospel of John, both translations add “pray” and “prayer” where they don’t exist in the Greek. In the same Gospel, the CEV actually adds the missing name of Jesus’s mother (see 2:1). Did the author of John know her name was Mary? Perhaps. But he never wrote the name.

Today’s NT scholars do admit that some diversity of thought exists in the New Testament. However, the extremely conservative British and American scholars of the early twentieth century were far less tolerant of such notions. When Wrede pointed out passages in scripture that strongly suggest various authors had divergent ideas about when Jesus became the Messiah, they were not amused. But Wrede went further. He said such divergence indicated an evolution of ideas:

• Jesus became the Messiah at his death (Paul)
• Jesus became the Messiah at the baptism (Mark)
• Jesus was the preexistent Son of God (John)

Moreover, Wrede pointed out that our earliest Gospel is a mixture of Mark’s dogmatic invention along with received tradition, and he showed that the author was neither an eyewitness nor a disinterested historian. Finally, his somewhat favorable references to F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss were certainly more than any self-respecting scholar could allow.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that pious Brits and Yanks savaged Das Messiasgeheimnis and its author, or that the book wasn’t translated into English until 1970. The tradition of reading and opining about Wrede, while diligently not reading Wrede has a long, proud history.

“The meaning of the item”

If they had read Wrede, they would have discovered that he identified a number of core problems with critical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Many of these problems persist.

In the affirmative answer to this question if Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” the high priest discerns blasphemy—and therefore a crime punishable by death. The blasphemy is usually thought to lie in arrogation to himself by a puny, weak and powerless man of the highest dignity known to Israelites, that of the Messiah sent by God. The tacit or explicit assumption behind this is that if the blasphemy lay in the pretension to divine glory and divine nature, Jesus like the high priest would have been taking the title “Son of God” to have a dogmatic, metaphysical sense and this is historically an impossibility. But to argue in this way is as dangerous as it is frequent. We must never say that if a particular item meant one thing it would not match up with the history of Jesus and that therefore it must mean something else. The meaning of the item is rather the prior question at all times. What history can make of it comes into consideration later. (Wrede 1901/1970, pp. 74-75, bold emphasis mine)

In a literary analysis especially, “the meaning of the item” must go back to the author, not to some imagined historical context. People still make this mistake. They gloss over the surface and look for what lies beneath. They leapfrog over the plain meaning of the text and evaluate matters as if they really happened, and they compare critically the terms Mark uses against the “normative” definitions found in other texts from roughly the same period.

As Wrede explains, calling oneself the Messiah would not constitute blasphemy. He writes:

[T]he mere assertion of messiahship does not, according to Jewish ideas, amount to blasphemy. But it is not any easier to see how a Christian author could find an instance of blasphemy here if he had only the Jewish idea of Messiah in mind. For when all is said the Messiah is not in Jewish eyes a divine being. On the other hand, if Mark understood “Son of God” in a supernatural and metaphysical sense, everything becomes quite clear. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 75, bold emphasis added)

Many scholars have chastised Wrede for putting too many things under the umbrella of messiahship. Why keep healings and exorcisms a secret, they ask, when being acknowledged as some sort of wonder-worker doesn’t make a person the Messiah? Similarly, they note that nobody would have thought a Jewish Messiah would suffer, die, and be raised from the dead. Well, yes. That’s what Paul said: The claim that the Messiah had died was a “stumbling block” to the Jews. But Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.

Ian Mills’s Critique of Wrede’s Solution

Let’s finally return to the Myth Vision podcast with Ian Mills. As we learned last time, he says almost nobody agrees with Wrede today. In fact, at around 6:40, he says, “It’s a bad theory.”

• 

  (6:48) Ian: One of the most influential arguments that people will usually start with is that dying and being raised from the dead is not part of the expectations for Jewish Messiahs. It’s not part of the grammar of messianism. There is nothing about a teacher dying and being raised from the dead that would make you say, “Oh, he must have been the Messiah!” In fact, that’s the opposite of what’s supposed to happen to the Messiah.

• (7:15) Derek: The Davidic Messiah is supposed to conquer.
• (7:18) Ian: Yeah, well I mean there’s a whole conversation about the complexities of messiahship. Messiah seems to be the word — it’s just the word “anointed.” It could . . . it’s used to describe the agents of Jesus doing various things. Sometimes like in the Dead Sea Scrolls that’s a purely like religious or ritual function. Sometimes it is in fact military — like you said, the Davidic Messiah. The point is nowhere do we have any discussion of the Messiah — the Jewish Messiah — dying and rising from the dead, so this creates a problem for Wrede’s theory, because his theory is that he gets starts getting called the Messiah after he dies and rises from the dead but that’s — there’s no connection there.

Mills is laying out a well-known argument. Essentially, he’s saying that as scholars understand the term, a Messiah isn’t supposed to die. Bart Ehrman says this over and over again.  However, if we stop and consider this claim in the broader context, does it hold up? Kings of Judah were the anointed “sons of God,” and they all died, even the good ones. Sure, we could set aside this obvious fact; however, simply placing the realization of messiahship before the resurrection doesn’t solve the problem. Consider both claims.

Claim 1: Jesus was known to be the Messiah before he died. He later appeared to the apostles as the risen Lord.

Claim 2: Jesus was not known to be the Messiah before he died. He later appeared to the apostles as the risen Lord, and at that point they understood he must now be the Messiah.

The problem with the first claim is that a man people called the Messiah was put to death. As Mills said, that wasn’t supposed to happen. One could argue that the second claim suffers from the same difficulty, namely that the Messiah has died. But that’s not quite correct.

Wrede’s Actual Argument

A closer reading of the text will clarify the argument Wrede was advancing. Let’s assume that messiahship was something God conferred upon Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, that designation occurs at the baptism. The sky cracks in two, the Holy Spirit descends on him, and a voice from heaven repeats a line from Psalm 2:7 — “This is my beloved son” — which is also repeated in Hebrews 5:5, adding “This day have I begotten thee.”

But we have an alternative view, which is found in Acts and some of the epistles. They didn’t kill the Messiah; they killed Jesus, who would become the Messiah.

Reading Wrede again:

In his sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2.36 Peter says that God has made the Jesus whom the Jews crucified both Lord and Christ. In this it is implied that this has been done through his being raised from the dead. This saying quite by itself would prove that there was in primitive Christianity a view in accordance with which Jesus was not the messiah in his earthly life. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 216, italics original)

This sermon, Wrede argues, comes from a pre-Markan (hence pre-Gospel) source, which presents a more primitive view of Jesus’s messiahship.

It has rightly been pointed out that Paul gives evidence of having an analogous view. Jesus is “designated Son of God in power” (Ro. 1.4.) “by his resurrection from the dead”. It is all one whether Paul was able to call the earthly Jesus too “Son of God”. If he did, this would only derive from the fact that in his premundane existence he already possessed the sonship, the einai isa theō. In reality the one who became man has already shed the existence which characterises the Son of God.“ And thus according to Paul too he becomes something, as a result of the resurrection, which as a man he in no sense was. The well-known passage in the letter to the Philippians, 2.6ff., says this plainly too. The human existence in which Jesus is devoid and empty of all dignity and lordship that was his due is removed as a result of his exaltation, and thereby he receives the name above all names, that of “Lord”, but with it naturally also the substance, which is lordship over everyone and everything. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 216)

That last sentence is a bit stilted, so I’ll offer an alternative rendering in English:

The human body, in which Jesus is bare and empty of all dignity and majesty that would belong to him, is superseded through the exaltation, and with it he receives the name above all names, the name of Lord, and with the name, of course, the very thing itself, lordship everywhere and over everything. (Tr. of Wrede 1901, p. 215)

How else can we know that he was not the Messiah while on Earth? Wrede reminds us that whenever we see the Greek word παρουσία (parousia), we should read it as “coming” and not “second coming.”

Further, parousia does not mean “return” but always “arrival”. The wrong translation should be strictly avoided, in order not to eliminate an important peculiarity of New Testament language. The entire usage manifestly rests upon the idea that the “return” is the first and only messianic appearance. Jesus has been there but the messiah is yet to come. But this is not to say that he only becomes messiah when he arrives. He has been messiah since the resurrection. (Wrede 1901, p. 217, bold emphasis mine)

And finally, to drive home the idea one last time:

The view that Jesus only becomes messiah after his death is assuredly not merely an old one, but the oldest of which we have any knowledge. Had the earthly life of Jesus been looked upon from the start as the actual life of the messiah, it would have been only with difficulty that, by way of supplement to this, the idea could have been hit upon of regarding the resurrection as the formal beginning of the messiahship and the appearance in glory as the single coming of the messiah. (Wrede 1901, p. 218, bold emphasis mine)

Conclusion

I was going to write a bit more on Mills’s argument that the crucifixion of Jesus proves that he must have been thought of as a political Messiah, a pretender to the throne, if you will. But this argument has always reminded me of Price’s observation: “[T]he Emerald City of Oz must actually exist since, otherwise, where would the Yellow Brick Road lead?” And it seems to ignore more primitive claims that he was “hanged on a tree” by the Jewish authorities rather than crucified by the Roman governor.

However, I think I’ve said enough for now. One last thing: please don’t assume I think Wrede was right about everything. That’s highly unlikely. I merely want to emphasize the notion that a sincere argument requires an honest assessment of the facts. People have been disagreeing with Wrede for decades now, and that’s all well and good. But if they don’t understand what he actually said, then we have to wonder how much of this is just performative apologetics. In that case, then not reading Wrede is not an oversight; it’s an act of piety.

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.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.