Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §14.7
büke to them need not indicate a total breakdown of relationships with his family.
234 Mark 6.3-4 also indicates local disillusion with Jesus in his home village,
235 and in the final reference to his family includes them within the unbelieving
response: Jesus 'marvelled because of their unbelief (6.6). 236 But the
fact that Mary his mother and his brothers are numbered with the disciples in
Acts 1.14 hardly suggests a severe rupture. 237 Equally Mark 3.34-35 certainly
seems to invite talk of Jesus' relations with his own family being replaced by relationships
with his disciples. 238 But is there not a danger of making a theological
mountain (the community of disciples as fictive family replacing all loyalty
to birth family) out of the molehill of a vivid repartee on a particular
occasion? 239 It is also true that Jesus elsewhere is recorded as promising to those
who have left family and possessions to follow him, that the compensations of
being part of a community of disciples will outweigh the loss (Mark 10.29-30
drink; Philo similarly uses it to describe the drunken-like effects of God-possession {Ebr. 146;
cf. Acts 2.4, 13; Eph. 5.18); and T. Job 35.4; 36.6; and 39.13 use it for suspected derangement
(probably on the basis of Job 36.28). Note also the parallel in John 10.20: 'he has a demon and
is mad (mainetai)'.
234. Even when Mark's tendentious presentation is recognized (Barton, Discipleship
69-81) — though I am dubious about reading 'house' in Mark (7.17; 9.28, 33; 10.10) as implying
new community in place of family dwelling (as distinct from place of private teaching) —
Barton rightly warns against using the episode to press for more extreme conclusions (82-85).
To acknowledge Markan redaction is to recognize that the Sitz im Leben Jesu was almost certainly
less sharply confrontational. Lüdemann is convinced of the historicity of 3.21, but thinks
that 3.35 reflects the later situation of converts who had been thrown out by their families and
judges it to be not historical (Jesus 24-25).
235. Cited below (§15.6c).
236. Both Matthew and Luke again soften the sharpness, here by omitting 'among his
relatives' and Luke also by omitting 'and in his house' (Matt. 13.57; Luke 4.24; also John 4.44).
Barton concludes that both phrases were added by Mark (Discipleship 90); against Pesch,
Markusevangelium 1.320-21. What this tells us about Mark's attitude to Jesus' family (Mark
uses it 'to skewer the family of Jesus', Jacobson, 'Jesus against the Family' 206) is a subject to
which we will have to return in vols. 2 and 3.
237. Note also John 7.3-10; 19.26-27.
238. Jesus 'called people away from the bondage of natural family relationships to a
new family joined by faith in God freely given'; 'liberation must start as release from the cord
of birth' (Hamerton-Kelly, God the Father 101-102, reading the tradition through the Oedipus
complex); Osiek and Balch, Families 127-28; Funk, Five Gospels 53 (Matt. 12.48-50 is accorded
greater credence than Mark's version — 190); 'Blood relationships are devalued in Jesus'
idea of the family; his real family is the family of God' (Funk, Honest 197-99); 'Jesus
speaks almost virulently against the family' (Crossan, Historical Jesus 299); 'the shocking demands
for family disloyalty that he (Jesus) made on his followers' (Wright, Jesus 149; also
401-403, 430-32); Jacobson, 'Jesus against the Family' 203-204.
239. If we treated such sayings as Mark 10.15 pars, in the same way, we could conclude
that the kingdom consists only of little children.
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