Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE QUESTION OF JESUS' SELF-UNDERSTANDING §15.4
any attraction to him, 158 a wise man would recognize the inflammability of the
Galilean crowd and its potential fickleness. The lesson learned or confirmed here
would go a long way to explain Jesus' reticence in other situations.
b. Peter's Confession
Here the focus turns to the enigmatic command to silence, which, according to
Mark, was Jesus' response to Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah (Mark 8.30).
In the tradition itself there is no indication that Jesus denied the confession. But
neither is there any indication that he accepted or welcomed it (Matt. 16.17 fills in
this lacuna). In Mark's version, 8.30 is a word neither of rebuke nor of congratulation.
It is a command to silence (on the issue of messiahship), followed immediately
by explicit and pointed teaching expressing Jesus' conviction that his mission
would end in rejection and suffering (8.31). Now the command certainly
functions in Mark's Gospel as part of his secrecy motif. But a historical reading is
entirely plausible: Peter's confession was of Jesus as royal Messiah in accordance
with the popular understanding of the Davidic Messiah as a mighty warrior
(§15.2a), and Peter's conception of the royal Messiah was close to that of the
crowd at the feeding miracle and on the same lines as that of the Zebedee brothers
when they asked for seats on the right and left of Jesus in his kingdom (Mark
10.35-37 par.). 159 If Jesus did not see his role in such terms, how might he have responded?
One alternative was to damp down such expectation and to attempt to
indicate (or construct) a role model closer to what he saw for himself. That is what
Jesus did, implies Mark, 160 and we have already seen that expectation of suffering
158. Does the account of Jesus' first temptation (Matt. 4.3/Luke 4.3) contain an echo of
this episode?
159. Cullmann, Christology 122-26; Taylor, Mark 377; Pesch, Markusevangelium 2.34;
cf. Leivestad, Jesus 93-95. Despite Räisänen's firm judgment — 'Nothing points to the alleged
Jewish nationalist meaning' (Messianic Secret 179) — the plausibility remains: if the question
of Jesus as royal Messiah did arise for the disciples (as seems inherently likely), the only obvious
category of 'Messiah' into which they could fit their hopes was that of the kingly, military
leader (§15.2a).
160. Catchpole, "Triumphal" Entry' 326, and Räisänen, Messianic Secret 179-81, are
right to point out that the command to silence does not function in the narrative as a correction;
Mark certainly did not want to dispute that Jesus was Messiah. The tendency to link Jesus' rebuke
of Peter (Mark 8.33) directly to Peter's confession (8.29), as summarized in Charlesworth,
'Messianology to Christology' 12 (Jesus 'apparently rejected Peter's confession, that he [Jesus]
was the Christ, as satanic'), should also be resisted. At the same time, Hengel not unfairly turns
the question round: 'Is it not an indication of the relative trustworthiness of the gospel tradition
that the ... "community" never produced an unambiguous scene in which Jesus announces his
claim coram publico with a clear "I am the Christ"?' ('Jesus, Messiah of Israel' 59).
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