Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§15.7 Who Did They Think Jesus Was?
most audiences. 304 And personally I have no doubt that Mark has used the account
of the two-stage healing (8.22-26) to indicate the painfully slow transition
of Jesus' own disciples from their blindness (8.18) to the partial sight of Peter's
confession (8.29) and beyond (9.9). 305
At the same time, the fact that most of the stories have a firm location is
hardly to be attributed to subsequent adornment. 306 The simple intimacy and unadorned
character of what is only the second healing in Mark's account (1.29-31)
is remarkable, even by Mark's standard — nothing worthy of special note here! 307
Equally remarkable is the description of Jesus' emotional state when confronted
with leprosy: 308 not only was he 'deeply moved' (1.41 — splanchnistheis), 309 but
Mark describes him as 'snorting' (1.43 — embrimesamenos) 310 at the leper. 311
Somewhat surprising too, given Mark's attitude to the law of clean and unclean
elsewhere (7.19), Jesus commands the man to 'go show yourself to the priest, and
304. Was it Mark who created the 'Markan sandwich' in 5.21-43 (cf. 3.20-35; 11.12-25;
14.53-72), or did a twin episode thus interwoven already in the tradition (and in memory) give
him the idea of using the same technique elsewhere? Here is a good example of the difficulty of
discerning Markan redaction (cf. above, §7.4c at n. 75). For the discussion on the point see particularly
Guelich, Mark 292-93.
305. Similarly, e.g., Guelich, Mark 430; Meier, Marginal Jew 2.691-92.
306. The house of Simon and Andrew (1.29); 'at home' in Capernaum (2.1); Bethsaida
(8.22); on Capernaum and Bethsaida see above, §9.9d and nn. 305 and 329 respectively; here
note also Meier, Marginal Jew 2.692-93 and his response to Guelich's conclusion that
'Bethsaida' is redactional in n. 71.
307. Peter's mother-in-law is never mentioned again. 'This brief vignette comes as close
as any to qualifying as a report of an actual happening' (Funk, Acts of Jesus 59); similarly
Lüdemann, Jesus 13. See also Pesch, Markusevangelium 1.131-32. Meier, however, almost
falls over backwards in his desire not to claim too much for this story (Marginal Jew 2.707-
708). Luke treats the healing as a quasi-exorcism: Jesus 'commanded the fever' (Luke 4.39; cf.
4.35).
308. On what the description lepros/lepra (1.40, 42) might have denoted see D. P.
Wright and R. N. Jones, 'Leprosy' ABD 4.277-82.
309. For the debate on whether the more weakly attested orgistheis ('angered') should
be regarded as the earlier reading see Meier, Marginal Jew 2.748 n. 106.
310. LSJ, embrimaomai; see Taylor, Mark 188-89; 'growling' (Marcus, Mark 1.206).
See also S. Eitrem, Some Notes on the Demonology in the New Testament (Uppsala: Almquist
and Wiksells, 2 1966) 51-55.
311. Opinion is divided on this episode. Lüdemann thinks the tradition has no historical
value (Jesus 14). But the Jesus Seminar 'agreed by a narrow margin that Jesus cured the "leper"
of some form of dermatitis' (Acts of Jesus 62). The usually more conservative Pesch, however,
is much less impressed (Markusevangelium 1.147); Meier declines to make any claims about
the details of the story, though he is more confident than Pesch 'that during his ministry Jesus
claimed to heal lepers and was thought by other people to have done so' (Marginal Jew 2.706);
and Kollmann thinks that the 'obviously christological adaptation and outbidding of 2 Kgs 5'(!)
allows no certain clue to the leprosy healings of Jesus (Jesus 225).
681