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ISSN 0142-064X the Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14.64 [JSNT 26.4 (2004) 379-401] ISSN 0142-064X The Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14.64 Adela Yarbro Collins Yale University Divinity School 409 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511, USA [email protected] Abstract The teaching of m. Sanh. 7.5, that the ‘blasphemer’ is not culpable unless he pronounces the Name itself, is attested by Josephus and the Community Rule from Qumran. The Markan Jesus, however, does not pronounce the divine name. Philo provides evidence for a broader understanding of blas- phemy, namely, claims to be divine or to possess divine power. The relevant passages are analogous to the Markan Jesus’ claims that he would be en- throned at the right hand of God and that he would ‘come with the clouds of heaven’. Both claims imply divine status, authority and power. The chief priests, as Sadducees, probably subscribed to a definition of blasphemy like that of Philo. Like other Jews of the time, they advocated the death penalty for blasphemy, but were more likely to carry it out. Mark did not wish to deny that Jesus blasphemed from the point of view of the chief priests. The narrative is ironic in the sense that what is blasphemy from the point of view of the council is true from the perspective of the implied audience. A great deal of the scholarship on the trial of Jesus before the high priest and the council of Judea in Mark has focused on the question of the his- torical reliability of the account.1 One of the issues involved in such studies is the question of responsibility for the death of Jesus, a sensitive issue for Jewish–Christian relations, especially since the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jews and the subsequent examination by Christians of their tradition, in which the Christian roots of anti-Semitism have been 1. See the review of scholarship in Darrell L. Bock, Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism and the Final Examination of Jesus: A Philological-Historical Study of the Key Jewish Themes Impacting Mark 14:61-64 (WUNT, 2.106; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), pp. 5-29; the concerns of Bock’s study are also primarily historical. © The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX and 15 East 26th Street, Suite 1703, New York, NY 10010, USA. 380 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26.4 (2004) analyzed. A major problem in the study of the trial of Mk 14 is the dis- crepancy between the procedures followed there and the procedures man- dated by the tractate Sanhedrin in the Mishnah for capital cases (m. Sanh. 4.1–5.5). If the regulations described in the Mishnah were in force during the time of Jesus, then the trial before the council was illegal, even a gross miscarriage of justice. Herbert Danby has argued persuasively that those regulations were not in force in Jesus’ time.2 Israel Abrahams has noted that the relevant portion of the Mishnah reads like a polemic against the Gospels.3 Although a detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this article, I am attracted to the hypothesis that Abrahams hinted at only to reject, namely, that the Mishnah passage was composed, at least in part, in order to demonstrate that the high priest and council would not have conducted a trial in such a manner. The rabbis wanted to make the case that the accounts of Mark and Matthew are libelous fabrications. In any case, the regulations regarding trials involving capital punishment in the Mishnah should not be used in historical studies of the trial of Jesus. The point about the relevance of the Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin is the only aspect of the question of what actually happened to be addressed by this article. I will focus rather on the cultural presuppositions and rhetorical force of the text of Mk 14.53-64. With regard to the presentation of the event, even when one puts the Mishnah aside, it is clear that the text of Mark portrays the high priest and the other members of the council as proceeding in an unjust manner. Such is implied by the statement that ‘the chief priests and the whole council were seeking testimony against Jesus in order to put him to death, and yet they could not find any’.4 This statement strongly implies a lack of impartiality on the part of the members of the council who were functioning at the time as judges. The next part of the narrator’s report, which concerns the false witnesses, implies that the members of the council had sought and found persons willing to appear and bring false testimony against Jesus.5 The problem was that their 2. Herbert Danby, ‘The Bearing of the Rabbinical Criminal Code on the Jewish Trial Narratives in the Gospels’, JTS 21 (1919–20), pp. 51-76. 3. Israel Abrahams, ‘The Tannaitic Tradition and the Trial Narratives’, in Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (New York: Ktav, 1917–24), II, pp. 129-37; the reference is to p. 137. 4. Mk 14.55; all translations of Mark are my own. 5. Mk 14.56-59. The ga&r of v. 56 links the false testimony with the activity of the members of the council reported in v. 55. Compare Acts 6.13 where the procurance of false witnesses is explicit. © The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. COLLINS The Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14.64 381 testimony did not agree. There was bias against Jesus, but the conspiracy was not sufficiently well planned. Whatever actually happened, it is clear that Mark wishes to make the point that the leaders of the people were trying to frame Jesus and thus condemn him unjustly. The narrative flow of the passage implies that the purpose of the false testimony was to convict Jesus of blasphemy against the temple and thus against God. This reading is supported by the remarks of the high priest, ‘Why do we need witnesses any longer? You heard the blasphemy’ (Mk 14.63-64). Witnesses are no longer needed to convict Jesus of blasphemy because he himself has blasphemed in the hearing of the judges. These remarks make clear that the high priest is interpreting the statement of Jesus in 14.62 as blasphemous. Here again there is tension between Mark and the Mishnah. According to m. Sanh. 7.5, the blasphemer is not culpable unless he pronounces the Name itself. Such is clearly not the case in Mark, since Jesus uses the circumlocution ‘the Power’ rather than the divine name (Mk 14.62). As will be demonstrated below, this limited understanding of blasphemy is attested in the period roughly contemporary with Mark. But this does not mean that this understanding was the official one that the council of Judea would have applied in the case of Jesus. The understanding of blasphemy likely to have been characteristic of the Sadducees, chief priests and per- haps other leaders as well was a broader one, as will be shown below. Although Mark portrays the members of the council as biased and unjust, the charge of blasphemy in the trial of Jesus has verisimilitude in the cul- tural context of the Gospel. Mark did not wish to deny that Jesus blas- phemed from the perspective of the high priest and the council. The prob- lem lay, in his view, with their perspective, which failed to acknowledge Jesus as the authoritative agent of God. The narrative of the trial is ironic in the sense that what is blasphemy for the members of the council is true from the perspective of those who accept Jesus as the agent of God. Indeed, in the view of the audiences of Mark, Jesus had already been enthroned as the heavenly Messiah. This conviction intensifies the ironic effect. Blasphemy in the Cultural Context of Mark The whole question about blasphemy in the Jewish scriptures and Second Temple Jewish texts needs to be clarified first of all linguistically.6 Many 6. For brief introductions to the topic of blasphemy, see Hermann Wolfgang © The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2004. 382 Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26.4 (2004) texts are quite inappropriately interpreted as ‘blasphemy’. The first step toward greater clarity is to recognize a significant linguistic difference between Mark, Jews of the Second Temple period, and ordinary Greek speakers of the same period, on the one hand, and modern exegetes on the other. That difference may be illustrated by the fact that contemporary speakers of English use the word-group related to the term ‘blasphemy’ only with God as the object. We never speak about ‘blaspheming’ another human being. In ordinary ancient Greek, however, the verb blasfhmei=n is used with either gods or human beings as the object. This ordinary usage is reflected in the New Testament. In Col. 3.8, blasfhmi/a refers to slander against other human beings; in Eph. 4.31, the same noun is equivalent to loidori/a, which means abusive speech.7 ‘Blasphemy’ in the Hebrew Bible The situation is quite the same in the Hebrew Bible. There is no specific term in that collection of texts that means ‘to blaspheme’.8 Those who claim that the concept of blasphemy appears in the Hebrew Bible connect it with one or more of the following terms: Prx (‘reproach, taunt, despise, scorn’), C)n (‘contemn, spurn, scorn, despise’), Pdg (‘revile, affront’) and the piel of llq (‘curse’). All of these words are used in the Hebrew Bible with both human and divine objects, just as blasfhmei=n is used in ordinary Greek.
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