Jesus (68 page)

8
. There was dislike on both sides, as Amy-Jill Levine reminded me: “Samaritans disliked the Jews as much as the Jews disliked Samaritans.”

9
. Brueggemann,
Finally Comes the Poet
, 109.

10
. Reed,
Archaeology and the Galilean Jesus
, 220.

11
. Lk 16:19–31.

12
. Donahue,
Gospel in Parable
, 2.

13
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 102.

14
. Mt 18:12–14; Lk 15:3–7.

15
. Johnson,
Gospel of Luke
, 235.

16
. There is a longer discussion of this topic in my book
Between Heaven and Mirth
, which considers the ways in which some of Jesus's parables and images would have seemed to the original hearers not simply provocative, but funny.

17
. Harrington,
Jesus
, 31.

18
. Mk 4:10–12.

19
. Lk 8:9–10; Mt 13:10–16.

20
. Mk 3:21.

21
. Mk 3:31–35; Mt 12:46–50.

22
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 118.

23
. Mt 13:44.

24
. Mt 25:14–30; Lk 19:11–27.

25
. Donahue,
Gospel in Parable
, 107.

26
. Donahue,
Gospel in Parable
, 108.

27
. Mt 20:1–16.

28
. Barbara Reid, “Unmasking Greed,”
America
, Nov. 7, 2011, 47.

29
. Only the Gospel of Luke (15:11–32) includes the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

30
. Johnson,
Gospel of Luke
, 237.

31
. Mt 14:14; Lk 7:13; 10:33.

32
. Gn 45:1–15.

33
. Johnson,
Gospel of Luke
, 237. Johnson also notes that for the early Christians the idea of a son who was dead and now lives would have had deep resonances.

34
. Lk 15:1–2.

35
. Johnson,
Gospel of Luke
, 241–42.

36
. Nouwen,
Return of the Prodigal Son
, 72.

Chapter Thirteen:
Storms

1
. Don't let the fact that Mussolini liked the Holy Land dissuade you from visiting.

2
. Murphy-O'Connor,
Holy Land
, 318.

3
. At one point Luke describes Jesus sending out “the seventy,” which may be a good indication of the number of disciples (10:1–20).

4
. Ps 69.

5
. Acts 27:27–32.

6
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 158. The authors draw parallels to the “unconcerned sleep” of the farmer who trusts in God's provident care of the harvest in Mk 4:27.

7
. The
kibbutz
, a communal settlement, was called Ginosar, a variant of Gennesaret.

8
. Pottery shards and carbon dating securely date the boat from the time of Jesus (Crossan and Reed,
Excavating Jesus
, 4).

9
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 158.

10
. Gn 1:6–8. The Canaanite God Baal and the Babylonian god Tiamat were “storm gods.” Thus, when God divides the waters in the Book of Genesis (between the rains in the heavens and the seas on the earth), the Hebrew people would have seen this as God implicitly subduing not only the chaos and peril that threatened them, but also the lesser gods of their enemies.

11
. Ps 89:9. Also Ps 107:29: “He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.” And Ps 65:7: “You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves.” Richard Clifford, SJ, an Old Testament scholar, reminded me of a line from the hymn “For All the Saints.” One line speaks of the saints “casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.” The glassy sea is the image from Revelation, in which God exerts his authority over all things and calms the raging seas.

12
. Ps 13.

13
. Mt 14:22–33; Mk 6:45–52; Jn 6:16–21.

14
.
Eremos
is Greek for solitary, lonely, or desolate, specifically as in a wilderness or desert. The word “hermit” comes from the same root.

15
. Ex 3:14.

Chapter Fourteen:
Gerasa

1
. John Meier, in
A Marginal Jew
, includes a fascinating discussion about the place's name (and the variants Gergesenes, Gergesines, and Gergystenes) and offers arguments about the event's historicity, which he supports (2:650–56). Bargil Pixner, in
With Jesus Through Galilee
, suggests that it may mean the “region of the expelled peoples,” that is, the Girgashites driven away from Israel by Joshua's conquest of the land (Jo 3:10). “Perhaps the original text of Mark, which caused so much confusion,” Pixner writes, “should have read simply ‘They went across the lake to the country of the expelled people (Hebrew: Gerushim or Gerashim)'” (45). Levine and Brettler, in
The Jewish Annotated New Testament
(69), suggest that the confusion may indicate that Mark was not from northern Galilee, or perhaps that Gerasa evokes the Hebrew
gerash
, which means “expel,” not simply in the way that Pixner relates, but also as an evocation of the expelling of the demons into the pigs; so, “Place of Expulsion.”

2
. Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy, eds.,
New Jerome Biblical Commentary
, 607.

3
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 163.

4
. Barclay,
Gospel of Mark
, 135.

5
. Mk 1:24.

6
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 165.

7
. Scholars sometimes interpret this as a philosophical (or “ontological”) statement: “I am who am” could mean “I am Being itself” or even “I am with you.” But given the other times that this locution occurs in Scripture, it is more likely that the meaning I mentioned in the chapter is the case: it indicates the unwillingness to fully reveal the divine name. Richard Clifford, SJ, an Old Testament scholar, told me, “It's first of all wordplay on the divine name YHWH. ‘I am who am' in Hebrew is ‘'HYH.' It thus seems to be revelatory of the divine being, yet with a further sense that one cannot control God by knowing his name. Know me, that I am God, not your best friend, but I want you to know that I am with you in this extraordinary formative moment.”

8
. Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy, eds.,
New Jerome Biblical Commentary
, 607. In this interpretation, “legion” is not a name so much as a number.

9
. In the Greek legiwvn (
legiōn
).

10
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 166.

11
. Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy, eds.,
New Jerome Biblical Commentary
, 607.

12
. Interestingly, the mascot of the Roman legion garrisoned in the region, the Legio X Fretensis, was a boar, which was emblazoned on its standard, adding yet another layer of meaning to the story.

13
. Joseph Fitzmyer remarks wryly: “The stampede of pigs from Gerasa to the lake would have made them the most energetic herd in history!” (
Gospel According to Luke, I–IX
, 736).

14
. Murphy-O'Connor,
Holy Land
, 354.

15
. Murphy-O'Connor,
Holy Land
, 355.

Chapter Fifteen:
Tabgha

1
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 211.

2
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 132. Also, not even Jesus's opponents deny his powers of healing and wonder-working. They challenge the
source
of his power, not the power itself.

3
. The theme is common in the Acts of the Apostles: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (2:44–45).

4
. Meier, whose work on the historical Jesus strives to determine which events have the greatest claim to historicity, writes, “[T]he feeding of the multitudes is supported by an unusually strong attestation of multiple sources.”
A Marginal Jew
, vol. 2, 965.

5
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 134.

6
. Harrington,
Jesus
, 38.

7
. The Feeding of the Five Thousand appears in Mk 6:30–44; Mt 14:13–21; Lk 9:10–17 and Jn 6:1–15; the Feeding of the Four Thousand appears in Mk 8:1–10 and Mt 15:32–39. Donahue and Harrington write in
The Gospel of Mark:
“Innumerable theories have been offered to explain the relation of the different versions of the feeding to each other and to a postulated primitive narrative [i.e., from before the writing of the Gospels]” (208). Meier's
A Marginal Jew
describes the possible interplays between the various accounts (2:950–67). N. T. Wright's reminder of the possibility of several versions is also helpful: “My guess would be that we have two separate versions of the great supper parable [and other stories and parables that seem duplicated] not because one is adapted from the other or both from a common written source, but because these are two out of a dozen or more possible variations that, had one been in Galilee with a tape recorder, one might have ‘collected,'” that is, from the various witnesses (
Jesus and the Victory of God
, 170).

8
. Again, the idea of several versions is helpful. Meier writes in
A Marginal Jew:
“Their amnesia about Jesus's previous feeding miracle when faced with a very similar problem is difficult to comprehend. The most likely explanation is that Mark has incorporated two versions of the same story into his narrative” (2:957).

9
. Mk 6:13.

10
. Mk 6:31–32.

11
. Ez 34. Elisha's feeding of the multitude in 2 Kings 4:42–44 might have also been on their minds.

12
. Brown,
Introduction to the New Testament
, 136.

13
. Or a “bed for leeks.” Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy, eds.,
New Jerome Biblical Commentary
, 610.

14
. Donahue and Harrington,
Gospel of Mark
, 207.

15
. Bergant and Karris, eds.,
Collegeville Bible Commentary
, 990.

16
. Meier,
Marginal Jew
, 2:963.

17
. Thus the “Feeding of the Five Thousand” may have included not just five thousand men but, additionally, women and children. As Amy-Jill Levine suggested to me, the miracle might be more accurately called the “Feeding of the Twenty-Five Thousand.”

18
. The barley harvest takes place around the time of Passover, so John's inclusion of the barley loaves (6:9) is another link to the Jewish festival and thus perhaps a way of drawing a parallel to the Last Supper.

19
. Mt 22:1–14: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.” See also Lk 14:8–24.

20
. Ex 17:1–7; Ex 16:1–36; Nm 11:4–9.

21
. Jn 6:35.

22
. Pope Benedict XVI writes in
Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration:
“The fundamental context in which the entire chapter [John's narrative of the miracle] belongs is centered upon the contrast between Moses and Jesus. Jesus is the definitive, greater Moses—the ‘prophet' whom Moses foretold in his discourse at the border of the Holy Land and concerning whom God said, ‘I will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak to them all that I command him' (Deut 18:18). It is no accident, then, that the following statement occurs between the multiplication of the loaves and the attempts to make Jesus king: ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!' [Jn 6:14]” (264).

23
. Mt 8:11.

24
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 58.

25
. Mk 10:17–31.

26
. Mt 13:8; Mk 4:8; Lk 8:8.

27
. Lohfink,
Jesus of Nazareth
, 109.

Chapter Sixteen:
Bethesda

1
. The story is told at length in
St. Peter's Bones
by Thomas J. Craughwell.

2
. For citations see
The Gospel of John
, by Francis J. Moloney, SDB, 171–72. Also, Barclay notes as well that several elements in the story had previously appeared to be simply allegorical: the thirty-eight years, for example, as standing for the time that the Jewish people wandered in the desert, and so on, which lent credence to the idea that the entire story was an allegory (
Gospel of John
, i:210).

3
. Murphy-O'Connor,
Holy Land
, 29.

4
. “Running water” and “living water” are the same expression in Hebrew, according to Amy-Jill Levine.

5
. There is a dispute over how the Greek text should read—different ancient manuscripts use different names: “Bethesda,” “Beth-zatha,” and “Bethsaida.” “Bethesda” is found in many texts and is the most common way of referring to the place today (McKenzie,
Dictionary of the Bible
, 92). The New Revised Standard Version, however, uses “Beth-zatha.” For a longer discussion of the Greek variations, see Brown,
Gospel According to John I–XII
, 206.

6
. Barclay,
Gospel of John
, 1:208.

7
. Brown,
Introduction to the New Testament
, 345.

8
. Gerald O'Collins calls him a “first betrayer,” an anticipation of Judas, in
Jesus
, 216. Thomas Stegman said that he (and scholars like Gail R. O'Day and Jeffrey L. Staley) see the man more positively. “The verb
anangellō
(‘announce') is used elsewhere in John with the positive sense of announcing who Jesus is,” Stegman told me. “O'Day notes that while the healed man focuses on healing, the religious leaders focus on the Sabbath violation. To me, it seems more likely that he would want to announce the good news of his healing, rather than betray Jesus.”