Challenging the authority of Jesus: Mark 11: 27-33 and mediterranean notions of honor and shame

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Jun 2000 by Hellerman, Joseph H

This suggests that to answer that John's baptism was "of human origin" would have been unthinkable for the Jewish leaders. The people in the crowd, Mark tells us, "all regarded John as truly a prophet." To publicly deny the truth of that conviction would be to compromise the Sanhedrin's honor among the people and, by extension, the leaders' effectiveness as Roman retainers. In contrast, the other option-to answer that John's baptism was "from heaven"-would have been most compelling to Jesus' adversaries. Indeed, for the Jewish leaders to retain their honor among the crowds, "from heaven" constitutes the ideal response. After all, the baptizer was dead, so there was no potential conflict of interest or authority in agreeing with the people's assessment of John.36 And we must keep in mind that it is the crowd, throughout the tension-filled debates of Mark 11-12, that proffers the public verdict in these challenge-riposte encounters. To reply to Jesus that John's baptism was "from heaven," then, would align the Sanhedrin with the onlooking crowd, protect their honor in a highly-charged public setting, and put Jesus, once again, on the defensive.

Or would it? The rhetorical knife, as the reader is well aware, sharply cuts both ways. Although agreement with the convictions of the crowd would have preserved the Sanhedrin's honor in the short run, it would have left them open to another riposte from Jesus, one which would have proved ultimately devastating: "Why then did you not believe him?" (11:31). For to acknowledge the authority of John-i.e. to "believe him"-is to acknowledge Jesus' own authority to prophetically denounce the whole temple enterprise and therefore to implicitly legitimate Jesus' action in the temple on the previous day (11:15-19). This is so because of John the Baptizer's attitude both toward the temple and toward Jesus.

Mark's narrative begins with John appearing in the wilderness, "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (1:4). The ref erence to "forgiveness of sins" has been interpreted in a variety of ways.37 What is important for our purposes is that the locale or institution immediately associated with "forgiveness of sins" in first-century Judea was the Jerusalem temple-not the Jordan river. For John to offer the forgiveness of sins outside the normal avenues of the centralized sacrificial system was to essentially call into question the ongoing validity of that system for the procurement of divine forgiveness.

The Lukan infancy narrative relates that John came from priestly stock, a heritage which he apparently later rejected. The coherence between Mark 1 and Luke 1 suggests that John Meier is quite on target (in spite of his own continuing reservations) in his description of John the Baptizer's activities: " . . . the only son of a priest turned his back on the vocation decreed for him by his birth, effectively rejected both his priestly family and the temple, and struck out into the desert to embrace the role of an Israelite prophet of judgment."38