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8
What Does It Mean to Say
That Jesus Is the God of Israel?
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An exchange with Richard B. Hays, |
At a study day on the 5th December 2008 in Kings College London Professor Hays presented two papers. The one in the morning had caught my eye. It was entitled Hidden in order to Be Revealed: Jesus as the God of Israel in Mark’s Gospel.
You see I am convinced that the revolutionary texts in the Bible present the God of Israel ideologically as the god of the Hebrew marginals, as the god designed to advocate and justify a marginal perspective or world-view. This being the case I am quite comfortable with the idea that the Gospels present Jesus as the God of Israel, since as I see it Jesus clearly operated with a god-of-the-marginals ideology and fulfilled it to the hilt. That said I was pretty certain Hays would not read Mark’s Gospel in this way. This made me want to ask what he thought Mark was aiming to convey to people by suggesting that Jesus and the God of Israel were one and the same. Was he speaking religiously - vaguely saying that Jesus was the greatest: the answer to anything and everything - or was he being ideologically specific? In fact what value was Mark attributing to Jesus in presenting him thus?
Richard Hays’ objective in his paper was to try and demonstrate that, though Mark’s Gospel is not built around the full blown Christology one associates with later Christian texts, none the less the basic attributes of such a Christology can already be identified within it. It seemed to me that this was something one could easily grant. However, what remained unclear for me was what Richard thought Mark was doing in suggesting that Jesus and the God of Israel were the same, thereby establishing what, for better or quite possibly worse, was later to turn into a full blown Christology, since clearly his aim in writing his Gospel couldn’t have been to sell a Christology that had not yet been developed?
After Professor Hays had read his paper I posed my question regarding the ‘cash-value’ of the God of Israel. I explained that scholars like E.P. Sanders tell us that the God of Israel was, for the evangelists, associated with a conservative ‘Jewish salvation history’ ideology whereas other scholars, like Robert Funk and Marcus Borg, claim he was associated with a liberal ideology while other scholars still, like J.D. Crossan, argue that to the contrary he was associated with a radical peasant world-view. What, therefore, did he, Robert Hays, think Mark would have signified by this God of Israel personality? What would have been the cash value he gave to this identity, cash-value he then sought to attribute to Jesus?
Richard Hays was clearly uncomfortable with my question. All he could think to say was that if it was political answers I was after I had better wait to hear what he had to say that afternoon. True enough there was more politics in this second paper entitled Turning the World Upside Down: Israel’s Scripture in Luke-Acts. However, though turning the world upside down – Richard Hays description of Luke’s theology – certainly appears to involve a revolution of some kind it does not of itself make clear what sort of revolution we are talking about. It does not seem to me that we can make any of the Gospels square with a bourgeois revolution giving rise to a liberal ideology, as Funk and Borg try to make out, or even with a peasant revolution giving rise to an egalitarian proto-ideology as Crossan claims. So simply implying that Luke (and perhaps also Mark?) was on about a revolution, as Hays does, leaving it at that, clearly won’t do. I was therefore left without an answer and to wonder what it is about this simply question concerning the roots (whether political, religious or whatever) of the God of Israel idea, that causes scholars either to produce answers that are clearly wrong or else, as was the case with Richard Hays, to instinctively clam up?
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