The Birth of Jesus, Part III. The Testimony of Mark, the Earliest Gospel
The first gospel to be written, the one we call Mark, was composed in the early years of the 8th decade (70-72). It contains no story of and no reference to the birth of Jesus. To explain this omission, there are only two possibilities: Either the author of Mark had never heard about the birth tradition because it had not yet been created or he knew about it and deemed it unworthy of inclusion. For a number of reasons the first of these two alternatives is generally agreed to be the overwhelming probability.
First of all, it is not just an argument from silence. There are a number of episodes in the corpus of Mark’s gospel that would have been either impossible or incomprehensible, if he had been aware of a miraculous birth tradition. I will look at three of them.
In the first chapter of this gospel we find the familiar story of Jesus coming to John the Baptist to be baptized. The preamble to this episode is not a birth story or a childhood story, but a reference to the fact that Jesus was believed to be the fulfillment of the hopes and the writings of the prophets. Mark builds this case by quoting Malachi 3:1 and II Isaiah 40:3, although he only acknowledges his dependence on Isaiah in the text. Then he launches into a description of John the Baptist that is developed in such a way as to identify him with the prophet Elijah. Mark describes John the Baptist as wearing the clothing of Elijah, a man of the desert, and portrays him as eating Elijah’s diet of locusts and wild honey (Mark 1:6-7 and II Kings1:8). By turning John the Baptist into an Elijah-like figure, Mark was playing to the messianic images that suggested that Elijah must come first to prepare the way for the messiah. John the Baptist has thus been co-opted by Mark to play this role in the first gospel to appear in writing. This is not history. This is interpretive portrait painting, but the synagogue audience for which Mark was writing would immediately understand the symbols he was employing.
Next, in the first act that Mark attributes to Jesus, he is baptized by John in the Jordan River. There is nothing about this gospel’s first mention of Jesus to suggest that he was different or supernatural because of some aspect of his birth. He was pictured simply as an adult, a fully human male. Mark employed the custom of that day, by introducing Jesus by name followed by his home town. If any further identification was needed, Mark would have said, “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of _____ ” and then named his father. That was not deemed necessary for Mark’s introduction. Indeed, the father of Jesus, whether human or divine, is never mentioned in this gospel.
It is only in this account of his baptism that the first supernatural references are mentioned by this writer. First, he said, the heavens opened. The sky was thought of as a dome that separated the realm of God above from the realm of human life below. In the creation story, which would have been quite familiar to Mark’s Jewish audience (Genesis 1:6), the sky was called “the firmament” and was supposed to have served to separate “the waters above from the waters below.” The heavenly waters that fell from the sky as rain formed the earthly waters that became the oceans, rivers and streams. In time, that heavenly water came to be identified with the Holy Spirit. So in this narrative the heavens opened to the dwelling place of God and the Spirit descended from God to fall on Jesus like a dove. Then a voice from heaven rang out across the earth proclaiming Jesus to be God’s “beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Once again in the use of these words, texts from the Hebrew Scriptures were in the mind of the writer of this gospel. II Isaiah (Isa. 40-55) had God refer to the “suffering servant” of his narrative as “My chosen in whom my soul delights” (Is. 42:1) and the Psalter has God refer to the Lord’s anointed as, “You are my son, today have I begotten you” (Ps. 7:2). The Spirit does not come on Jesus just for a season, but has come to dwell on him permanently, so that he becomes a God-infused human life. The Holy Spirit was not the male agent in conception as the later birth narratives would assert. The Holy Spirit dropped from heaven on the fully human adult Jesus at this baptism to indwell him in an ongoing manner. This was Mark’s way of explaining the source of the divine presence that was found in Jesus. Had he known about the virgin birth tradition, Mark’s explanation of the coming of the Spirit to dwell permanently in him would not have been necessary. The later developing supernatural story of Jesus’ miraculous birth had clearly not yet been thought of or composed by anyone.
The second Marcan episode that reveals that he had never heard of the story of the virgin birth comes in chapter 3. Jesus, we are told, has broken onto the public scene in a series of rapid-fire activities. He had chosen some disciples; astonished a congregation at Capernaum with his teaching in a synagogue; healed a man with an “unclean spirit,” who then with supernatural insight, recognized Jesus’ divine presence; healed Peter’s mother-in-law; cast out demons and healed the sick of an entire city; cleansed a leper; healed a paralytic; called Levi from his tax collecting trade into discipleship; distinguished himself from John the Baptist; violated the Sabbath by picking and eating grain in the fields; proclaimed himself “Lord of the Sabbath,” and, finally, in the synagogue on the Sabbath healed a man with a withered hand (see chapters 2 and 3). This Sabbath healing was not an emergency act, which would have made it legitimate, since the hand would still be withered on the day after the Sabbath, so it was a calculated Sabbath violation. All of these provocative acts brought immediate public notice.
Then Jesus went home to Nazareth and his family began to hear of these things. They were not pleased, Mark says, “They went out to seize him, for all the people were saying, ‘He is beside himself’” (Mark 3:20-21). This is the first biblical mention of the family of Jesus, other than Paul’s reference to James as “the brother of the Lord” in Galatians. It is not, however, until the end of this chapter that the family of Jesus is defined. Thinking him mentally disturbed, which is what the words “beside himself” mean, Mark tells us that “Jesus’ mother and his brothers came to where he was.” Standing outside the crowd, they sent a message to him asking him to come out. When informed of their presence, Jesus not only declined to accede to their wishes, but he also redefined his kinship to them. Whoever does “the will of God, he said, “is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).
Note first that the mother of Jesus thinks him mentally disturbed. That is not the behavior of one to whom an angel might have appeared to tell her she would be the mother of the messiah. One does not receive that divine message prior to a child’s birth and then think he has gone out of his mind when he reaches his adult life. No, when Mark wrote this gospel he had not heard of the tradition that Jesus had a supernatural birth because it had not yet been created.
The final Marcan episode that makes it clear that the birth narrative of Jesus was not part of the original Christian tradition, but a late-developing addition to the story, comes in the sixth chapter of Mark. Jesus had returned to his home in Nazareth from a series of adventures described in chapters 4 and 5, which included casting the legion of demons out of a demented man and allowing these demons to enter a herd of swine, causing a stampede that resulted in the drowning of that herd in the Sea of Galilee; raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead, and healing the woman with the chronic menstrual flow. The author of this gospel clearly meant to suggest that the people were talking of his power and wondering about its source.
At this point, Mark says, Jesus entered his synagogue and created astonishment at his teaching. The people, who had been his neighbors, could not believe what they were hearing. So Mark had an anonymous member of that crowd ask this question: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon and are not his sisters here with us” (Mark 6:3-4)? Please note the following things about this passage. First, this is the first time in the Christian story that the role of the carpenter has been mentioned and it is Jesus who is the carpenter, not Joseph, who is cast in that role. That will change when we come to Matthew a decade later when the shift is made. Second, this is also the first and only time in Mark that we hear that “Mary” is the name of Jesus’ mother. Third, there is no mention of a father in this family. In addition to his mother four brothers are named and the plural word “sisters” is used, indicating that there was more than one. Finally, be aware that for an anonymous voice in the crowd to call a grown man named Jesus, “the son of Mary,” was pejorative in Jewish society. One did not call a mature man the “son of a woman” unless his paternity was suspect. This phrase meant that his father was unknown. It thus suggested that Jesus was “base born” or illegitimate. Rumors to this effect were clearly beginning to swirl around Jesus and echoes of these charges can be found in the other gospels. These rumors would in time create the necessity for developing the virgin birth tradition, but that time had not yet come
It is thus clear that the first gospel writer, Mark, had never heard of the virgin birth. When Mark was written over forty years had passed since the crucifixion and some seventy years had passed since the birth of Jesus. Mythological traditions build slowly. The story of the virgin birth of Jesus is one of these mythological traditions. We will pursue this study in subsequent weeks as this series continues.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online
here.
