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195 Chapter  Refracted Christology: What Jesus Says Instead Not only does the Markan Jesus attempt to deflect attention and honor away from himself and toward God (the focus of the previous chapter on deflected christology), but the Markan Jesus also refracts—or bends—the christologies of other characters and the narrator. The image comes from the way a prism refracts “white” light and thus shows its spectral colors. When a thing is bent and looked at from another angle, something different appears. The most obvious way in which the Markan Jesus bends the christologies of others is by his statements about the “Son of Man”—or, to translate the Greek (ho huios tou anthrōpou) more literally, “Son of Humanity,” especially in juxtaposition with “christological titles” offered by other characters. No other character or the narrator speaks of the “Son of Humanity.” The Markan Jesus’ statements about the “kingdom of God” may also be seen as refracting the christologies of other characters and the narrator. No other character speaks of the “kingdom of God,” and the narrator does so but once, just after Jesus’ death (15:43). “Son of Humanity ” and “kingdom (rule) of God” depict the Markan Jesus’ distinctive point of 1. In all the canonical gospels, “the Son of man sayings are formulated in the third person singular and placed in the mouth of Jesus Himself. ‘Son of man’ is never found as a mode of address or in any formula of confession” (Ferdinand Hahn, The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity [New York: World Publishing, 1969; first published in German in 1963], 32). However, Acts 7:56 narrates this speech of Stephen, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (noted by Hahn, 49 n. 108). 196 MARK’S JESUS view. This chapter explores Markan narrative christology by examining what the Markan Jesus says instead of what the narrator and other characters say—what Jesus says about the “Son of Humanity” (with a preliminary word on the work of Kingsbury and Naluparayil on this designation) and the “kingdom of God.” Kingsbury and Naluparayil on the Markan “Son of Man” Jack Dean Kingsbury’s way of dealing with the “Son of Man” statements in Mark deserves an initial comment. He recognizes, of course, their uniqueness to Jesus, which is a literary critical observation, but his analysis of them is tremendously influenced by his negative reaction to theories of Markan “corrective christology ” in which “Son of Man” statements are evaluated positively over against “Son of God” statements considered as reflective of a rejected “divine man” or theios anēr christology. “Son of God” is, of course, one of two favorite “christological titles” of the Markan narrator—and the favorite title of Kingsbury. I am very much in agreement with Kingsbury’s critique of “corrective christology” as ignoring and distorting much of the evidence of the Markan narrative and importing quite problematic “evidence” about the divine man christology of Mark’s presumed opponents. However, I find Kingsbury’s way of interpreting the “Son of Man” statements of the Markan Jesus, given Kingsbury’s prior commitment to the point of view of the Markan narrator, completely unsatisfying. Kingsbury deals with all the “titles” other than “Son of Man” in an integrated , chronological way; he deals with “Son of Man” alone in a final chapter or in a trailing excursus. This isolation is a first step toward minimizing the signifi2 . John R. Donahue, S.J., briefly discusses “the picture of Jesus as proclaimer of the kingdom and as Son of Man” as “[t]wo of the major metaphors by which Jesus is presented in the Gospel of Mark” (“Jesus as the Parable of God in the Gospel of Mark,” Interpreting the Gospels [ed. James Luther Mays; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981], 148–67, quotation from 156; first published in Int 32 [1978]: 369–86). 3. On three phases of the “divine man” discussion, see M. Eugene Boring, “Markan Christology: God-Language for Jesus?” (unpublished paper distributed to members of the Mark Seminar of the SNTS, 1998, 7–8 n. 21; these comments are not included in the version published later under the same title: NTS 45 [1999]: 451–71). Over against the proponents of Markan “corrective christology” (e.g., Weeden, Perrin), Werner H. Kelber argues in The Kingdom in Mark: A New Place and a New Time (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1974) that it...

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