Jesus Christ as the Son of David in the Gospel of Mark by Max Botner (review)

This monograph is, by the author’s description (p. ix), a lightly edited version of his Ph.D. dissertation (University of St Andrews, 2017, supervised by Elizabeth Shively). As the title suggests, the study revolves around the Davidssohnfrage of Mark 12:35–37: how can David’s son, the messiah, also be his Lord (cf. Ps 110:1)? Botner takes issue with William Wrede’s influential essay “Jesus als Davidssohn” (Vorträge und Studien [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1907] 147–77) and studies influenced by it, which dissociate Mark’s portrait of the Christ from Davidic messianism. Rather than concentrating narrowly on the few explicit references to David in the Gospel (Mark 2:25; 10:47–48; 11:10; 12:35–37), as Wrede did, B. adopts Umberto Eco’s conceptual model of the “encyclopedia.” This entails not only “an awareness of the interrelations and distinctions of the discrete sememes one encounters in a dictionary,” but also “facility in the social conventions, presuppositions, shared history and so forth that comprise the system of conceptual knowledge undergirding linguistic meaning, the encyclopedia” (p. 27, citing Eco, Encyclopedia of Semiotics [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976] 98–114). B. holds that Mark’s language about “his” Christ follows the rules of an ancient Mediterranean language game, a “grammar of messianism” (p. 26, following Matthew Novensen, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users [New York: Oxford University Press, 2017]). Mark’s concept of the messiah is not reducible to explicit claims of Davidic ancestry but includes a combination of elements that the linguistic community to which Mark belonged would have recognized as Davidic (p. 45).

Botner makes the case that Mark portrays Jesus as a messiah with recognizably Davidic traits throughout the Gospel: beginning with Jesus’s baptism, constructed as an anointing (Pss 2:7; 42:1), to narratives prior to Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (8:27–33) that imply that Jesus is a messiah like David (1:27–28; 2:23–28; 3:20–35; 6:30–44)—if not necessarily of Davidic descent. He devotes a chapter to Mark 10:47–12:37, commencing with the cry of Bartimaeus (“son of David, have mercy on me,” 10:47–48), which, he argues, is ambiguous as to Jesus’s Davidic lineage only if considered in isolation from the preceding chapters, and from the entry into Jerusalem that immediately follows (11:1–11), which establishes that Jesus is not only like David, but of the lineage of David, the promised heir to the throne. This sets the stage for the riddle concerning David’s son in 12:35–37 (Ps 110:1), which must be answered in the affirmative in the light of the previous narrative.

In chap. 6, B. turns to Mark 14:26–15:47 with special reference to the argument of Elizabeth Struthers Malbon that the Gospel, and the passion narrative in particular, are antimonarchical (Mark’s Jesus: Characterization as Narrative Christology [Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009]), which misses the irony of the passion story. He also highlights the role of Psalm 22 (21 LXX) in Mark’s account of the crucifixion, where the words of David in the Psalter are placed on the lips of David’s son, Jesus. Chapter 7 draws together B.’s arguments and draws out some implications for future study. Throughout the book, B. emphasizes the point that “[t]here are no scriptural traditions about David and his descendants that Mark reads apart from the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ” (p. 163).

Botner sees the exegetical tradition that denies the role of Davidic descent in Mark as as originating in Protestant NT scholarship “begotten of a set of a priori methodological decisions about how an evangelist like Mark should express interest in the idea of Davidic sonship. . . . And once we have determined that Mark has it out for...