Redescribing Jesus’ Divinity through a Social Science Theory: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Forgiveness and Divine Identity in Ancient Judaism and Mark 2:1–12

Abstract

Studies of divine identity theory applied to Jesus in the NT have been steadily increasing. A welcome addition to this trajectory is Beniamin Pascut’s recent Cambridge Ph.D. thesis supervised by Simon Gathercole. Pascut surveys three main theories of identity, opting for the most all-encompassing: a “communication theory” that posits personal, enactment, relational, and communal dimensions. These four analyze, respectively, what differentiates a person from others, the actions and communications that disclose who they are, what their relationships with others reveal, and what groups of people they identify with.Pascut then studies the disclosure of Yahweh’s divine identity in ancient Judaism and the depiction of Jesus’s divine identity in Mark. Chapters follow on the nature of forgiveness and who can actually forgive and on the relationship between forgiveness and divine identity in Judaism. Finally, Pascut considers various texts that have been alleged to show people other than God enacting his forgiveness for people and engages in a careful exegesis of Mark 2:1–12 with all this background in view.Yahweh’s personal identity appears in his divine name and his attributes, especially as disclosed in Exod 34:6–7. He reveals his enactment identity in his creation, protection, redemption, and judgment. His relational identity comes from bringing people, especially the Israelites, to himself, for whom he is king, husband, father, and God, while his communal identity concentrates on electing the nation of Israel as a unique people.Mark, in turn, demonstrates Jesus’s divine identity personally when he equates Jesus with the Lord who is coming (Isa 40:3; Mark 1:3), the demons recognize him as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), he knows people’s thoughts (2:6–8), and he is uniquely good (10:17–22); in the enactment layer with the enduring nature of his word (13:30–31), the miracles of the healed leper, stilling the storm, and feeding the multitudes (given their OT background of things only Yahweh can do); and relationally, as both the son of Mary and son of God but also doing what only Israel’s God does as his people’s bridegroom, Lord of the Sabbath, and the one who chooses a new Israel. Communally, he identifies with humanity, Israel, and his followers but also with uniquely supernatural beings, including God and angels.Space forbids even listing the evidence for the main points Pascut makes in the subsections of his remaining chapters. But he develops with some sociological and philosophical sophistication the common-sense notion than only person A (and not a third party, C) can forgive person B of offenses B has committed against A. Of course, other individuals can announce divine forgiveness, but no one else can enact it. Speech-act theory helps here, too, as one recasts the situation in perfomative terms. Various texts in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism that might appear to illustrate others enacting divine forgiveness turn out not to indicate that at all. The “angel of the Lord” bestows God’s forgiveness but only because he shares divine identity, representing God anthropomorphically.When Pascut at last turns to Mark 2, he is poised to stress that the passive voice, “your sins have been forgiven” (v. 5), is a divine performative (in keeping with numerous other passives in Mark); that the accusation of blasphemy (v. 7), as at Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin (14:64), makes sense only if he has transgressed a boundary between the human and the divine; that the authority to heal is what is called harder (compared with the authority to enact divine forgiveness—v. 9); and that the crowd’s amazement (v. 12) matches that in other Markan episodes of Jesus’s working uniquely divine feats (raising Jairus’s daughter and walking on water).While a few of the book’s sections seem to make the obvious unnecessarily complicated, a major contribution remains its survey of biblical and extrabiblical passages other than Mark 2 that stress that only someone with divine identity can enact God’s forgiveness and that Mark’s Jesus consistently displays divine identity. Pascut’s work now helpfully supplements Richard Bauckham’s, David Capes’s, and Andrew Loke’s on divine identity Christology.