Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom. Osvaldo D. Vena

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24. I am very interested in the subject at hand. This means that my investigation is “interested.” I come to the text with a pre-understanding. I do not consider this to be a hindrance or a drawback to the exegetical endeavor, but rather a healthy motivation. In the words of Daniel Patte, “Coming to the text with a vested interest, and thus a question or an expectation, does not in itself engender a misreading. In sum, preunderstandings motivate our readings, including our critical readings.” Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation, 56.

25. I owe this insight to my colleague, David Hogue.

26. Here it is important to notice how social location affects theology. What for me became irrelevant, for other people was crucial to their religious experience. For example, the slaves knew that their situation of oppression and exploitation was going to be changed the day they died, when they arrived to the other shore of the Jordan; so they sang: “Sooner-a-will be done with the trouble of this world, going home to live with God.” Because of their predicament, they were not interested in the Christological affirmations of the Fathers of the Church, such as Athanasius, who said that the Son is of one substance with the Father, the question of homoousia. That is not a black question, says James Cone. Blacks ask “whether Jesus is walking with them, whether they can call him in the ‘telephone of prayer’ and tell him all about their troubles.” Cone, God of the Oppressed, 14. In my case, my oppression was not social, but intellectual and psychological; therefore, the need to escape from it was not impeded by any social structure, but by my own self-imposed religious consciousness triggered and fed by the conservative missionary preaching I was subjected to during my youth.

27. For this idea, I am deeply indebted to Ched Myers and his seminal work, Binding the Strong Man.

28. Schüssler Fiorenza states: “A critical interpretation for liberation does not begin with the text; it does not place the bible at the center of its attention. Rather, it begins with a reflection on one’s experience and socio-political religious location.”Wisdom Ways. 90.

29. Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 7–11, makes three affirmations worth quoting: (1) Theology is construction. (2) Theological construction is undertaken on a particular social location. (3) The traditions in which we work provide a “building code” that each construction has to follow. For Christology, he proposes that one such code could be “do not deny either the true humanity or the true divinity of Jesus Christ.” I am not sure that I am willing to follow the Nicene-Chalcedonian creed as my guiding light or my building code as I unpack the meaning of Jesus as disciple in Mark. Rather than seeing these ancient creeds as the building blocks for my Christology, I prefer to use Mark’s text, which represents a pre-Chalcedonian Christology, as my building code.

30. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 59–60.

31. But he speaks of himself as one who serves (Mark 4:45).

32. One of those passages is the account of Jesus’ baptism. To many scholars, the likelihood that Jesus was indeed a disciple of John the Baptist is very high. This is the only way they can interpret his baptism by John. I should come back to this later.

33. I have explored this concept in “Gospel Images of Jesus as Deacon,” 1–16.

34. Fatum, “Gender Hermeneutics,”160.

35. It still puzzles scholars that Mark, if he had access to Q, did not include such important materials as the Sermon on the Mount, or some version of the birth narratives, etc. Obviously, he was making an editorial, and therefore theological, choice.

36. “In speaking of the Jesus movement rather than of the person of Jesus himself, we are stressing the fact that it is the social fact, of which the person is to be sure a part, that has historical importance. It is a bourgeois admiration for heroic personalities that focused much of New-Testament research on the person of Jesus.” Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 111.

37. This is particularly evident in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus delivers five sermons that resemble the five books of the Law and teaches the disciples on far more occasions than in the other gospels. Of all the gospels, it is Mark that gives less importance to Jesus as a teacher.

38. Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 65.

39. In attempting to portray Jesus as the disciple of the kingdom par excellence, I am not denying other portrayals. I am only making my assumptions known from the very beginning. At the same time, I also am acknowledging that there have been—and there are—many conscious as well as unconscious presuppositions scholars bring to their study of Jesus. I want to make mine clear, and I want to use them as hermeneutical lenses into the text. I have some historical basis for my affirmations, but the bulk of my argument will be literary; that is, it will be based on the text of the gospels, particularly Mark, with an eye toward finding support for my hypothesis. The end product will be, I hope, a theological construction dictated by my own theological journey.

40. See especially Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity.

41. Pixley affirms the importance of Theissen’s approach of focusing on the Jesus movement, but recognizes that this is somehow different from his own and that of other Liberation Theology scholars. While Theissen sees the narrative as a source for the reconstruction of the Jesus movement, Pixley and others, such as Fernando Belo, to whom I would add also Ched Myers, see it as an ideological construction of the author. The words of Jesus lose their significance when taken out of the narrative. Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 112.

42. Theissen, Sociology, 8.

43. “Unshakable faith and trust in God, the biblical emunah, was the hallmark, the ideal of Jesus which he preached and practiced. It was the spiritual engine of his whole life’s work.” Vermes, Changing Faces of Jesus, 220.

44. I owe this insight to Jerry Moyar, a member of the Koinonia class at the First United Methodist Church in Downers Grove, Illinois, USA.

45. For the importance of group formation in the early Jesus movement, see Malina, Social World of Jesus and the Gospels, 60–67.

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