Kata Markon

["Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT comcast.net>]

Reading through Hebrews 2:10-18  the other day,  I was struck by how the themes set out there mirror those that are now found in Mk. 8:27-9:1.

In both we find a statement about Messiah Jesus being brought by God to his destiny by and through suffering

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.  (Heb 2:10)

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again (Mk. 8:31)

Both assume that those who wish to follow Jesus must likewise follow a path of suffering.

Both  make mention of how those who are Jesus "family"  are prevented from following him because of a fear of death

Since the children have blood and flesh,  he too shared in their humanity so that ...  he might ...   free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

[When hearing that Jesus was destined by God to be executed] Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him (Mk. 8:32)

Both contain a reference to the Devil as one who uses the fear of death to sway Jesus' family from being obedient to the ways of God that Jesus has revealed are necessary for being the true people of God:

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death (Heb.. 2:14-15)

Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." (Mk. 8:33)

Both present Jesus' death as destroying -- or as the means God has chosen for his Messiah to destroy  -- Satan's power.

Both present Jesus in terms of a Messiah who is/has been tested over the issue of whether he, as Messiah,  will be obedient to the path of suffering that God has decreed is his.

I'm wondering then, not only if these parallels are more than coincidental,  but what they suggest, if they are real, that  the author of Hebrews is actually getting at in Heb. 2:10-18.   I am wholly dissatisfied with the view, which seems the traditional understanding of the aim of these verses,   that he is asserting a proto Nicean doctrine of the incarnation in order to speak in general how Jesus, in becoming man, solves a problem that everyone faces by virtue of the fact that they are flesh and blood.

That renders the author of Hebrews a systematic theologian and hardly coheres with the evident fact that the the toying on the part of his particular readers  with a particular apostasy that was tantamount to crucifying the son of God and NOT the human condition was  the issue he was intent to address.

So what do they then suggest?

The answer to this is obviously linked to what we see as the occasion of Hebrews.  For argument's sake,  I'd like to follow Alexander Nairne in this and  assume that  that the occasion of the Epistle is  the clarion call to “rally round” through armed revolt “the national standard”  that was issued by the Zealot party at the outbreak of the Jewish war.

If this is so, then these verses are part of a larger argument on the part of the author of Hebrews that was designed to prevent his readers from joining the Zealot cause which at the outset of the war, and especially after the  stemming of the attack against the Temple by Gessius Florus and the military triumph over the legions of Cestius Gallus, had come to be seen by his readers, along with the majority of Jews, as having thunderous divine approval?

But my question then is:   how do they actually work to accomplish this aim?

Can anyone here suggest anything?   One might note how the trope about the fear of death preventing would be Zealots from following the Zealot path is something that is used by Eleazar ben Yair, the grandson of the Judas the Galilean, in Book 7 of Josephus' Jewish War.


Yours,

Jeffrey

-- 
Jeffrey B. Gibson, D.Phil. (Oxon)
1500 W. Pratt Blvd.
Chicago, Illinois
e-mail jgibson000 AT comcast.net