In the comments section of my last post, Dr. Tobias Hägerland left his unpublished paper in response to Johannson’s view that Jesus declaring the paralytic’s sins forgiven was unprecedented in Second Temple Judaism (focussing on Josephus, Ant. 6.92) and argues that it is only the evangelist’s insertion of Mk 2:7 that would lead one to believe that Jesus goes beyond what a prophet could do in mediating forgiveness. A well-argued rebuttal, though for interested readers it does presuppose a certain level of Greek, and if we bring in James Crossley’s view from a couple of posts ago we now have three distinct views on the passage in question. That is, the action is read as revealing the high christological self-understanding of the historical Jesus (Johannson), the action only shows the prophetic self-understanding of Jesus but (with Mark 2:7) supports a high christology at the redactional level of the evangelist (Hägerland) or that not even the evangelist has a high christology and that 2:7 is best understood as a dispute over the source of Jesus’ authority (cf. the debate in Mk 3 whether Jesus’ authority in exorcisms derives from God or “Beelzebul”) (Crossley). Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments.
[...] “good,” the accusation that Jesus usurped a divine prerogative in claiming to forgive sins, the ignorance of “the son” about the eschatological day or hour, the experience of [...]
[...] The last two posts presented diametrically opposite positions that Mark either presents a pre-existence or a adoptionist Christology. In this post I will look at another work that argues for a high christology in Mark via a classic route, namely the Christological titles, in this case kyrios (master, lord). I will review Daniel Johansson’s “Kyrios in the Gospel of Mark” JSNT 33 (2010): 101-124 (for reviews of his work on Jesus forgiving the paralytic’s sins see here, here and here). [...]