Category Archives: Mark

Abducting John II

October 12, 2005 10:42 am ,

Paternity leave is over, so it’s back to the abduction of John. The story so far:

  • As an indirect way of thinking about how Christians, including Mark, have used and abused the Hebrew Bible, I’m looking at how they have adopted or abducted John the Baptist;
  • I’ve suggested that the independent, pre-abduction identity of John (or at least the fact that he had such an identity) is still dimly visible through the cracks of the Gospel text;
  • I’ve suggested that to take Mark’s Gospel seriously is to take seriously the claim that John’s identity as fore-runner, as messenger of Christ, is his real identity, his true identity – perhaps despite his own intentions and self-perceptions;
  • I’ve suggested that part of the answer is that John did in fact make way for Christ (my ‘John as theotokos’ point – his ministry provided the matrix for the birth of Jesus’ ministry), and that it makes sense to claim that he did so because he was obedient to God;
  • but I’ve left hanging the question about how John himself might have treated the claim that he was nothing more or less than Jesus’ forerunner.

I’m going down this route because it seems to me that asking about the Gospel’s use of a person raises questions of supersessionism (abduction) even more sharply than asking about the Gospel’s use of a text. Of course, in the process, I am myself using John – but I think I can live with the irony.

The next point that struck me as I thought about this was a potential theological get-out-of-jail free card – quickly followed by the realisation that the card was not actually going to solve my problems.

  1. To say that John’s true identity is given in his relation to Christ is no more than I would want to say about Mark, or about myself: our identities are ‘hid with Christ in God’. I too am being abducted, and my truth is not in myself but in Christ. This is the get-out-of-jail free card: ‘Yes, there is supersessionism here, but only because we’re all, in a sense, superceded.
  2. If we play this card, we declare that the abduction of John does not consist in the claim that I (or Mark) possess John’s truth just as we possess our own – but that none of us possess our own truth. For all of us our ‘truth’ will be found only in relation to Christ.
  3. The dangerous point comes if we go on to claim that, as it were, Mark and I know the one who possesses our truth in a way that John the Baptist may not have done. And some claim at least that strong does seem to be implied if we go along with Mark’s willingness to depict John as forerunner – i.e., to depict who John is in relation to Christ. The Gospel does not say of John, ‘Who he is is a mystery hid with Christ in God’, it says, ‘This is who he is.’

With this in mind, I find myself being drawn towards a kind of answer that has attracted me in other contexts. Perhaps we are simply left with a tension between the Christologically-grounded desire to say, ‘This is what John means; this is simply who he really was’ and the countervailing desire to say, ‘No, that does not exhaust who John was: we can still glimpse John’s unassimilated identity through the gaps in our theological construction’. Perhaps, that is, we are simply left with a tension between interpreting John theologically and registering John’s resistance to this theological interpertation. And perhaps, as a Christian interpreter, I have to abide with this tension not because I give up on the claim that John’s identity too is truly hid with Christ in God, but because I have to step back from converting that claim into the further claim that his identity is therefore given into my possession.

Hmmm. I still don’t think this is enough – but I only dimly perceive where to go next. To put it gnomically: I think more needs to be said about the kind of ‘abduction’ we’re talking about – more about the nature of the God who is doing the abducting, and the reasons why this abduction cannot (must not) be understood as a form of violence.

To be continued…

Posted in: Hermeneutics, Mark 1:4-8

Abducting John

September 14, 2005 9:50 am ,

ἐγένετο Ἰωάννης ὁ βαπτίζων ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ καὶ κηρύσσων βάπτισμα μετανοίας εἰς ἄφεσιν ἁμαρτιῶν

Mark 1:4

Questions about providence and supercessionism – about what is implied about the nature of the Hebrew Scriptures when Mark says that the coming of Jesus took place ‘as it was written’ – can, I think, be clarified by thinking about John the Baptist.

I don’t think we should lose sight completely of the independent reality of John. It is at least possible to ask whether John is rightly – fairly – interpreted in the Gospel. Perhaps, to some observer of John’s ministry who was not one of Jesus’ disciples (and perhaps to John himself) it would have seemed an odd claim to make to call him the fore-runner, the announcer, the evangelist of Christ. Perhaps it could reasonably have been said that this was not really what was going on, or that it was only one strand of what was going on – and an ambivalent, debatable, soon-questioned strand at that. We can find traces in the Gospels themselves which might lead us to such a conclusion. From such a perspective, the Gospel of Mark’s use of John might appear as abuse – as a violent mis-reading of John, the abduction of John.

To take Mark’s Gospel seriously, however, is to take seriously the claim that John’s identity as fore-runner, as messenger of Christ, is his real identity, his true identity: that even if it was to some extent despite himself, and even if it was with demurrals and qualifications, John did prepare the way for Christ and so made way for the King.

Reading this text with a critical eye, I have to ask what it means to say of John that, even if it was for him and his explicit intenions an accidental or half-hearted matter, even if it was an ‘ambivalent, debatable, soon-questioned strand’ of his ministry, so overwhelming and so central is the truth for which he did in fact make way that his pointing to it is his truth – that whatever else we might have been able to say about him is cast into the shadow by this.

Part of the answer must surely lie in the claim that he “did in fact make way” for Jesus. I don’t think we should downplay this. I’d like to draw upon some classic ecclesical reflection on Mary to put this strongly: I think we could consider John as, to an extent, Theotokos, God-bearer: his ministry provided the matrix for the birth of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ humanity was shaped by this context, and – perhaps – shaped decisively. And I think I’d want to claim that, from the little we know of John’s ministry, it makes sense to say that he was able to play this role because of a fundamental ‘be it unto me according to thy word’ – a fundamental obedience or openness to God that characterised his ministry.

Yet I think we can say all this, about John’s obedience, and about John as Theotokos, without denying any of our critical suspicions about how John himself might have treated the claim that he was nothing more or less than Jesus’ forerunner.

…to be continued.

Posted in: Mark 1:4-8

Believing in providence

August 23, 2005 10:34 am ,

Mark makes the claim that what happened with Jesus took place ‘just as it was written’. What has happened in Jesus has enabled Jesus’ followers, they think, to see the truth of the scriptural texts. The texts were, as it were, set up beforehand with Jesus in mind. I don’t think we can get away from the fact that some such claim is being made in Mark’s text.

When reflecting on this a couple of years ago, I wrote the following:

I don’t really believe in such a providential ordering, not at the level of my deepest sensibility, not at the level of my basic stance towards the world – not in my gut. I’m reading (because it has been lent to us) Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, and have found it so packed with portent, each incident foreshadowed and wrapped with prophesied inevitability, that I cannot stomach it. καθὼς γέγραπται is not in my blood.

I find it difficult to sort out my options here. If I say that using these Old Testament texts Christologically is, in some sense, the right thing to do – what am I committing myself to?

Posted in: Mark 1:2-3

Quoting the prophets 2

July 18, 2005 12:05 pm ,

Time to return to Mark 1:2-3. In an earlier post, I gave a speculative reconstruction of the process by which these quotes from the prophets might have been included here. I now want to take that further, moving away from the game of speculative reconstruction, and towards the use of this text by a believing community.

(1) As should be clear from my speculative reconstruction, and my comments on authorial intention, I’m not sure there’s any way we can clearly establish quite how much Mark meant by the inclusion of these texts. Of course, I’m not denying that the process which led to this inclusion involved connections being made between the nature of Jesus’ mission and interpretations of these (and other) OT texts. But quite what connections, and quite what interpretations, is very much more difficult to say – and the answer might be considerably more limited than we would like.

(2) If, however, we ask what this inclusion makes possible, things look rather different. The inclusion of these texts allows for the continuation of (and marks the existence of) a process of ongoing interpretation: exploring OT prophecy and other texts to do with the coming of God, and asking whether and to what extent they enable us to make sense of Jesus? The inclusion of these texts here is one of the ways in which Christians are provided with a canon.

(3) We need to be wary here of too simplistic a fact-interpretation disjunction. Jesus emerges against a background of such texts as this, a background of uses of such texts; who he is and what he does is in part constituted by his relation to such texts and uses – by what he does with this background, how it is reshaped in him. The difference he makes is similarly in part constituted by these texts and their uses. In asking what is ‘made possible’ for a believing community, we are asking about how a community forms around the impact of this text-ridden Jesus, how a community struggles to find ways of living appropriately in the text-wrapped space he has opened up. The community so struggling is given these prophetic texts, given the already running process of interpretation, of sense-making, right from the start.

(4) I suppose it is possible to imagine a community being formed in such a way as to regard this interpretive question as closed. One could imagine a Saviour, perhaps, who attempted to bequeathe a fixed and final interpertation of the prophetic texts. “This is that, this means that; end of story.” This does not seem to be the case with the Jesus movement, which seems to be from the beginning involved in a fluid, unfinished, exploratory reading of the Hebrew Scriptures. (And my earlier speculative reconstruction was intended to suggest concrete ways in which the interpretation of these particular texts might have been ‘in progress’ at the time of the writing of Mark.)

(5) Christian identity (the identity of the community struggling to make appropriate sense of Jesus) is therefore in part constituted by the attempt to make sense of Jesus in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures, and vice versa. Christians are, as I have already said, hereby given a canon. Yet being given a canon like this means being given worries about the misappropriation of this canon (and note the misattribution, and the misquotation, already involved in these brief quotations) . Accepting this canon is a dangerous strategy, because it means accepting a source that to some extent stands over against one – a source of potential challenge to one’s interpretation. And that means that Christian identity is marked in two ways:
(i) As I’ve stressed already, this means that Christian identity is going to be inherently dialogical and argumentative – simply because there is (and can be) no single, univocal way of making sense like this.
(ii) This also means that Christian identity is inherently bound up with dialogue/argument with Judaism (if by ‘Judaism’ we mean those strands of first-Century Judaism who make sense of themselves by making sense of the same Hebrew Scriptures, but who do not feel captivated by the possibility of making this sense in the light of Jesus of Nazareth).

(6) And all this means that I could not possibly hope to set down anything like a complete interpretation of these two verses in this blog. I can’t step in and say, “Here is what is meant by the inclusion of these prophetic texts.” I can only hope to dip into the ongoing stream of interpretation – give one particular view of how to make sense of Jesus by making sense of these texts.

I know I’m labouring this like crazy. I’m simply trying to get my thoughts clear, and can only do that by trying to set them out in some kind of ordered way. Apologies to anyone who is still reading…

Posted in: Hermeneutics, Mark 1:2-3

Quoting the prophets

June 22, 2005 11:24 am ,

How did these texts end up being quoted here, and what purpose do they serve?

Purely speculatively, I imagine something like the following history.

(i) John the Baptist, out preaching in the wilderness, perhaps understands himself, and is perhaps understood, in terms which are partly drawn from texts such as these. Texts such as these provide part of the background which makes the way he goes about his ministry ‘make sense’ – whether he, his followers, or his hearers think about it explicitly or not. (And, of course, behind this there would have to stand patterns of usage of such texts as these in the years running up to John’s ministry that would have allowed them to become part of people’s mental furniture.)

(ii) My guess is that at some point before Jesus comes on the scene, these specific texts may have been used to interpret or represent John’s ministry. And in my speculative reconstruction, I see this as an irreducibly complex process. In part, it might simply have happened because there were some handy (if dubious) verbal hooks – like the ‘voice in the wilderness’ phrase – which could be grabbed hold of and wrapped around John. In part, there might have been a recognition that the message, ‘prepare for the coming of the King’, was actually a good fit for the kind of message John was actually proclaiming. And in part there might simply have been a making explicit of the implicit scriptural background to John’s activity and its reception.

(iii) If something like this process took place, I suspect that it would have begun having two effects. (1) It might have further shaped perceptions (perhaps including John’s own) of what his ministry was – selecting and highlighting from a range of possible interpretations one which made ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ a central slogan. (Think of it as an accidental rebranding exercise.) (2) It might have meant that people’s ideas of the coming day of the Lord, and of the relation in which they stood to it, started taking on colours from John’s ministry – the application of these texts providing a conduit by which the innovations in John’s message can infect the eschatological ideas people already have.

(iv) At some point, Jesus emerges against this background. (He may, of course, have been involved in any or all stages of it; I don’t know what scholarly thinking currently is on the early relationship between John and Jesus.) And so he emerges on a scene where people’s eschatological ideas have begun to be reshaped by John’s ministry, and where John’s ministry is understood in part through texts like these – and perhaps through these specific texts. That background provides some of the parameters by which people try to ‘place’ Jesus – to understand his significance. And perhaps – just perhaps – this set-up allows Jesus’ ministry to be thought of as playing some part in the eschatological coming of God for which John was now seen as the forerunner. Perhaps that becomes part of John’s understanding; perhaps of some of John’s followers; perhaps of Jesus himself; perhaps of Jesus’ followers. These texts, prepared as it were by the existing uses in John’s movement, become part of the internal and external identification of the Jesus movement.

(v) In the process, however, these texts become political: they become caught up in the relationship between John’s movement and Jesus’ movement – and are used by the latter to place John (and his followers) relative to Jesus (and his followers), as well as being used to say something about the role or significance of Jesus himself. And as time goes by, this becomes the primary role of these texts in the Christian movement. And once John and his movement have vanished, it is this role that remains for these texts. They become the leitmotiv by which we identify John the Baptist: they are the summary statements of his identity, his role in the drama. And the eschatological content, and any claims about the role of Jesus, are eventually more or less erased.

Where might Mark’s inclusion of these texts fit in this history? If something like it is true, where does it leave us as readers trying to interpret these verses in Mark?

Posted in: Mark 1:2-3

The coming King

June 14, 2005 11:33 am ,

καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ ἰδοὺ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου πρὸ προσώπου σου ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν σου φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” ’
(Mark 1:2)

ἰδοὺ ἐγὼ ἐξαποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου καὶ ἐπιβλέψεται ὁδὸν πρὸ προσώπου μου καὶ ἐξαίφνης ἥξει εἰς τὸν ναὸν ἑαυτοῦ κύριος ὃν ὑμεῖς ζητεῖτε καὶ ὁ ἄγγελος τῆς διαθήκης ὃν ὑμεῖς θέλετε ἰδοὺ ἔρχεται λέγει κύριος παντοκράτωρ καὶ τίς ὑπομενεῖ ἡμέραν εἰσόδου αὐτοῦ ἢ τίς ὑποστήσεται ἐν τῇ ὀπτασίᾳ αὐτοῦ διότι αὐτὸς εἰσπορεύεται ὡς πῦρ χωνευτηρίου καὶ ὡς πόα πλυνόντων καὶ καθιεῖται χωνεύων καὶ καθαρίζων ὡς τὸ ἀργύριον καὶ ὡς τὸ χρυσίον καὶ καθαρίσει τοὺς υἱοὺς Λευι καὶ χεεῖ αὐτοὺς ὡς τὸ χρυσίον καὶ ὡς τὸ ἀργύριον καὶ ἔσονται τῷ κυρίῳ προσάγοντες θυσίαν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight – indeed, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the LORD in righteousness.
(Malachi 3:1-3)

φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν πᾶσα φάραγξ πληρωθήσεται καὶ πᾶν ὄρος καὶ βουνὸς ταπεινωθήσεται καὶ ἔσται πάντα τὰ σκολιὰ εἰς εὐθεῖαν καὶ ἡ τραχεῖα εἰς πεδία καὶ ὀφθήσεται ἡ δόξα κυρίου καὶ ὄψεται πᾶσα σὰρξ τὸ σωτήριον τοῦ θεοῦ ὅτι κύριος ἐλάλησεν
A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.’
(Isaiah 40:3-5)

Malachi pictures an approaching potentate whose retinue precedes and announces him – the LORD of hosts coming to re-establish the covenant, to sit in the temple, to purify the people. Isaiah speaks of the return of the LORD to a broken people, and of the vast efforts to be expended on making ready for him, preparing for him. Both speak of the return of the King in splendour, and the re-establishment of the rule of law: a terror to the transgressors and a comfort to the oppressed.

Posted in: Mark 1:2-3

As it is written

June 8, 2005 9:57 am ,

καθὼς γέγραπται
As it is written

Mark, or the Markan community, or the early Christians in general: what are they doing here? Something (someone) strange, radical, unsettling has happened in their midst – something that to some extent jarred against its surroundings – but they have wrapped it in terms drawn from the Scriptures which are so deeply embedded in those surroundings (or, better, have always already seen it in terms of those Scriptures). This has enabled them to make sense of this thing that has happened, certainly – but it has also made new sense of those Scriptures. I don’t think we should underestimate the complexity of the processes by which this dual ‘making sense’ takes place.

In the particular case we see here, however, things get even more complex, because we are also dealing with the appropriation by Mark, the markan community, or early Christians in general, of John the Baptist. He is being ‘made sense of’ as forerunner of Jesus, and Jesus being ‘made sense of’ as the one to whom he points – and this dual making sense is itself made possible by the fact that their relationship is made sense of by drawing on certain Scriptures, and those Scriptures made sense of by being applied to this relationship. And again, I don’t think we should underestimate the complexity of the process by which all these ways of ‘making sense’ take place.

Posted in: Mark 1:2-3

The voice in the wilderness

June 7, 2005 3:09 pm ,

καθὼς γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Ἠσαΐᾳ τῷ προφήτῃ
ἰδοὺ ἀποστέλλω τὸν ἄγγελόν μου
πρὸ προσώπου σου
ὃς κατασκευάσει τὴν ὁδόν σου
φωνὴ βοῶντος ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ
ἑτοιμάσατε τὴν ὁδὸν κυρίου
εὐθείας ποιεῖτε τὰς τρίβους αὐτοῦ

In the beginning … a voice crying in the widlernes, ‘Make straight…’
In the beginning … the earth was a formless void … then God said, ‘Let there be light…’

Posted in: Mark 1:2-3

Son of God

June 6, 2005 5:02 pm ,

υἱοῦ θεοῦ

“Son of God” – another of those densely loaded terms. Here’s my initial stab at teasing out what’s going on.

(i) In the early decades of Christianity, all the Christians we know about are (as far as I can make out) united in believing that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection mark some kind of decisive transition in God’s dealing with the world. They express that in various ways, mostly using different strands of Old Testament language for describing God’s dealing with the world. But what they’re describing is nearly always what God is up to, and how what has happened in Jesus fits into that – they’re not really addressing the question of what kind of being Jesus has to be or what kind of relationship he has to have to God in order for their claims to be true. And whilst there is plenty about the uniqueness, decisiveness, unprecedentedness of the stage in God’s ways with the world that has been inaugurated in Jesus – and also quite a bit about the unique character of Jesus that enables him to play the relevant part in God’s plan: uniquely obedient, uniquely pure, that sort of thing – that’s not really the same as an attempt to spell out claims about Jesus as a unique kind of being. (To give these different sets of claims names, the first lot are ‘functional’ – what unique function does Jesus play?, the second ‘ontological’ – what unique kind of being is Jesus?)

(ii) ‘Son’ language in the Gospels falls mostly into this kind of area: it is, I think, in large part a way of saying that God’s relationship with Israel, and with the Kings of Israel, has been perfected in the perfect Israelite, the perfect King. I don’t, personally, think that the hellenistic background is the most relevant one, although I’ve no doubt it colours the early reception and propagation of ‘Son’-language.

(iii) However, alongside this, and developing slowly around it, is an increasing fascination with the further question, ‘Well, if Jesus does play this unique role, who is he? What kind of being is he?’ And in the first few decades, we certainly get a bewildering variety of partial answers to this attempted. I think, however, that
the question is only vaguely perceived, is tentatively and speculatively answered (if at all), and that (most of the time) little weight appears to have been attached to the details or consistency of the answers given. And most of the answers offered in biblical literature draw on ideas or models available in the OT, or from intertestamental Judaism; I don’t see much evidence of direct plundering from straight Hellenistic sources. Even discussion of Christ’s pre-existence comes, I suspect, from this Jewish (albeit hellenized Jewish) milieu – from Jewish speculation about the preparation beforehand, in the will of God, of the decisive elements of his plan: the Law and so on. To some extent, ‘Son’ language might get drawn into that ambit, and so have
some connotations (even in the Synoptics) about the special kind of human being Jesus is – but not, I think, as its dominant notes.

(iv) As we move into the second century and beyond, there’s (a) a more direct focus on the ontological question behind the functional question – indeed, the growing realisation that you can’t keep on making functional claims without considering the ontological questions those throw up. There’s also (b) more borrowing from straight Hellenistic sources. So you begin to get descriptions of Jesus which clearly represent him as something other than human: as some kind of divine being who temporarily appears human. And ‘Son’ language sometimes gets transformed in the process, so that it starts to be taken as describing the special kind of being Jesus is – whether one of a class of ‘sons’ of God, or uniquely son of God, in some way which resembles the divine-human heroes of Greek myth.

(Cautionary note: any trading on a supposed Jewish/functional/active v. Hellenistic/ontological/static opposition is a wild and silly simplification. I mean here to refer only to a background of rather different stories featuring characters called ‘son of God’ at some point – stories that make certain ways of explicating the Jesus story seem more obvious than others.)

(v) One way of describing the process of doctrinal developments that runs from the second century through to AD 451 is as the slow, fitful, complex rejection of some of these Hellenistic, or more wildly speculative of Jewish answers to the ontological question: an attempt, that is, to answer the ‘ontological’ question in ways which both allowed Jesus to function as God’s decisive intervention in the world – the climactic action of God’s plan, both inaugurating our salvation and revealing the nature of God – and yet to be fully and entirely human. To be sure, those points were made using an ‘ontological’ language to do with natures and hypostasis, but the answer eventually arrived at is one that converts far more easily than do earlier, more speculative answers to the ontological question, back into functional categories. But those are big claims, and I haven’t justified them here.

So: here in Mark 1:1, the phrase ‘Son of God’ is I think primarily functional, and primarily tied to the Old Testament – but if you listen carefully you’ll hear the faint buzz of approaching ontological concerns, and creaks and pings as the word expands in an increasingly hellenistic context. And yet we only hear any of this by temporarily blanking out the noise of all we know from the fourth and fifth century debates – and yet such blanking will never be perfect, and should in any case only be temporary: what those later debates did with this term remains an entirely legitimate matter for consideration.

Posted in: Mark 1:1, Son of God

All about Jesus

June 6, 2005 11:59 am ,

εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

Here we touch on my deepest reasons for beginning this study. An academic theologian, I say a lot about Jesus, about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, about the centrality of this man. But am I really interested in news about him? Is the Gospel in which I believe anything to do with him, except in the most tenuous of senses? Or am I captivated by a few easy ideas, a number of theological commonplaces, rather than by him? Am I captivated by the internal and self-sufficient dynamism of an academic and ecclesial conversation which trades on his name, but which bears no relationship to the actual traces of his historical particularity?

You see, I have a sneaking suspicion that these questions are the whole of Christian theology: that Christian theology is kept Christian, and kept theological, only by the relentless asking of that question. The whole edifice of Christian doctrine (Christology, Trinity, atonement, creation, providence – all of it) is a way of forcing this question: What will happen if we let Jesus break through?

Or rather, what will happen if we let Jesus Christ break through – Jesus Messiah. The whole edifice of Christian doctrine is a way of forcing the question, What will happen if we let break through Jesus the Jew, Jesus the Israelite?

Posted in: Mark 1:1