Jesus, Disciple of the Kingdom. Osvaldo D. Vena

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.

46. Malina, Social World of Jesus and the Gospels, 149–57.

47. Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, 50.

48. John Dominic Crossan qualifies this idea by stating that Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic who embodied the values of the lower Galilee culture. Historical Jesus, 421–22.

49. See here specially Segundo’s ground breaking work, Christology at the Crossroads.

50. Tannehill, “Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology,” 57–95.

51. Malbon, Mark’s Jesus, 4.

52. Ibid., 6–14.

53. Ibid., 6.

54. I borrow this concept from Robbins, Tapestry, 1–17.