Difficult texts: Mark 6.3

The response of the Markan Jesus to the two questions posed by the residents of Nazareth took the whole discussion of his status into the area of honour and shame: ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ Cultural anthropology has alerted us to the distinction between achieved honour (roughly, a matter of doing) and ascribed honour (roughly, a matter of being, over which one has no control). Of these two, the former connects directly with the first question: ‘Where did this person get all this, and what is the wisdom that has been given to this person, and such acts of power as have taken place by his hands?’ (6.2b), while the latter connects directly with the second question: ‘Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ (6.3a). Somewhere, and we want to know where, within these questions there lies the grounding of the offence, the scandal (6.3b), that gives rise to Jesus’ application to himself of the proverbial saying about the denial of honour to prophets.

For Mark the alienation of the family members has already been placed on record. Two adjacent ‘sandwich structures’ in 3.20–35 and 4.1–20 place his mother and his brothers outside the company of the fictive family, attribute to them a critical rejection of his (probably) ecstatic and exorcizing ministry, and associate them with his scribal antagonists. In the profoundest sense of the term, they are ‘outside’ (3.32; 4.11) – outside among those who neither see nor hear nor receive ‘the mystery of the kingdom’. Doubtless this lies below the surface of Jesus’ reference to kin and home as refusing him honour. But those references are, as our own proverbial use may confirm, not essential to the original proverb, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their country/home town.’ Mark’s editorial portrayal of the tension and dissonance within the family, which can hardly be a creation ex nihilo, does, however, serve to make overwhelmingly improbable any notion of a supernatural conception: would such a mother treat such a son as the Mary of Mark treats the Jesus of Mark, or as the historical Mary (by inference) treats the historical Jesus?

The family members thus withhold achieved honour from Jesus and share in ‘being scandalized’. But what about the residents of Nazareth, i.e. those outside the family? Their evaluation of Jesus, determined by his wisdom and his deeds, involves no withholding of honour at all! The verb ekplēssomai used to describe their assessment is recurrently a verb of appreciative amazement, at home in any setting where human persons confront evidence of a divine intervention and/or are forced to ask questions about a phenomenon which is beyond their ken. There is not the slightest whiff of critical distance, let alone of being scandalized. Mark 1.22, amplified in 1.27, and subsequently adopted for the indubitably appreciative response to the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7.28), sets a trend in Markan story telling, with an exorcism exemplifying and effecting the authority of the teaching which provokes appreciative astonishment. The same reaction is put into words in Mark 7.37, where Jesus has looked to God (sic) for miracle-working power (7.34) and, after exercising it, caused extreme astonishment and the acclamation that ‘he has done all things well’. Luke (9.43) follows the same train of thought – Jesus’ healing of the epileptic has the effect that ‘they were astonished (exeplēssonto) at the greatness of God’ – and supporting examples abound from elsewhere, cf. Wisdom 13.4–5; Mark 11.18; Acts 13.12, to name but three. When the residents of Nazareth ask their question, they go halfway towards answering it themselves by using the divine passive: ‘the wisdom that has been given to this person’. So in respect of honour, they do not withhold their recognition of achieved honour. And yet in the end ‘they were scandalized’.

By a process of elimination the text leaves us with, on the one hand, the refusal of ascribed honour, and on the other hand, ‘the carpenter/artisan, the son of Mary …’. Now even from the lofty perspective of the educated elite there is nothing dishonourable about the status of the artisan (cf. Sir. 38.24–34). So ‘the son of Mary’ has to bear all the weight of dishonour and disapproval.

It goes without saying that ‘son of Mary’ can hardly generate such negativity if any of the range of protective, sometimes apologetically driven, ‘explanations’ are invoked, e.g. that Mary is a widow following the supposed death of her husband, or that Mary is of higher social status than her husband, or that Mary is Jesus’ mother whereas another wife of Joseph is the mother of the siblings mentioned. On the contrary, the almost irresistible inference of illegitimacy would not only explain what happens in this episode but also the keenness of other Gospel writers to draw a veil over such a thought. But that in itself poses a challenge: How are we to account for the recurrent references to Joseph’s parenthood? The widespread attestation of such a relationship ultimately tips the balance for Andrew Lincoln in his fine and measured exploration Born of a Virgin? (London: SPCK, 2013). But maybe we should draw a distinction between biological fatherhood and that ascription of parenthood which defines a person’s formal status in society.

In Sirach 42.9–11 (cf. 26.10–12) any father is advised to keep a strict watch over his daughter, given that deviation from the sexual straight and narrow may happen in a variety of ways: ‘A daughter is a secret anxiety to her father, and worry over her robs him of sleep: when she is young, for fear she may not marry, or if married, for fear she may be disliked; while a virgin, for fear she may be seduced and become pregnant in her father’s house; or having a husband, for fear she may go astray.’ If within one of those scenarios an engaged/married woman should turn out to be pregnant, and if the fiancé/husband should waive (for whatever reason) the legal requirement to activate divorce procedure, and if the marriage had been contracted before the birth of the child, then the position of the husband would be parenthood rather than biological fatherhood. And thus, it could be that talk of Jesus as the son of Joseph should become almost standard. Almost, but not invariably! For Matthew, who is not troubled by the demands of strict logic when covering Christology (thus, for example, 19.16–17) and who therefore has to be assessed cautiously, replaces Mark’s ‘the carpenter, the son of Mary’, with ‘the son of the carpenter’, but he also, probably depending on earlier tradition, is quite clear that Joseph is not the biological father (1.18–25).

Unless the pre-Matthean tradition at that point is simply a spin-off of a Greco-Roman instinct to suggest supernatural conception for hero figures, a possibility which cannot be ruled out tout court, it may provide confirmation from within Jewish society that social dishonour was indeed attached to Jesus’ birth within the community of Nazareth where he is likely to have been born.

In no way need that be seen theologically as any kind of inhibition on the ascription of honour, both ascribed and achieved, to the one whose prophetic mission was vindicated in resurrection.