Preliminary Remarks

Paula Fredriksen sees Paul's Jesus as a heavenly being sent down to earth to take human form. This makes Paul a witness to an earthly Jesus through those who knew him even if, Fredriksen admits, he does not much dwell on Jesus' earthly life. However, it is clear that by her list above, Fredriksen mentions ‘only briefly’ of a historical figure. Because Paul says his Jesus was ‘born under the law’, he must have been a Jew, as the law is understood as the Jewish Scriptures. Paul states that Jesus was ‘born of a woman’ and thus he had to have been human with a human mother that gave birth to him. He was a descendant, according to Fredriksen's reading of Paul, of David, and therefore claimed (or perhaps others portrayed Jesus as one claiming) to be the Messiah. Fredriksen reads that Jesus came in ‘the likeness of sinful flesh’, that he was a man, a descriptive which expressed a historical, human Jesus. Many scholars accept that Paul's image of Jesus was a historical human being that Paul elaborates upon, and with only a few exceptions many also agree that Paul does not seem to busy himself with historical information. Paul's ignorance of Jesus' human qualities and his human crucifiers is because, per Fredriksen, Paul's focus was on the resurrected Jesus, the ‘divine preexistent son of God’.

In this essay, I present a brief analysis of the construction of a single episode in Mark's Gospel and of the methods which were effectively used in the development and use of a significant building block of his Jesus narrative, reflecting an allegorical technique which reiterates earlier biblical narratives similarly composed within a biographical mode. I have earlier illustrated how specifically allegorical function of such biography has roots in the ancient Near Eastern and early Mediterranean world of narratives, particularly in narratives reflecting royal ideology. I have found the genre's allegorical function most accessible in the development of the figure of Job, but it can also be recognized, for example, in the narratives about Abraham and Esau, as well as in those of David, Solomon and Jesus. While considerable progress has been made in regard to such Samaritan and Jewish functions of commentary and prophecy in the development of the Gospel narratives through a reiteration or rewriting of the Old Testament, I here wish to pay as much attention to mythic functions which were developed in the broader literary world of antiquity.

A Summary of an Untold Story

The brief account of Jesus' temptation in the desert, which we find in Mk 1:12-13, appears at first to do little more than evoke a story which remains, however, untold. Although lacking a proper narrative, it, nevertheless, offers four clearly presented and distinct thematic elements of a plot-line: (1) the spirit who drives Jesus into the desert; (2) the forty days he is tempted by Satan; (3) he lived with the wild animals and (4) angels cared for him.

Mark's story brings together two central but distinct sayings of Jesus, each of which has a significant, thematically driven, sub-motif. The first embodies our title: ‘Is this not the carpenter?’, with its subordinate leitmotif of hands doing wonders, significantly emphasized in the story's conclusion wherein hands are laid on some of the sick to heal them. The other saying is Jesus' complaint that a prophet is unrecognized in his own home town, and the corresponding anger and dissonance that this provokes. These distinct thematic elements are treated independently in the variants of this story we find in the other Gospels.