Extracts from the “Did Jesus see himself as the Messiah?” roundtable post by Michael Waddell at BSA.
- Note the contrast between the Jesus that the gospels describe and the Jesus they continually insist that he is.
- Jesus more-or-less committed suicide by cop. I [Jason Staples] think he intentionally got himself executed, because he thought he would be resurrected, and I think he’s reading that out of several prophecies that later Christians read together: the prophet like Moses in Deuteronomy who will be ‘raised up’, David’s seed that will be ‘raised up’, etc. If the big miracle [like Theudas saying he could part the Jordan River] Jesus is going to perform fulfills those sorts of things, it’s entirely plausible that an early Jewish teacher would conclude he was going to be ‘raised up,’ as in ‘conquer death’.
- Robyn [Faith Walsh] sees Mark and the other gospels as heavily influenced by Pauline theology, and any self-conception Jesus may have had is drowned out by the ideas of Paul and subsequent writers.
- Mark Goodacre did hedge a bit: “I think it’s a plausible inference that Jesus and JBap knew each other, but the way that the gospels have done this — bringing JBap onto the stage at the beginning and then having him replaced by Jesus — is an apologetic move to say ‘You might have heard of this guy JBap, but he’s not the one, it’s really our guy.’
- Jason Staples notes how odd it is that JBap is recording as doubting in Luke 7. … One possible conclusion is that JBap didn’t think Jesus was the Messiah. And Josephus doesn’t associate Jesus with John. I actually think that, well after the fall of the temple, there’s a JBap movement that’s a good bit stronger than the Jesus movement.”
- …in Mark’s passion narrative, the people connected with Jesus’ arrest are always chief priests and elders. He’s made Pharisees the enemies all the way through the gospel, and then they’ve vanished, and we’ve got these new people called the chief priests, which really does link us again with the temple.
- …in Mark’s passion narrative, the people connected with Jesus’ arrest are always chief priests and elders. He’s made Pharisees the enemies all the way through the gospel, and then they’ve vanished, and we’ve got these new people called the chief priests [Mark Goodacre]
From a post here containing ChatGPT’s summary of the transcript of Paula Fredriksen’s Lecture: “Turning the Tables on the ‘Purification’ of the Temple” in NINT 2025.
- Animals like oxen and sheep could not have been sold within the Temple due to practical reasons (they’d defile it). The amount of manure would have been tremendous.
- Paul, who wrote earlier than any Gospel, never mentions a Temple incident or any Jesus prophecy about its destruction. Paul speaks positively of the Temple and sacrifice (1 Corinthians 9:13; 10:18). uses Temple imagery to describe the church (“you are God’s temple,” 1 Corinthians 3:16); Refers to the Temple cult as divinely given (Romans 9:4–5). If Jesus had publicly condemned the Temple, Paul and Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem would have known—but they did not.
- Fredriksen suggests that the real sequence leading to Jesus’s crucifixion was:
- His triumphal entry at Passover, hailed as “King of the Jews.”
- Pilate interpreted this as political sedition, a threat to Roman order.
- Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender, though Pilate likely knew he was harmless.
- His disciples survived unpunished, showing Rome did not see them as dangerous.
Jesus did not heal the man with a “skin disease” NRSVue [“leper” in KJV] in Mark 1:40-45, he “cleaned” him.
Several critical scholars argue that Revelation 2–3 reflects the author’s disagreement with Pauline teaching, especially on idol-food and accommodation to pagan society. Go to the post on this site here for more.
Re: The Beloved Desciple – As James promptly took over the Jesus Movement in Jerusalem, he was well known and, given his name James the Just, he was highly regarded. As the next oldest son, it was his duty in the Jewish community to take over the care for his widowed mother. If he did not care for his mother, then he would have neglected his duty and would not have been highly regarded.
