Extracts from The best explanation for the Messianic Secret I’ve ever heard by Michael Waddell at BSA.
Part 1: The problem
The Gospel of Mark is full of places where Jesus does not want people to know who he is. At the very beginning, in Mark 1:23-25, a demon recognizes Jesus as “the Holy One of God”, and Jesus orders the demon to be silent. In verse 34,
He cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.
Some have claimed that Jesus just didn’t want people to misunderstand his mission, but here he silences the demons specifically because they know exactly who he is. And it’s not just demons. In Mark 1:44, people who are healed are supposed to keep it a secret. Witnesses to miracles are ordered to keep it on the down-low too, as in Mark 7:35-36. When Peter finally understands that Jesus is the Messiah in Mark 8:29-30, Jesus doesn’t tell him to spread the Good News… he tells him to not tell anyone! Why? Wouldn’t Jesus want people to know he’s a miracle-worker, the Messiah, the Son of God? How are people supposed to believe in him if it’s a big secret?
This is all very different from the other gospels. In John, Jesus is constantly performing public miracles specifically so that people will know who he is and believe in him (as John 2:11 and 2:23, among many other examples). In Luke 7:20-22, it’s his public miracles and exorcisms that prove that Jesus is the one John the Baptist foretold. It’s only in Mark (or in stories the synoptics reuse from Mark) where Jesus doesn’t want people to know, and seemingly doesn’t want people to believe in him. In Mark 4:11-12 he explains why he speaks in parables:
To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything comes in parables, in order that:
‘they may indeed look but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand;
so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’
Jesus doesn’t want people to understand, because he doesn’t want them to be forgiven? Harsh! What’s going on?
Part 2: William Wrede’s solution
William Wrede’s famous 1901 paper on the Messianic Secret concludes, correctly, that this can’t be historical, for several reasons. First off, the secrecy doesn’t make logical sense most of the time.
- When Jesus goes to raise a little girl from the dead in Mark 5:35-45, he sees a crowd outside the house “weeping and wailing” in grief. He goes in, heals the girl, and orders them not to tell anyone. But there’s a crowd outside mourning at full volume! What are they going to think when they see her alive?
- Similarly, in Mark 7:33-37 he sees a man who is deaf and mute, and takes him “aside in private, away from the crowd”. It’s just the two of them. Jesus heals him, and “ordered them to tell no one”. Who is “them”? No one is around!
- It looks like the order to keep silent is a narrative device Mark is using, overlaying it onto earlier stories that didn’t have it.
Also, Jesus isn’t the only person in Mark who tries to keep it a secret. In Mark 10:46-48, random people in the crowd try to prevent a man from calling out who Jesus is. If Jesus, historically, tried to keep his Messiahship a secret, why would random bystanders (who didn’t know who Jesus was) participate? In other places, such as Mark 6:52 and 8:17, his disciples fail to understand who Jesus is because “their hearts were hardened”, reusing a phrase from Exodus where God hardened the Pharoah’s heart so that he would not relent and be saved.
And finally, recall in Mark 4:11-12 (at the end of Part 1) how Jesus said he spoke in parables so that people wouldn’t understand. Is that how parables work? Both before and after Jesus, Jewish teachers were said to speak in parables similar to Jesus’s, and these were always described as helping people understand. Is the Parable of the Mustard Seed so obscure that it would make people less likely to understand?
For all these reasons, Wrede concluded that Mark invented the Messianic Secret. And he thought he knew why. The answer, Wrede said, is in Mark 9:9, just after the Transfiguration: As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
It was okay to say he was the Messiah after the resurrection, but not before. Wrede concluded that, historically, people didn’t actually think Jesus was the messiah during his ministry, because he didn’t claim to be. But after the crucifixion, when the disciples encountered the risen Jesus, they saw that he was the Messiah and always had been. Mark had to explain why no one thought Jesus was the Messiah during his lifetime, so he made up the Messianic Secret to explain it.
Problems with Wrede’s thesis
As brilliant and influential as Wrede’s paper was, many critics have poked holes in it, for three main reasons.
- Jesus actually does seem to have been thought of as the Messiah in his life. Mark records that he was crucified as “King of the Jews”, and this was not a title the early church used or found appealing. Mark probably records it that way because Jesus really was executed for claiming to be the Messiah.
- If no one thought Jesus was the Messiah, but later the disciples thought Jesus had been raised, why would that make him think he was the Messiah? No one expected the Messiah to be raised from the dead. It’s more likely they already thought he was the Messiah, and the resurrection appearances confirmed it for them.
- If the Messianic Secret was Mark’s way of explaining why no one thought Jesus was the messiah in his lifetime, then it’s odd that Mark describes it as not working. Constantly in Mark, people tell everyone who Jesus is, even though he tells them not to. Mark 1:45 is an especially vivid example.
So if that’s not why Mark made up the Messianic Secret, why did he?
Part 3: Ian Mills’ solution [presented when a speaker at NINT2025 to the Elite Level members] as summarized by Michael:
Ian Mills puts together three important clues.
First he notes the one exception, the one time in Mark Jesus casts a demon out of someone and instruct him to tell people about it, in Mark 5:18-20. As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. But Jesus refused and said to him, “Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone was amazed. The Decapolis was a gentile community, and if they were “his own people”, this man must have been a gentile. But why would that matter? That’s clue #1.
Second, recall Mark 7:26-27, when a Syrophoenician gentile begged Jesus to cast a demon out of her daughter, and he replied, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Setting aside the harsh diss, why does he say “first”? He doesn’t say that children (of Israel) should be fed exclusively, but just first. That’s clue #2.
And thirdly, recall Mark 4:11-12 one more time, where Jesus explains that he speaks in parables to prevent people from understanding. He’s quoting Isaiah 6:9-10 here to make his point. And he wasn’t the first. Paul, in Romans 11:7-8 (writing before Mark) quotes the very same passage in order to show why the Jews were, on the whole, prevented from seeing that Jesus was the messiah. In context, Paul lays out his timeline, trying to explain why so many Gentiles and so few Jews have believed in Jesus. First, the message went to the Jews, but their hearts were hardened. Then the message went to the Gentiles, who accepted it gladly. And now (Paul hopes), the Jews will be jealous and embarrassed and believe.
So suppose Mark was a Pauline Christian (as many suspect), and he wanted to tell the story of Jesus. Suppose he gathered tales of Jesus’ baptism, parables, healings, teachings, and other stories, and assembled them into a cohesive narrative. The Messianic Secret would just be Mark’s way to narrativize Paul’s explanation of why the message was more successful among Gentiles, despite Jesus interacting with very few Gentiles himself. It’s Paul’s explanation, made into a story.
End of extracts from Michael’s OP.
From the same post is this response from Charles Bledsoe
A very persuasive theory. Keith Nickle also has an interesting theory, that “Mark” and his community were afraid that Gentiles seeing Jesus through a pagan lens would make too much of his wonder-working and exorcisms and wrongly understand him to be the sort of thaumaturgical theanthropos, god-man they were familiar with, and to counteract the risk of this happening Mark was keen on soft-pedaling the importance of the miracles and expelling of demons, on making the point that Jesus’ suffering, death on the cross, and resurrection is what’s key to understanding him, not his prodigies, and he in part made this point by having Jesus treat his prodigies as something that didn’t need to be advertised and turned into a big deal. According to this view the underlying motive of the invention of the messianic secret was theological. It’s a literary device that functions to make a key theological point.
