Sunday, December 18, 2022

How much does Mark's gospel suggest that Jesus' relatives were unbelievers?

Critics often cite the gospel of Mark against a traditional Christian view of the childhood of Jesus. Supposedly, all of the living members of Jesus' immediate family, including his mother, are portrayed as unbelievers in Mark. That's supposed to contradict what we see in the other gospels, and the unbelief of Jesus' family is considered evidence against what Matthew and Luke say about miracles surrounding Jesus' childhood. Why would Jesus' family not believe in him if those miracles had occurred?

The other gospels agree that Jesus' brothers weren't believers at the time, so there's no issue there. And they agree that Mary sometimes wavered, much as other believers did at the time. Luke and John have Jesus himself rebuking Mary, Luke even referring to such an episode in Jesus' childhood, as I've discussed elsewhere (e.g., here and here). Furthermore, there were even more miracles reported in Jesus' adulthood than in his childhood, and Jesus' miracles were widely acknowledged by the early opponents of Christianity, both of which illustrate how unreasonable it is to think that opposition to Jesus demonstrates a lack of belief in miracles associated with him or a lack of reports of such miracles. If Jesus' family could oppose him in the context of his miracles as an adult, they could even more easily oppose him in the context of fewer miracles associated with his childhood. For these and other reasons, there isn't much significance to this objection based on the unbelief of Jesus' family. I've said much more about this subject in responses to Raymond Brown (here and here) and Michael Shermer and Bart Ehrman. And Mark's gospel does imply some significant characteristics Jesus had in his childhood, like sinlessness and Davidic ancestry, as I've discussed elsewhere.

Then there's the absurdity of suggesting that somebody like the author of Mark would have been ignorant of the widespread early Christian accounts of Joseph and Mary's faith. I'm not aware of any early source who refers to Mary as an unbeliever. If such a view existed in Mark and nowhere else, that's an astonishing amount of isolation for a view that would be so significant. If Mark's gospel was as influential as people (including atheists, liberal scholars, etc.) often suggest, why is the view that Mary was an unbeliever so lacking in the historical record? If Mark's author held such a view and was advocating it in his gospel (and presumably elsewhere, such as in his oral conversations with people), I'd expect to see it in other early sources as well. And since Mark's gospel agrees with the others in portraying Joseph as being off the scene by the time Jesus' public ministry begins (probably because Joseph was dead by then), and Mark doesn't refer to Joseph as an unbeliever anywhere, the early Christian accounts of Joseph's faith are uncontested in that sense.

Keep in mind that the amount of time between Mark's gospel and the other Synoptics was likely small, probably a single-digit number of years. That doesn't allow much time for development.

While it's true that Mark 6:4 could be taken to mean that nobody in Jesus' immediate family was a believer, there are multiple reasons to reject that interpretation. For one thing, as mentioned above, that interpretation would put Mark in conflict with the other sources we have. That sort of isolation makes less sense than the traditional Christian alternative, which has Mark focusing on different issues than other sources without contradicting them. But there's another point that should be made here, one that doesn't get discussed enough. Go on to verse 5 in Mark 6. Contrary to what skeptics occasionally say, maybe because they've misread the passage or its parallel in Matthew, Jesus is referred to as doing few miracles in Nazareth, not no miracles. The lack of miracles is connected to the lack of faith there (implied by Mark's comment that "he could do no miracle there" between two references to their unbelief in verses 4 and 6 and the phrase "because of their unbelief" in the parallel passage in Matthew 13:58). The few miracles that are done imply the presence of some faith, though not much. If the general unbelief of the city allowed for some exceptions, so could the general unbelief of Jesus' family. He had at least six siblings, so unbelief among his siblings could outnumber the belief of his parents. And even his parents' belief was inconsistent, much like the wavering of Nicodemus, Peter, and other figures in the gospels and elsewhere. So, if there was merely that sort of wavering belief among a minority of Jesus' family members, that's adequate to make sense of Mark 6:4 and lines up well with the same scenario verse 5 spells out for the city as a whole. What the other gospels report about Jesus' family parallels Mark 6:5, even though critics allege that verse 4 contradicts the other gospels.

As I've mentioned before, "son of Mary" in Mark 6:3 likely alludes to the premarital timing of Mary's pregnancy. The best explanation for why that premarital timing wasn't more of an issue in early Christian and non-Christian circles, including in Mark, is that the knowledge of the premarital timing was accompanied by belief in the virgin birth. If there was just belief in a premarital pregnancy without a qualifying factor like belief in a virgin birth, the lack of scandal surrounding the timing of the pregnancy makes less sense. Keep in mind that the critics' own source, the gospel of Mark, reports that Mary and Jesus' siblings were easily accessible. Mark 6 even has the unbelievers in Nazareth mentioning Mary and the siblings by name. If the virgin birth claim was circulating during Mary's lifetime, as the evidence suggests, and Mary was an unbeliever who rejected the claim, then it would have been in Mary's interest to have said so. That would have helped prevent Jesus from taking his movement further, and it would have gained favor with the religious authorities. Sex between an engaged couple was looked down upon, but it wouldn't bring about a death penalty or anything similarly severe in Jesus' day. Joseph and Mary did get married shortly after the pregnancy occurred, the pregnancy was a few decades removed from the time of Jesus' public ministry rather than being a recent event, and the authorities would have wanted to reward cooperation with their efforts against Jesus rather than punishing it. Unbelievers would have already been claiming that Mary had been sexually active prior to marriage (as Mark 6:3 illustrates), so she wouldn't be losing much in that context by acknowledging the claim. Most of her peers in Nazareth and elsewhere and most of the authorities in her nation were unbelievers who would have rewarded her rather than punishing her for cooperating with the authorities. It seems unlikely that she would be uncooperative in order to avoid getting Jesus into trouble, since he was already in so much trouble, he was headed for more if his movement continued, and she publicly opposed him in Mark 3:21-35. The critics I'm addressing in this post claim that Mark 6:4 has Jesus publicly commenting on the unbelief of his entire family, so her alleged unqualified unbelief was a fact being publicly discussed according to these critics. If Mary was an unbeliever who rejected the virgin birth claim (and other Christian claims about Jesus' childhood), the failure of Christianity's opponents to discover, preserve, and disseminate that information is surprising. By contrast, the other gospels' portrayal of Mary as a wavering believer makes more sense of the evidence.

Mark opens his gospel with a citation of Isaiah, has references similar to what the other gospels have to Jesus' fulfillment of Isaiah 9:1 (see here and here for further details), 10:34 probably alludes to Jesus' fulfillment of one of Isaiah's Servant Songs (Isaiah 50:6), etc. Mark probably thought Jesus fulfilled what Isaiah predicted about the childhood of the Servant, in Isaiah 9 and elsewhere. Whatever Mark had in mind in his discussions of Jesus' family in chapters 3 and 6, he thought that material was consistent with a supernatural childhood of Jesus.

Part of the problem with the critics who take Mark 3 and 6 as evidence that Mark contradicts the other gospels is that they're not thinking enough about the context in which Mark wrote and the implications of what he said in passages other than the ones the critics are focused on. In the case of 6:4, they ought to read the verse that comes just before it and the one that comes just after. Verse 3 probably alludes to the premarital timing of the pregnancy of Mary, with the implications discussed above, and verse 5 tells us that verse 4 allows exceptions. You have to take verse 4 out of context in order to arrive at the skeptical interpretation of it.

The Christian approach of qualifying Mark's material with what we find in other sources, including later ones, is something commonly practiced by skeptics in other contexts. And it so happens that one of those contexts is whether Jesus' relatives were believers. As I wrote in response to Annette Merz several years ago:

Merz and other critics of the infancy narratives often allow later sources to qualify earlier ones. They date Paul's letters earlier than Mark's gospel, yet they allow what Mark's gospel says about the initial unbelief of Jesus' brothers to qualify Paul's unqualified references to Jesus' brothers as believers. In my citation of Merz above, she harmonizes the sources. She combines what sources like Mark and Paul tell us to conclude that James didn't become a believer until he saw Jesus risen from the dead. She and other critics of the infancy narratives also do that frequently with other sources (Josephus, Tacitus, etc.). If Merz can harmonize the sources like that, so can those who disagree with her.

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