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I begin this work with the assumption that Christologies1 are not given revelations or spontaneous historical manifestations but rather community-constructed models, that is, ways of talking about Jesus that are born out of a community’s theological identity. There are some good reasons that a given community ascribed to Jesus different titles and roles. For example, it is very interesting to note the way Paul talks about Jesus and the way Mark does; or the way the authors of Ephesians and Colossians talk about Christ as compared to the way Paul describes him. Each Christological description is different because the make-up and situations of the communities are different. This cannot be overstated. Christology is always driven and fed by the praxis of the community.2 It is not a given. It has to be constructed. It is never deductive, but inductive. It is never from above, a revelation implanted in people’s minds and heart by God, but always from below, from the human sphere where people struggle to remain faithful to God. Christology then is not an abstract, value-free reflection3 about who Jesus is but a practical response of the faithful done from the perspective of interested discipleship. Here I agree with Terrence W. Tilley, who proposes that Christology “must begin where we are. . . . Christology always arises in disciples’ imagination. We start with Jesus as he is perceived and imagined on this earth. We start telling the story here even if the story we tell begins in heaven.”4 This starting point of Christology is made even more poignant by Jon Sobrino:

[We] will give preference to the praxis of Jesus over his own teaching and over the teaching that the New Testament theologians elaborated concerning his praxis. Thus the New Testament will be viewed primarily as history and only secondarily as doctrine concerning the real nature of that history.5

Starting the Christological task deeply embedded in the praxis of the community is something advanced by Liberation Theology and nicely summarized in Gustavo Gutierrez’s famous dictum concerning the relationship between theology and praxis: “Theology follows,” he says, “it is the second step.”6 I treat Christology as a subset of theology,7 namely, the discourse8 about Jesus as Christ, so the dictum still applies. This “second-step” characteristic of any theology explains very well the process by which the New Testament books were written, as well as any contemporary reflection on these texts. What comes first is an experience with God channeled through and rooted in a historical event, namely, the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The second step is the discourse we construct, from the practice of discipleship,9 about who this Jesus was/is and therefore who we are as God’s people on earth. Since there are a variety of practices of discipleship due to the fact that we are all immersed in different contexts and social locations, there will always be a variety of Christological affirmations that need to be seen not so much as competitive but as complementary. They need to be brought into dialogue so that each one of our communities may contribute to the other a new insight that can be used in the practice of discipleship. The goal here is not orthodoxy, an agreement on the right doctrines, but orthopraxis, a strategy for knowing what the right practice is in a given context.

As the New Testament clearly shows, this process of Christology-building started in the early years of the movement, even before followers were called “Christians.”10 One of the first, and perhaps most influential “Christologists,”11 was indeed the Apostle Paul. Furthermore, this process can also be found in the Markan community, as its members struggled to find their place as followers of Jesus of Nazareth in a conflicting and changing world. But I would argue that in Mark’s community, the Christology that developed was less exalted, and certainly less apocalyptic, than the one manifested in and by the Pauline communities.

The essence of my argument is that of trying to find support for a Christology that sees in Jesus the disciple par excellence (chapters 3 and 4). This is not going to be an easy task, for Jesus is usually seen as the teacher, the Messiah, the Son of God, etc., rather than as a disciple. I would contend that this might be precisely one of the reasons the church has often failed in its work of proclamation of the good news, namely a mistaken understanding of Jesus’ identity and mission, which in turn impacted the way the church has understood itself and its own mission. If we can get back to a pre-Christian, or pre-canonical understanding of Jesus ministry,12 as preserved by one community, Mark’s, then perhaps we can find a way of being the church that is more in tune with God’s redemptive mission in the world.

Since this is more a socio-rhetorical13 than a historical-critical investigation my search for a discipleship model is done at the level of the text.14 This means that historical insights into the possibility of seeing Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom are limited to a general background. Rather, the text is explored, looking for clues that may help us build the proposed model. But insights from the historical-critical methods, especially those of redaction and source criticism, are brought into the discussion in order to clarify and interpret the world of the NT writers in general and Mark in particular.

The Need for a New Model

According to Philip F. Esler,15 a model is “a heuristic tool, allowing comparisons to be made with the texts for the purpose of posing new questions to them. The texts must supply the answers, not the model. . . . For this reason, it is inappropriate to debate whether a model is ‘true’ or ‘false,’ or ‘valid’ or ‘invalid.’ What matters is whether it is useful or not.” Therefore, Christologies are more relevant for their consequences, their social repercussions, than for their content. For example, Mark’s Christology may have seemed flawed to some (especially Matthew and Luke, who added to it!) but it was useful to the community that produced it. The same could be said about Paul’s Christology and ours.

The traditional, and I would say orthodox,16 descriptions (or models) of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Savior tend to confine him to ethnical, religious and metaphysical descriptions that alienate those who want to find in him an example for Christian living and praxis.17 Something similar happens with the roles of prophet and servant. The first one could be interpreted too narrowly in terms of gender (most of Israel’s prophets were men), and the second may send the wrong message to those people in society who already have a secondary position, such as women and ethnic minorities. For people whose lives are defined by continuous and ill-rewarded service, the description of Jesus as the ideal servant is not very comforting.18

We need a more inclusive and liberating model, one that can speak to people who have always felt that the Jesus proclaimed by the kerygma is too divine, too out of touch with reality. Often this Jesus seems to be playing a game called “Now I’m human, now I’m not.” For just when one begins to identify with a down-to-earth Jesus, the one who eats with sinners and publicans, who is thirsty and asks water from a woman in Samaria, who cries in front of the tomb of his friend Lazarus, the game changes. Now Jesus is divine, the Son of God, the agent of God’s final kingdom, an almost unreachable character who predicts his death to the last detail, forewarns his followers of the impending coming of the last days, and ascends to heaven in a cloud, as two heavenly figures tell the perplexed disciples that one day he will return in the same way as he now ascends. The game of biblical chess ends in a tie when the Orthodox Church, meeting at Chalcedon in 451 CE proclaims that Jesus was “fully human and fully divine.” That may have worked in the fifth century. but not so well in the twenty-first century. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth is made into this impossible entity who can only inhabit the world of theological and abstract thought, but never (or seldom) the real world of contemporary women and men, who have a difficult time identifying with someone who is not completely one of them.19

The Jesus who has been proclaimed by the various historical-Jesus researchers has also alienated people both in the church and in society at large, for this Jesus seems to be the product of liberal Christianity (Jesus the charismatic genius and great hero), or of scientific, and thus positivist, investigation that sees in Jesus a healer, preacher of renewal, cynic, and so on, who is at odds with the Judaism of his time. The problematic images of Jesus coming from these different quests have been addressed in depth by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in her book, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation. She advocates for an ethics of interpretation that recognizes that any presentation of Jesus, whether religious or scientific, is really a reconstruction done with the tools available to the researcher that condition the results of the investigation. She says:

[An] ethics of interpretation seeks to analyze the nexus between reconstructions of the Historical-Jesus and those theoretical, historical, cultural, and political conceptual frameworks that determine Jesus research. Hence biblical scholarship . . . must learn to understand itself as a critical rhetorical practice which carefully explores and assesses its own impregnation with hegemonic knowledge and discursive frameworks that made “sense” of the world and produce what counts as “reality” or as “common sense.”20

Yes, we need a new model, and I would like to suggest that this model is one that sees in Jesus the ideal disciple of the kingdom.21 What would it mean to see Jesus, in the Gospel of Mark primarily, but also in the other gospels, as the supreme example of discipleship? Among other things, it requires a rereading of the titles and roles traditionally associated with him—Son of man, Son of God, Son of David, Messiah, prophet, etc.—from the perspective of Jesus’ own sense of discipleship as interpreted by Mark. What would be the implications of such a reading for Christology, theology, ecclesiology and, especially, for Christian praxis? How would the Jesus that comes out of such a reading be regarded by the institutionalized church, by the guild of Biblical Studies, by everyday, real flesh-and-blood Christians,22 and by those outside of the church? In the present work, I concentrate mainly on exploring the possibility23 of constructing such a model given the textual data of the Gospel of Mark and I hint briefly at the ramifications of such a proposal in the life of the church.

The need to see Jesus as the example of true discipleship grows directly out of my own journey24 in the Christian faith. I reached a point where theories of atonement and heavenly rewards became totally irrelevant for my life, and Jesus’ question in Mark, “Who do you say that I am,” now personalized as “What does Osvaldo think that I am?” 25 was asked anew. It is the Christological question. And the only answer that made sense to me26 was that Jesus is the supreme example for a life of discipleship that is understood as the construction of a new order,27 a new society. And I found ample justification for this new understanding in the Markan story of Jesus. The metaphor that I like to use is that of Jacob wrestling with the man at Peniel in Genesis 32:26. When the man (angel?) wanted to leave, Jacob said: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” My hermeneutical struggle with the text has resulted, in the end, in blessing. But like Jacob after the encounter with God disguised as an angel, I am not the person I used to be. My theological walk has changed. Now I am limping, forever affected by the encounter, and people, especially traditional Bible scholars, notice it. My walking is irregular because it acknowledges the paradoxes of life and the way they affect the interpretation of the text. Now my social location precedes me as I delve into the text in search for answers.28

Such an endeavor is a reconstruction, or better yet, a construction.29 It is not offered so it will replace other constructions, but in the hope that it will contribute to a host of other images and views of Jesus that have been proposed throughout history. My only ethical exigency is that the model I propose will result in liberation, giving of life instead of taking it away from people. This general goal is unpacked by Schüssler Fiorenza when she says that any historical-Jesus research should be mindful of not reinscribing, in and through its scholarly discourse, the anti-Judaism inscribed in the gospels; that it should consider how much it has contributed to the liberation or oppression of women and other minorities around the world; that it should criticize the ideologies of colonization and domination that often use the biblical text as justification for their colonial agenda; and that it should assess whether or not it promotes a politics of exclusivity, inferiority, prejudice, and dehumanization when it comes to cultural or religious identity formation.30 Furthermore, my model has to prove that it can coexist peacefully with these four areas of concern. At the end of the book, I evaluate whether or not this has been the case.

Challenges to the Present Work

To speak of Jesus as disciple presents us with many challenges. First and foremost, there is the text of the New Testament: in no place does Jesus speak of himself—nor is spoken of by others—as a disciple of anybody.31 Jesus is either the teacher, the Lord, the Logos, one with the Father and so on. Therefore, searching for this model will prove to involve a bit of detective work. We have to look at passages32 where Jesus is “functioning” as a disciple or is speaking of himself in discipleship categories, or using terms such as “servant”33 or “slave” that present him in a less exalted manner. These representations will have to be seen as synonymous or similar to discipleship, if not historically at least theologically and literarily. In that sense, Lone Fatum has said:

A Gospel text may seem descriptive or narrative; in effect, however, it is prescriptive, as we know, and its purpose is to demonstrate to its Christian audience what it means to believe in Christ and to live the social lives of committed Christians. This implies that Jesus does not appear in the various texts as a human being or as a historical person of individual quality, but rather as the Christ of a particular congregation. Jesus as well as the people around him are actors in the reality of the text, and we know them only as such. We meet them playing their parts in the adaptation of Christian meaning that is the deliberate purpose of the text. In other words, in a particular Gospel text both Jesus and the people around him are bearers of just those symbolic values on which the universe of Christian plausibility is structured and meant to be sustained in a particular congregation. But, to be sure, an author is responsible for the literary construction as well as the deliberate staging of the actors as narrative agents, and so the author is present in the text as the structuring consciousness, as is the historical audience the author implies within the construction.34

A number of observations are in order here. First, the prescriptive nature of the narrative: Mark is not trying to describe the way Jesus was, but rather, to convince his congregation of how he should be understood. Second, this version is one geared toward a particular congregation. His Christ is the Christ of the Markan community, a group of believers that were undergoing a challenging time, as we will see. In that sense, they were different from the Matthean, Lukan, or the Johannine congregations. Third, Jesus and the people around him are actors in the reality of the text, bearers of the symbolic values that made possible the Christian universe. In this universe, discipleship is a prominent category. And fourth, the author is responsible for the construction, and therefore, present in the text as the structuring consciousness. One of the many ways in which this is implemented is through the rhetorical devices utilized by the evangelist, the most important of which may be the chiastic structure that I propose in chapter 2.

Seeing the text as prescriptive and as a construction will help me in my own endeavor, for I am not trying to discover the meaning already present in the text, but to construct one that I hope convinces the reader of the plausibility of such an interpretation, namely, that Jesus can be seen in the Gospel of Mark as the example par excellence of discipleship. Mark’s narrative utilizes oral and written traditions about Jesus and fixes them in a text that is constructed to convey his understanding of who Jesus was, what he did, and how his life, death, and resurrection affected the life of his community. Mark’s endeavor is not historicist, but theological and pastoral. Therefore, he embarks in the writing of a story where Jesus is present as a literary character more than as a historical personage. But Mark still has at his disposal vivid and lively traditions about the historical Jesus, memories of his words and deeds that were still very much alive among the believers. He is not constructing the character of Jesus out of thin air, but is basing it on the historical memory of the community. I don’t have that. I have Mark’s text, the only way to get to the historical Jesus via a (re)construction by the evangelist, whereby oral traditions, written texts, and plain memories come together under the theological supervision of the author to render a portrayal of Jesus that serves the needs of his community. But I also have, which Mark did not, a history of interpretation of the text, the way in which the church has ascribed meaning to the life of Jesus during two millennia and which conditions the way I read the text. And I also have my own reaction to that history of interpretation, which makes me privilege certain readings over others, in a similar fashion as the evangelist privileged certain traditions over others.35

Whereas the first challenge, the witness of the text of the New Testament in general and Mark in particular, is literary and rhetorical, the second, conceptualizing Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom, is theological. It requires admitting that there was an element of learning and obedience in the way Jesus approached his ministry. And this is something very difficult for orthodox scholars to accept, even when faced with the fact that a cursory reading of the gospels seems to suggest the possibility that John the Baptist may have been Jesus’ teacher. Not only that, but Jesus’ subjection to God, something again made plain by the gospel writers, is often missed in some Christologies, although not by the author of Hebrews, who declares in 5:8 that “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.” This seems to suggest that an element of learning, characteristic of every disciple, accompanied him throughout his life, since this passage refers to Jesus’ final moments in Gethsemane. It follows then, that during his public work, when he was clearly being regarded as a teacher, he was still learning. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, yes, but primarily of God, a disciple of the kingdom. Together with other disciples, Jesus learned what it meant to proclaim God’s coming rule, at a time when Rome was the unchecked world power. He was part of a movement of disciples who resisted Rome’s imperial rule, for they had their eyes fixed on another reality, the kingdom (basilea) of God.36

Of course, the main obstacle to seeing Jesus as disciple of the kingdom is the Gospels’ description of Jesus as teacher.37 If he is a teacher—in fact, “the teacher” according to John 13:13—then how can he be a disciple? But in antiquity, every teacher or philosopher traced his teaching to a source, to a teacher. So, every teacher was a former disciple or student of someone. My contention is that humanly speaking, Jesus’ teacher was John the Baptist, but that ultimately God was his Teacher. In that sense, disciples and prophets had their ultimate source of authority in the God of Israel who was regarded by all as a teacher (cf. John 6:45; Isa 54:13; Jer 32:33; Hos 11:13; Pss 71:17, 119:102, 143:8, 10).

To speak of Jesus as a disciple of the kingdom, then, implies that Jesus’ ministry needs to be seen as paradigmatic, instrumental, temporary, and not necessarily absolute and final, qualities of God’s reign to which Jesus seems to have always subordinated himself. The Gospel of John alludes to this when it says: “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). Luke also shares this opinion by writing an entire book, Acts, devoted to the work of the apostles and their followers, thus making it clear that Jesus’ earthly ministry was unfinished and was now being continued by the Spirit through the work of the community (cf. John 14:16, 26; 16:4–15; Acts 1:8).

In the Gospels, Jesus cannot be depicted as a disciple of the kingdom, because by the time they were written, the Christian church had already become uprooted from its Palestinian context.38 Jesus had become the message, not the messenger of the kingdom. Nonetheless, there is a residue of tradition that is still perceptible in the highly theologized and constructed narrative of the Gospels, which reflects a time when Jesus was regarded and, I would contend, regarded himself as a messenger of God’s kingdom alongside other figures such as John the Baptist. It is precisely this residue, this memory that we are interested in. Therefore, I explore the text of the Gospel of Mark looking for clues and vestiges hidden in the rhetorical tapestry of the text that may help us build the proposed model. Inter-textual connections with the Hebrew Scriptures are made, particularly when trying to imagine what would have been the possible traditions behind a certain model of discipleship.39

Historical and Sociological Approaches to Jesus

What was the historical Jesus, the real flesh-and-blood Jesus, like? This is what a historical approach to Jesus would try to find out, and many answers have been proposed, most of which have been treated ad nauseam by scholars from the nineteenth century to our own days and whose record appear, among a myriad of academic and popular works, in Craig S. Keener’s monumental volume entitled The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. In his book, Keener traces the history of Jesus scholarship in detail, providing an invaluable resource for those interested in this kind of endeavor. Since mine is less historical than rhetorical, as previously noted, I refer the reader to Keener’s book. Nevertheless, I would like to consider briefly some of these images, for they provide the background to my own investigation.

Jesus as a Wandering Charismatic

Nowadays, and thanks to the work of the Jesus Seminar and other historical and sociological reconstructions of Jesus’ life,40 we are familiar with the notion of a “Jesus’ movement,” which is seen as a precursor to what later became the early church as represented in the writings of the NT. This was, according to Gerd Theissen, a movement of wandering charismatics41 composed of traveling apostles, prophets, and disciples that relied on a group of sympathizers that took care of their everyday needs.42 During this time, it was the kingdom of God, rather than the death of Jesus, which held salvific value. The kingdom was seen as the message and Jesus as the messenger. To this time belongs some of the earliest stratum of the Q tradition. Even Paul testifies to this early stage (Paul’s authentic letters and Q’s earliest traditions come roughly from the same time period, 50–66 CE). We have Paul advising believers to have the “faith of Jesus” and telling them that God justifies the one who has this faith (Rom 3:26). Jesus also exhorts disciples to have faith in God, and he obviously sees himself as one who has such faith.43 All of this would agree with the idea that Jesus was the messenger of the kingdom, someone like John the Baptist, and not the message.

But while messenger is a more passive concept, disciple has a more active connotation.44 A disciple is someone who has been formed by a teacher who embodies a worldview, an ideology, and sees himself as a follower of that teacher or a subscriber of their ideology. But disciples are hardly ever solitary individuals. They belong to groups and/or movements that hope to make an impact in the society of their time. Jesus was part of such a movement. He was not just a heroic person who appeared out of the blue, and, yet, see the abrupt way in which Mark describes Jesus’ beginning of his ministry in 1:9! Rather Jesus is an individual deeply formed by the social group to which he belonged.45

Jesus as the Broker of God

The social-science model of patron, client, and broker also has been used to explain Jesus’ relation to God and the kingdom. From this perspective, Jesus can be seen as a broker of God, the heavenly Patron. In his work, Jesus made accessible to people the benevolence of God dispensed as grace, forgiveness, and mercy. This model allows us to see Jesus always in a relationship of dependence and subordination to God, even when as a teacher he was also a sort of patron to the disciples, who in turn acted as his brokers. Nevertheless, realizing how connected Jesus was with God, it is better to see both him and the disciples as brokers of the heavenly Patron, co-disciples in the service of the kingdom.46

Jesus as a Mystic

First-century Jewish mysticism adds another layer to this picture. According to this model, Jesus was taught by John to meditate on the vision of God depicted in the first chapter of Ezekiel, the Chariot, the moving throne of God. Bruce Chilton describes the Chariot as the “source of God’s energy and intelligence, the origin of his power to create and destroy. By meditating on the Chariot, John and his disciples aspired to become one with God’s Throne.”47 Jesus, as one of John’s disciples, learned the secrets of this meditation and in turn taught it to his disciples. This heavenly vision became the source of Jesus’ power and authority. Therefore, it is possible to affirm that Jesus remained a disciple of that vision, a servant, if you will, of a higher source of authority: God’s throne, God’s heavenly realm. His experience was similar to that of Isaiah, Ezekiel and, later, the Apostle Paul (cf. Isaiah 6; Ezekiel 1; 2 Cor 12:1–4).

Other Possible Models

Besides the models of itinerant charismatic, broker, and mystic, there are many other historical and/or sociological possibilities for a Jesus who, in the eyes of some early Christian communities, behaved as a disciple of the kingdom. Some would like to see him as a cynic or a sage—an idea advanced by the Jesus Seminar48—or as a prophet like Moses and/or Elijah, a favorite theme in Liberationist Christologies.49 All of these models reflect the perspectives of those proposing them, and are all contextual interpretations, and as such valid, inasmuch as they remain aware of their contextual nature. My own investigation in the present work seeks to be a contribution to an on-going dialogue between Christologies, with the hope that it may help to clarify for some readers their own participation as disciples in the work and ministry of the church.

Literary Approaches to Mark

By literary approaches, I refer to those methods that concentrate mainly on the text of the gospel without any concern for the way that text came to exist. They are basically synchronic rather than diachronic, for they assume the autonomy of the text to convey meaning without the control imposed on it by the author or the social location that gave it birth. Among these methods, we find narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, structuralism, semiotics—as well as various post-modern approaches such as reader-response and, especially, deconstruction. For the sake of this work, I limit myself to a brief examination of narrative and rhetorical criticism.

According to Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, the term “narrative Christology” was introduced by Robert Tannehill in his article, “The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology.”50 She quotes Tannehill as saying that “we learn who Jesus is through what he says and does in the context of the action of others.”51 She goes on to affirm that the main question of narrative studies on the gospels is: How does the story mean?52 She acknowledges the importance of the historical context in which the gospel was produced and its religious significance for Christian faith (What does the story mean?), but her own research is strictly literary. It concerns itself with the narrative aspects of the gospel, which include settings, characters, plot, and rhetoric, all of which are conscious devices utilized by an implied author to try to communicate with an implied audience.53

My own approach in this book is slightly different. I take seriously the social context of the author and the way in which he is trying to address some problems arising from his context by means of a literary production. Therefore, I concentrate on one of the aspects of Malbon’s method, namely, the rhetoric of the gospel, the way in which the evangelist has placed the traditions available to him, as well as its own redaction of them in order to convey an understanding of who Jesus was that would answer some of the questions the community had. In that sense, this work could be described as an example of socio-rhetorical54 Christology more than narrative Christology. I will be more interested in the what than in the how of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, although how the evangelist puts together his resources will play an important role in my argument. This is illustrated mainly by my work in chapter 2, where I discuss the rhetorical center of the gospel and its theological implications. I conclude there by saying that the whole gospel betrays an intentional form used by the evangelist to drive home his main theological point.

Also important in this rhetorical analysis of Mark is how the evangelist has incorporated into the narrative some key religious and philosophical concepts of the Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, which Robbins calls “intertexture,” the relationship of data in the text to various kinds of phenomena outside the text, including oral-scribal, historical, social, and cultural intertexture.55 In chapter 1, I analyze two expressions that are examples of intertexture: “disciple” and “Son of Man.” Disciple represents a case of what Robbins calls echo, meaning by that a word or phrase that evokes a cultural tradition,56 both in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world. I examine then the traditions behind the idea of disciple/discipleship present in the first-century Mediterranean world. The other expression, “Son of Man,” is an example of re-contextualization, an aspect of the oral-scribal intertexture that utilizes words from biblical texts without necessarily stating that the words are written anywhere else.57 In Mark 13:26, the reference is to Daniel 7:13–14, but the evangelist does not mention, as he does in 1:2–3, the Hebrew Scripture text he is using. In this book, unless explicitly stated, all occurrences of intertexture are referred to as rereadings, which is the preferred expression for theological reappropriation used by Liberation Theology exegetes.

Conclusion

Recovering an early Christology that sees Jesus as the ideal disciple of the kingdom of God is a constructive and creative task that moves us from the comfort zone in which orthodoxy has placed us into the realm of possibility and imagination. This task makes us all Christologists, builders of new understandings of who Jesus was and therefore is for certain communities. It assumes that Christologies have always been, and therefore are, community-constructed models, that is, ways of talking about Jesus that are born out of a community’s theological identity. They all bear the marks of contextuality and contingency and, therefore, are not universal and objective but particular and subjective. They are born not in busy minds detached from the real problems of the world, but in busy hands engaged in a praxis that tries to change the world. My hope is that this book will demonstrate precisely that.

1. By Christology, I simply mean a discourse about Christ that is based on the historical recollections of the community informed by its current situation. In that sense, any talk about Jesus that tries to make his person and message relevant for a given community is a Christology. Christology is born then in the crucible of memory and praxis, or remembrance and practice. Its purpose is to guide the community in times of struggle by giving them a sense of identity and by encouraging them to remain faithful to the God of Israel. For a similar understanding and treatment of Christology, see Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 1–15.

2. To quote Jon Sobrino: “The diverse Christologies of the New Testament were elaborated from two poles. Jesus of Nazareth was one pole. The other was the concrete situation of each community. Each had its own cultural backdrop and its own set of problems both within the church and vis-à-vis the outside world. The resurrection of Christ made their faith possible, but in the elaboration of a Christology they had to deal with the concrete features of Jesus’ life. They would have to select and choose between those elements, rejecting some and accepting others. In today’s situation the various churches are confronted with the same task.” Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, 13.

3. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, xvi, criticizes the tendency in traditional and dogmatic Christologies to reduce Christ to a sublime abstraction that introduces a separation between the total or whole Christ on the one hand and the concrete history of Jesus on the other. This quite often leads to an alienating understanding of Christ, as seen in spiritualizing practices that invoke vaguely the Spirit but do not look for the concrete spirit of Jesus as the driving force behind his ministry.

4. Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 37.

5. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, xxii.

6. Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, xxix.

7. Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective, 1.

8. My understanding of “discourse” is informed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s discussion of the subject in Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 14–20, as she applies this concept to historical-Jesus research. I also tend to view discourse as ideological construction.

9. I borrow this expression from Terrence W. Tilley, because it corresponds somehow to Gutierrez’s understanding of “praxis.” Tilley says that practice is a term of art where the key is the learning aspect of the practice: “One learns how to engage in a practice; only then can one know what the practice is and what participation in the practice produces—including among the products of practice those dispositions we call ‘beliefs’ and formulate in sentences. . . . The practices are primary; the doctrines are derivative.” Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 13, 14.

10. “The various theologies present in them [the texts of the NT], accordingly, fail to be interpreted, in part at least, as the symbolical provinces of meaning erected by the authors of the various texts, or by the traditions before them, to legitimate the early gatherings of Christians, not yet even bearing that name. In the light of the model, New Testament theologies become sacred canopies for those fragile social worlds seeking to find a place for themselves and their faith, in the teeth of opposition from without and dissention and ennui within.” Esler, First Christians, 11.

11. This made-up expression is borrowed from a conversation with my colleague, Ken Vaux.

12. William R. Herzog II has alerted us of the problematic nature of the word “ministry” when applied to Jesus. He writes: “The use of ministry to describe Jesus’ activities implies that the model for understanding Jesus is Christian ministry. While this model might be useful in a number of theological or ecclesiastical contexts, it assumes too much and is anachronistic when applied to the historical Jesus.” Prophet and Teacher, 1. Nevertheless, for our purpose in this work, the word ministry is still relevant because Mark is writing for a Christian community involved in ministry. The historical Jesus is not the object of our study, but rather Mark’s Christological construction of Jesus as the disciple of the kingdom.

13. For this idea, see Robbins, Tapestry, 1–17.

14. Here it is important to remember what Robbins says about the nature of texts, namely, that they are “performances of language, and language is part of the inner fabric of society, culture, ideology, and religion.” Robbins, Tapestry, 1. Therefore, Mark’s use of language cannot be separated from the society and culture that produced it. Both aspects will be considered as we delve deeply into the inner workings of Mark’s text.

15. Esler, First Christians, 13.

16. I use “orthodox” in a broad sense. What I mean is any view of the Bible or of the Christian tradition that claims to be the “right one,” and therefore, the only valid interpretation. Even though, for the most part, I have in mind conservative approaches to biblical scholarship, the term can also be used to describe any view that takes on the mantle of normativity.

17. It needs to be said, from the outset, that in emphasizing “orthopraxis” over “orthodoxy,” I will be proposing an alternative view to the traditional one of Jesus as Lord and Savior.

18. Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 72–73.

19. James H. Cone has said that “without the historical Jesus—and by that he means the human Jesus—theology is left with a docetic Christ who is said to be human, but is actually nothing but an idea-principle in a theological system.” Cone, God of the Oppressed, 118.

20. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 59

21. I already anticipated this, ever so intuitively, in a previous publication in which I say: “In the gospel of Mark Jesus is the one who embodies authentic discipleship.” And also, “The gospel of Mark is then more about discipleship than it is about Christology, it is more about who is a true disciple than it is about who is the real Messiah.” But at that point, I had not yet made the connection between discipleship and Christology that I am making in this book. At the time, I still thought of Christology in exalted terms, not in practical, praxiological ones, as I do now. Vena, “Rhetorical and Theological Center of Mark’s Gospel,” 343–45.

22. In a first trial run of this idea in front of a Latin American audience, the comment was made that if it was already difficult for a believer to measure up to the disciples of Jesus, how much more difficult would it be, now that Jesus is made into the model of discipleship, to live up to these standards. I recognize that this is a problem, especially if one sees the difference between Jesus and the disciples as ontological. I will contend, though, that the difference is not ontological but relational. In this work, I will propose a different view of Jesus’ relationship to both God and humans.

23. Schüssler Fiorenza criticizes the criterion of plausibility that judges materials on the basis of whether or not they can be made to fit into the culture and times of Jesus. This criterion tends to ignore the fact that that which is considered plausible, or common sense, depends on an hegemonic understanding of how the world works, and that this understanding is derived from a certain type of scholarship marked by the presupposition that women were not active participants in the Jesus movement. Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 51–55. Applying the same criticism to the criterion of plausibility, I would like to suggest that Jesus as disciple of the kingdom is not only plausible, since he started his career as a disciple of John the Baptist, but also possible, especially when one considers that the Markan community may represent a theological stand that is in some ways pre-Orthodox. Those who deny the possibility of a Christology where Jesus is presented as a model of discipleship, and that perhaps this was the main or prevalent way of understanding Jesus given the rhetorical shape and the theological flavor of the gospel, will have to prove that such possibility did not exist at the time of Mark.

24. I am very interested in the subject at hand. This means that my investigation is “interested.” I come to the text with a pre-understanding. I do not consider this to be a hindrance or a drawback to the exegetical endeavor, but rather a healthy motivation. In the words of Daniel Patte, “Coming to the text with a vested interest, and thus a question or an expectation, does not in itself engender a misreading. In sum, preunderstandings motivate our readings, including our critical readings.” Patte, Ethics of Biblical Interpretation, 56.

25. I owe this insight to my colleague, David Hogue.

26. Here it is important to notice how social location affects theology. What for me became irrelevant, for other people was crucial to their religious experience. For example, the slaves knew that their situation of oppression and exploitation was going to be changed the day they died, when they arrived to the other shore of the Jordan; so they sang: “Sooner-a-will be done with the trouble of this world, going home to live with God.” Because of their predicament, they were not interested in the Christological affirmations of the Fathers of the Church, such as Athanasius, who said that the Son is of one substance with the Father, the question of homoousia. That is not a black question, says James Cone. Blacks ask “whether Jesus is walking with them, whether they can call him in the ‘telephone of prayer’ and tell him all about their troubles.” Cone, God of the Oppressed, 14. In my case, my oppression was not social, but intellectual and psychological; therefore, the need to escape from it was not impeded by any social structure, but by my own self-imposed religious consciousness triggered and fed by the conservative missionary preaching I was subjected to during my youth.

27. For this idea, I am deeply indebted to Ched Myers and his seminal work, Binding the Strong Man.

28. Schüssler Fiorenza states: “A critical interpretation for liberation does not begin with the text; it does not place the bible at the center of its attention. Rather, it begins with a reflection on one’s experience and socio-political religious location.”Wisdom Ways. 90.

29. Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 7–11, makes three affirmations worth quoting: (1) Theology is construction. (2) Theological construction is undertaken on a particular social location. (3) The traditions in which we work provide a “building code” that each construction has to follow. For Christology, he proposes that one such code could be “do not deny either the true humanity or the true divinity of Jesus Christ.” I am not sure that I am willing to follow the Nicene-Chalcedonian creed as my guiding light or my building code as I unpack the meaning of Jesus as disciple in Mark. Rather than seeing these ancient creeds as the building blocks for my Christology, I prefer to use Mark’s text, which represents a pre-Chalcedonian Christology, as my building code.

30. Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation, 59–60.

31. But he speaks of himself as one who serves (Mark 4:45).

32. One of those passages is the account of Jesus’ baptism. To many scholars, the likelihood that Jesus was indeed a disciple of John the Baptist is very high. This is the only way they can interpret his baptism by John. I should come back to this later.

33. I have explored this concept in “Gospel Images of Jesus as Deacon,” 1–16.

34. Fatum, “Gender Hermeneutics,”160.

35. It still puzzles scholars that Mark, if he had access to Q, did not include such important materials as the Sermon on the Mount, or some version of the birth narratives, etc. Obviously, he was making an editorial, and therefore theological, choice.

36. “In speaking of the Jesus movement rather than of the person of Jesus himself, we are stressing the fact that it is the social fact, of which the person is to be sure a part, that has historical importance. It is a bourgeois admiration for heroic personalities that focused much of New-Testament research on the person of Jesus.” Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 111.

37. This is particularly evident in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus delivers five sermons that resemble the five books of the Law and teaches the disciples on far more occasions than in the other gospels. Of all the gospels, it is Mark that gives less importance to Jesus as a teacher.

38. Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 65.

39. In attempting to portray Jesus as the disciple of the kingdom par excellence, I am not denying other portrayals. I am only making my assumptions known from the very beginning. At the same time, I also am acknowledging that there have been—and there are—many conscious as well as unconscious presuppositions scholars bring to their study of Jesus. I want to make mine clear, and I want to use them as hermeneutical lenses into the text. I have some historical basis for my affirmations, but the bulk of my argument will be literary; that is, it will be based on the text of the gospels, particularly Mark, with an eye toward finding support for my hypothesis. The end product will be, I hope, a theological construction dictated by my own theological journey.

40. See especially Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity.

41. Pixley affirms the importance of Theissen’s approach of focusing on the Jesus movement, but recognizes that this is somehow different from his own and that of other Liberation Theology scholars. While Theissen sees the narrative as a source for the reconstruction of the Jesus movement, Pixley and others, such as Fernando Belo, to whom I would add also Ched Myers, see it as an ideological construction of the author. The words of Jesus lose their significance when taken out of the narrative. Pixley, God’s Kingdom, 112.

42. Theissen, Sociology, 8.

43. “Unshakable faith and trust in God, the biblical emunah, was the hallmark, the ideal of Jesus which he preached and practiced. It was the spiritual engine of his whole life’s work.” Vermes, Changing Faces of Jesus, 220.

44. I owe this insight to Jerry Moyar, a member of the Koinonia class at the First United Methodist Church in Downers Grove, Illinois, USA.

45. For the importance of group formation in the early Jesus movement, see Malina, Social World of Jesus and the Gospels, 60–67.

46. Malina, Social World of Jesus and the Gospels, 149–57.

47. Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, 50.

48. John Dominic Crossan qualifies this idea by stating that Jesus was a peasant Jewish Cynic who embodied the values of the lower Galilee culture. Historical Jesus, 421–22.

49. See here specially Segundo’s ground breaking work, Christology at the Crossroads.

50. Tannehill, “Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology,” 57–95.

51. Malbon, Mark’s Jesus, 4.

52. Ibid., 6–14.

53. Ibid., 6.

54. I borrow this concept from Robbins, Tapestry, 1–17.

55. Ibid., 96.

56. Ibid., 110.

57. Ibid., 107.