Was Mary Israel, Bride of God? 3
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, December 07, 1998
Abstract
The Bridegroom and Fasting
In Mark 2:18-20 are more details of the wedding ritual when disciples of John and the Pharisees accuse Jesus and the Nazarenes of not fasting when they should have been. Jesus would not have been so impious as to ignore a fast unless there were a strong reason for it or unless it never happened at all because it was a parable not an actual event. It is a distorted kingdom parable which makes use of the idea of marriage as a covenant between God and Israel. Note that the bride had to be a day over twelve years and a half for the marriage to be legal.
In Jewish tradition the bride and bridegroom fast until the solemnizing of their marital promises when the fast is lifted for the wedding feast. In other words the bride—Israel, the children—enters the house—the kingdom—of the bridegroom—God. The fast which went before is broken and the joyous wedding feast—messianic meal—begins a week of celebrations. In this case, Jesus was not recommending that Jews should not fast, but was giving an analogy between the kingdom and the feast after the wedding fast. Jesus would have used it in this sense implying that there was cause for rejoicing because God was with the Elect and they would soon be entering His kingdom. This has been distorted into Jesus feasting when others fasted.
But this and the two mini-parables which follow (Mk 2:21-2:22) might also be part of a discussion about the temple related to the promise to raise up the temple in three days. The point is that there is a minor Jewish fast ending on the 9 Ab mourning the destruction of the temple. The date is that of the end of services in Herod’s temple in 70 AD but originally there was a fast mourning the end of Solomon’s temple in 587 BC. In the preceding three weeks no marriages are celebrated. When the fast is broken, marriages can again occur and wedding festivities be celebrated.
The Christian interpretation is that Jesus, the Christ, has stopped the need for absurd duties like fasting. Yet, immediately, he says there will be a time when it is appropriate—when he is killed—even though his death is the very climax of God’s plan to redeem mankind. If Jesus died on the cross as part of God’s plan to atone for mankind’s sins, as the clergy would have us believe, then the crucifixion was no occasion for fasting!
A prediction of the death of Jesus (Mk 2:20) is plainly hindsight. Mark was writing around the time of the Jewish War about 40 years after the events of the gospel so he could put words like this into the mouth of Jesus to make him seem to predict his crucifixion, but the addition is illogical. In fact, the early church found that it was doing what the rest of this distorted passage seemed to forbid—Christians were still fasting, because Jesus had issued no such directive. The church therefore had to add this line to justify anew the continuation of the practice.
“Disciples of John and of the” has also been added to “the Pharisees” in this passage in Mark because at an early stage some Nazarenes rejected Jesus to follow John the Baptist and the gospel writer wanted to tar them with the Pharisees’ brush.
Both of the mini-parables in Mark 2:21-2:22 have to be given their proper context. They seem to be referring to the newness of the Christian religion compared with the oldness of Judaism and emphasising the need to split cleanly with the old in favour of the new. If so it is something added by Mark and not something that Jesus said. The linking of these two mini-parables with the previous verses about marriage and fasting suggests that Jesus might have been describing in a parable the nature of the kingdom in the context of the destruction of the temple. He is promising that the kingdom will be accompanied by a new temple, whence the two mini-parables, showing that the old priesthood are incompatible with the new one provided by the Essenes. Elsewhere (Mt 26:61; Mk 14:58) he is accused of threatening to destroy the temple.
Essenes wore their clothes until they were in tatters. For them there could never be a question of patching old clothes. The reason was the Essene aversion to mixing anything, which in turn reflected their view that Jews and gentiles should remain distinct. Note also that it was the Essenes who used unfermented grape juice in their ceremonies, calling it new wine. Unfermented grape juice would begin to ferment in a skin which had contained wine, thus bursting the skin with the gas pressure generated.
Divorce
If Essenes had an idea of a symbolic marriage between God and Israel, it seems reasonable to think it will be reflected in Jesus’s attitude to divorce. Sure enough, a dispute over divorce arises:
Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him.Mk 10:2
The Nazarene band are approaching Judaea travelling apparently on the eastern side of the Jordan river—which in the north was part of Decapolis and, in the south, part of Herod Antipas’s kingdom—possibly so as not to attract premature attention from the Romans in Judaea. Pharisees are there again, but many early manuscripts make no mention of them, the question simply being put abstractly. This is one case in which it is manifest that a reference to Pharisees is not genuine. That is generally the case in the gospels.
Jesus’s answer, fleshed out in Matthew 19:1-12, is purely Essene—divorce by either party is adultery. The Damascus Rule prescribes that marriage is permanent! An Essene could not remarry even if his wife had died. Justification is that Genesis 1:27 states God’s intent in creating man and woman. Both Jesus and the Essenes considered it more fundamental than Deuteronomy 24:1-4, the Mosaic statement of the law of divorce. The Essenes also quoted the pairing of creatures in Noah’s Ark and Deuteronomy 17:17:
He shall not multiply wives unto himself.
Similarly Jesus quoted another verse—Genesis 2:24:
A man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be of one flesh.
This has been considered the only direct pronouncement on law made by Jesus in the gospels. Nonetheless it is parabolic as ever. Jesus is not merely teaching what the Essenes accepted as the law in respect of divorce. He is using it to justify his incursion against the Roman province of Judaea, the heart of the promised land. The reason why the discussion about divorce comes at this point is precisely that Jesus is intent on dispatching the Roman usurper of God’s rightful position as bridegroom of Israel. God was the bridegroom of Israel—divorce is not allowed under any circumstances, so God would not divorce his bride, Israel. As in the miracle of the raising of Jair’s daughter, the problem is that the bride has been illegally taken by another, Rome! Jesus saw it as the duty of the Nazarenes to recover the virtue of Israel by liberating Jerusalem. When it had been done, the marriage could go ahead, and the gates of the kingdom would open.
Israel is personified as an unfaithful or forsaken wife in the scriptures, and its people are therefore spoken of as whoring after foreign gods:
Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath profaned the holiness of the Lord which he loved, and hath married the daughter of a strange god. (“The daughter of” seems to be an interpolation.)Malachi 2:11
And the Lord said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them.Deuteronomy 31:16
And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto them throughout their generations.Leviticus 17:7
Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit whoredom with Molech, from among their people. And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits, and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.Leviticus 20:5-6
And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the Lord; but they did not so.Judges 2:17
And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.Judges 8:27
And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and made Baalberith their god.Judges 8:33Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast gone a whoring from thy God, thou hast loved a reward upon every cornfloor.Hosea 9:1In Isaiah 54:5-8, the Jews are described as a forsaken wife. The husband who forsook her? God! But he promises it was only for a moment. In Jeremiah 3:20 God speaks to the children of Israel who had become idolatrous:
Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so have ye dealt treacherously with me.The disciples ask Jesus for an explanation of the parable but either Mark cannot see, or does not want to suggest, that this is a parable. Mark therefore writes of the same matter changing the original of the parable. Neither is Mark’s explanation genuine. Proof is that, in Judaic law, a wife could not divorce her husband and adultery could only be committed against a man not a woman. Mark’s answer is fitted to gentile not Jewish practices of the time. Mark’s false answer has been substituted for Jesus’s explanation of the foregoing passage.
Jesus argues that God and Israel are as a groom and a bride. If divorce were possible then God could notionally divorce Israel, but He has decreed that once married the twain are one flesh—divorce is not lawful and He will never divorce His bride. So far Jesus is just restating that Israel is God’s forever but he does not conclude in such a simple fashion. He asserts:
What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.His point is not simply that divorce is illegal but that, in addition, no one can forcibly separate a married couple. Yet the married couple have been separated because the bride was no longer God’s but Rome’s. Remember that the Jews were theocrats—the metaphor of God as Israel’s groom meant God was Israel’s king. Rome had usurped God’s position as ruler of Israel.
The suppressed conclusion is, of course, that God simply awaits a sign from his people that the illegal marriage is rejected. That sign is that Jerusalem, symbolic of Israel as a whole, should be freed from the Romans. God would then respond appropriately. Thus the dispute about divorce is Jesus’s parabolic explanation of his purpose in heading for Jerusalem with his band of Nazarenes.
We find confirmation in Revelation 19 where the marriage is between the lamb and his wife after the destruction of Rome. The marriage still requires the destruction of Rome who had usurped God’s position. The change that has been made in Revelation is that the lamb has been substituted for God who was the true bridegroom and the only logical one in Jewish tradition. The wife was arrayed in clean white linen, the righteousness of the saints. And we also find:
Blessed are they who are called to the marriage supper of the lamb.A Dead Girl and a Menstrual Woman
in Mark 5:21-43, two stories are presented, one surrounding the other. A woman touches the fringe of Jesus’s robe and is cured of a haemorrhage she has had for twelve years, the inference always made being that it is a menstrual discharge when the Greek word simply means any kind of bleeding. The fringe referred to is the four tassels required by the law of Moses, showing again that Jesus followed Jewish orthodoxy. More amazingly the daughter, aged twelve, of a president of a synagogue—a Pharisee!—is raised from the dead. Peter and the Sons of Thunder as well as the parents are present. The two stories are written in different styles so must have come from different sources originally but Mark had reason to present them together. If the two stories were originally together but Mark got two versions of them he might have preferred one from each of his two versions. If the two stories occurred separately Mark has seen their connection and linked them.
The period of twelve years is the link. A woman ill for twelve years is cured and a girl at the beginning of womanhood dies but is resurrected. Two healing miracles, one of them apparently truly miraculous. The clue that the story of the older woman—if her discharge was indeed mensrual—was a parable and not a real event is that no Jewish woman with such a haemorrhage would have been in a crowd. She would have been unwelcome—menstrual discharges were unclean. If she had touched Jesus then he would also have been unclean. And this poor woman had been ritually unclean for twelve years continuously! Robert A Guelich has noted that the woman would have been “personally, socially and spiritually cut off” and a feminist writer has noted that she would have been socially and religiously dead.
There was a point about the touching for gentile readers of the time of Mark. They believed that holy men exuded their power or “dynamis” involuntarily. Believers could tap it just as the menstruating woman did. Mark has to make Jesus different however and, at the same time, get over a Pauline message. Mark makes Jesus immediately aware that his power is being drained from him and demands to know who had stolen it from him. Nevertheless he forgives her and assures her, and the Christian proselytes reading the story, that faith is the essence of salvation. All of which makes it clear that none of it is genuine Nazarene tradition and can be ignored.
In the story about the raising of the little girl, besides forgetting about the mutual antagonism between Jesus and the Pharisees, Mark forgets that the crowd must still have been outside even though he had forbidden them to see the cure itself. They must all have known about it as soon as the little girl chose to appear in public and his strait charge that no man should know is absurd. This too is a parable.
Here we have two bold speeches or declarations of Jesus in which he uses the two metaphors to show that the time to liberate Judaea is right. Naive Christians or the evangelist transmute them into innocent healing miracles.
The woman and the girl are personifications of Israel. Sickness and death, as ever, represent spiritual sickness—defeatism, lack of morale, fear. Judaea has been unclean for twelve years, suffered for twelve years, been spiritually and religiously dead for twelve years. Blood had flowed in Judaea from her occupation by the Romans in 6 AD. Now she would be cleansed or cured—the word for “healed” used in the parables really means “saved” or “delivered”. Note that the woman with the haemorrhage supports herself, so she is either not married or is divorced. If the woman had been ritually unclean for twelve years she would hardly have made a suitable bride—especially for God.
In another sense Israel has been like a little girl growing up for twelve years. She is God’s betrothed. Now, though she is on the verge of maturity and soon will be able to marry, she has been sentenced to death. For the Essenes, according to a scroll fragment, a betrothed girl who committed adultery had committed a capital crime. Israel had committed adultery because she had allowed herself to be abducted and ravished by the Romans. For that she should die but Jesus intended to save her from death so that the intended marriage could go ahead.
Jesus reassures his followers that she is not dead but only sleeping and tells her to rise using the expression, “Talitha cumi, Maiden arise”, a possible pun on words like, “lambs rise up” or “poor ones rise up”, implying an insurrection. The audience are amazed in just the sense that they were amazed in other parts of the gospel—Jesus was boldly declaring UDI. Finally he tells them to be discreet and not to tell anyone, for obvious reasons. Jesus could not have even imagined that he would be able to keep quiet the miracle of bringing a physically dead person to life. The correct interpretation makes it possible and necessary.
In both of these plainly equivalent metaphors, Israel is a polluted woman unsuitable as God’s bride, just as she is in the story of Joseph and Aseneth, which draws upon the same tradition. In that story the polluted bride also becomes cure or purified, but there her problem is apostasy—she has taken to foreign gods raher than foreign rule.
There is yet more to the raising of the young girl. The clue here is that Jesus takes with him the three priests in the leadership of the Nazarenes, Peter, James and John. They always accompany Jesus on solemn occasions, like the transfiguration and the expected miracle in Gethsemene. The raising of the girl is therefore actually a Nazarene ritual, an acted parable. Jesus, with his high priests, ritually raises Israel from her death, with the slogan or war cry, Talitha Cumi. The ruler of the synagogue would have been a mistranslation of the guardian of the congregation or assembly, an Essene camp rather than the synagogue—the Hebrew can be translated as either according to context. The name of the guardian, Jair, means God’s enlightened.
The evangelist adds that the maiden should be given something to eat, seemingly to add realism to his rewriting of the ritual as a miracle, but it is that part of the ritual when the Nazarenes were given a morsel of the holy bread of life. In other words, the Essene messianic meal concluded the ceremony, but the gospel writer cannot say so because he is reserving the institution of the Eucharist for the last supper, later in the narrative.
This explanation of the interval of twelve years would put the activity of Jesus at the time that Caiaphas was appointed High Priest (18 AD). Pilate might also have been appointed prefect at about this time and not eight years later as Josephus appears to write in Antiquities of the Jews. It is possible that the two intervals that Josephus mentions that provide our only information about the extent of Pilate’s prefecture have been altered, a simple forgery.
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Moses and Exodus
