Mark’s Emphasis On Jesus’s Teaching, Part 2: Eschatological Significance

By Dane C. Ortlund

[Dane C. Ortlund is Executive Vice President of Bible Publishing, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois.

This is the second article in a two-part series on the eschatological significance of teaching in Mark’s Gospel.]

Abstract

Scholars increasingly understand Mark to present Jesus as the bringer of the New Age. Mark’s emphasis on Jesus’s teaching, surveyed in Part 1 of this article, contributes to this eschatological atmosphere. The Elijah theme in Mark further underscores the eschatological import of Jesus’s teaching.

* * *

The first part of this study looked at texts throughout the Gospel of Mark that emphasize Jesus’s teaching or words.[1] It also considered three themes scattered throughout Mark that reinforce Mark’s focus on the didactic: the deafness/hearing motif, Jesus’s title of “Teacher,” and the repeated saying “Truly, I say to you.” That survey drew attention to the importance of Jesus’s teaching and words and, closely tied to this, his instructions about revealing his identity.

One could follow the implications of this survey in several directions, such as the relationship between Jesus’s words and the creative and redemptive words of Yahweh in the Old Testament, or the proper focus of the church seeking to serve others in word and deed. This article takes the centrality of Jesus’s words in Mark and reflects on its eschatological significance. “Eschatological” here refers to inaugurated eschatology, the launching through Christ of all that the Old Testament anticipated. The latter days have begun and will be consummated in the future. Thus “eschatological” in this article refers to the cluster of events associated with Christ’s first coming.

The few scholars who note the importance of the didactic to Mark’s Gospel do not consider the implications for Markan inaugurated eschatology.[2] Meye even distances the didactic theme in Mark from the eschatological element.[3] But the two motifs are not in tension; indeed, each reinforces the other. Other scholars have at times presented Jesus as either an eschatological preacher or an ethical teacher.[4] But this can easily be a false disjunction. In Mark, Jesus’s teaching supports his work in ushering in the eschaton.

This article considers the eschatological significance of the didactic concern in Mark in two steps. First, what is the eschatological significance of Jesus assuming the role of teacher? Second, why is Elijah given such prominence in Mark, and how might the Elijah theme fill out the eschatological import of Jesus’s words in Mark?

Eschatological Significance Of Jesus’s Teaching In Mark

The Old Testament background to certain texts in Mark underscores the eschatological significance of Jesus’s teaching and words.[5] The New Age that the Old Testament writers longed for[6] included many elements: the flow of the Gentiles to Zion, the forgiveness of sins, the return from exile, the coming of Messiah, the restoration of Israel, the securing of the land, and so on. One less-noted element is the restoration of universal knowledge of God through the climactic fulfillment of the teaching ministry. Thus Jeremiah says, “No longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord” (Jer. 31:34). In the New Age such teaching will reach its decisive fulfillment and perfection.[7]

The Old Testament roots of Jesus as teacher are seen primarily in the office of prophet, understood both narrowly (through the formal prophetic office of, say, an Isaiah) as well as more generically (as through Moses).[8] God communicated to his people through human mouthpieces. God told Moses to go to Pharaoh, assuring him, “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say” (Exod. 4:12). God said to Jeremiah, “I have put my words in your mouth” (Jer. 1:9). Ezekiel was told by God, “You must speak my words to them” (Ezek. 2:7). Throughout the Old Testament, so often that we easily cease to notice it, prophecy is introduced by the words “Thus says the Lord.”

At times, to be sure, God communicates through direct actions, such as sending fire on Elijah’s altar at Carmel (1 Kings 18:38-39) or appearing to Isaiah in the temple (Isa. 6:1). At other times God has his prophets perform deeds—Isaiah walked naked for three years as a sign against Egypt (Isa. 20:3), and Ezekiel lay on his side for 390 days to symbolize Israel’s punishment (Ezek. 4:4). Yet never is God introduced with “Thus does the Lord.” God is a speaking God. He even spoke creation into existence. And his speaking activity is extended through his prophets. Thus teaching and prophesying are, in the purest sense, theological.

Yet we must speak not only of the Old Testament office of prophet generally but also of the true and final prophet who was to come. The key Old Testament text along these lines is from Deuteronomy 18:

The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, “Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.” And the Lord said to me, “They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die” (Deut. 18:15-20).

God not only speaks through numerous chosen human vessels but will raise up a final prophet—a prophet to recapitulate and culminate and conclude all prophecy.

We know the apostles were sensitive to Deuteronomy 18 as a key christological text because of Acts 3. Here Peter—who is the primary apostolic influence behind Mark’s Gospel[9]—explicitly identifies Jesus as the fulfillment of this promise to raise up a Moses-like prophet.

“But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days” (Acts 3:18-24).

The ministry of this final prophet is to “speak to them all that I command him”; the people’s response is to “listen” to him. As the previous article showed, this is how Mark presents Jesus throughout his Gospel.[10] Peter sandwiches the quote from Deuteronomy 18 between two references to the prophetic hope for eschatological fulfillment—“the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of the holy prophets long ago” (Acts 3:21) and “all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days” (v. 24). Thus Peter views the promise of Deuteronomy 18 as summing up the hope for a final Prophet who will speak the word of God.

It is initially plausible, then, that in his emphasis on Jesus’s words Mark is casting Jesus as the true and final Prophet-Teacher.[11] A handful of the texts adduced in the previous article point in this direction.

Mark 1:14 speaks of Jesus launching his ministry by preaching the kingdom of God. Isaiah longed that God “would rend the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1) instead of hardening the people’s hearts (63:17). This is how Mark describes the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry—the heavens are “torn open” (Mark 1:10), and God comes down to confront a people of hard hearts (3:5; 10:5).[12] Mark draws on Isaiah 64 to signal that Jesus is the agent of God’s eschatological reign. And while Jesus effects this new age through his death and resurrection, he communicates this new age through his words. “Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying . . . ” (Mark 1:14-15).

Later in Mark 1 Jesus’s teaching is called “a new teaching [διδαχὴ καινή]” (1:27). This is the language of inaugurated eschatology. The prophetic tradition has reached its zenith. Hence Jesus’s unique, astonishing authority, an authority far surpassing that of the scribes. The scribes presented what the Scriptures taught. Jesus presented himself as what the Scriptures taught (e.g., Mark 14:27).[13] This is not yet clear in Mark 1; throughout his Gospel Mark prefers to be implicit and veiled, wanting the reader to have “ears to hear” and to read between the lines (4:9, 23; 8:18). But by the end of the Gospel it becomes clear that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament messianic hope.

Exodus 23, from which Mark draws part of his opening quotation (Mark 1:2), speaks not only of God sending his angel to prepare his people’s way (Exod. 23:20) but also of the need for his people to “pay careful attention to him and obey his voice” (v. 21) and to “carefully obey his voice and do all that I say” (v. 22).[14] Thus the context of the Old Testament texts that Mark stitches together at the very outset of his Gospel alerts the reader that Jesus is the one whose voice must be heeded.[15]

Mark 6 is relevant, too. “He saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd [ἦσαν ὡς πρόβατα μὴ ἔχοντα ποιμένα]. And he began to teach them many things” (v. 34). Mark presents Jesus as the shepherd of Numbers 27 and Ezekiel 34 who was to tend to God’s people and restore them in the latter days.[16] Not only was Jesus’s initial response in compassion to teach the people, but he taught them as the eschatological Davidic Shepherd. Numbers 27 provides almost identical wording to that of Mark 6:34. Joshua was to lead the people so that they would not be “as sheep without a shepherd [ὡσεὶ πρόβατα οἷς οὐκ ἔστιν ποιμήν, LXX]” (Num. 27:17), and this shepherding was to be invested with Moses’s authority, “that all the congregation of the people of Israel may obey” (v. 20). In other words, Joshua was to teach. Mark 6:34 underscores that Jesus’s teaching is a sign of the dawning New Age. He is the final Moses, the final Joshua, the final Shepherd, who will tend his sheep.[17]

This finality of Jesus’s role in redemptive history comes through when Jesus says, “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). Jesus speaks here of his own coming at the end of all things, but he connects that event with one’s relationship to Jesus and his teaching now. This implies that there will be no other prophet after Jesus. He is the final Teacher.

Finally, we note two threads running through the account of the transfiguration in Mark 9—the eschatologically charged atmosphere, and the significance of the teaching/prophetic office. This event is filled with eschatological import.[18] It takes place “on a high mountain” (9:2), a place of God’s unique presence, revelation, and action throughout Scripture.[19] It was on a mountain that Moses received God’s definitive teaching, the Ten Commandments. Moreover, as Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus “a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud” (v. 7). The cloud signals the eschatological significance of this event.[20] In the book of Exodus, the Lord led his people by a pillar of cloud (13:21-22; cf. 1 Cor. 10:1-2), spoke to his people by appearing in a cloud (Exod. 16:9-10), gave his people the Ten Commandments amid a cloud (19:9, 16; 24:15-18), descended in a cloud when Moses entered the tent to speak with him (33:9; 40:34-38), and proclaimed his name in a cloud (34:5). Throughout the Bible the cloud signifies God’s glory-filled presence. In the transfiguration in Mark 9 Jesus appears with a cloud because he is the climactic display of the glory of God. Moreover, God comes in a cloud when he is coming to communicate to his people. This is also the case in Mark 9; the voice from the cloud says, “Listen to him” (v. 7). Shining radiantly in Mark 9, just as Moses had (Exod. 34:30), Jesus is the final “prophet like Moses” spoken of in Deuteronomy 18:15-18 to whom people must listen, as the cloud-voice exhorts. At the very end of his earthly ministry Jesus would also be taken up in a cloud (Acts 1:9). Jesus and the cloud are then explicitly brought together in the final judgment in John’s vision, drawing on Daniel 7, of “a white cloud, and seated on the cloud one like a son of man” (Rev. 14:14). Thus the cloud in Mark 9 fits into a whole-Bible trajectory that is given climactic expression in Jesus.

Further, Moses and Elijah, representing the Law and the Prophets, respectively, appear with Jesus in Mark 9, further underscoring the significance of Jesus as final Teacher. The didactic significance of Elijah and Moses is highlighted by rabbinic reflection on Malachi 4:4-6, which mentions both Moses and Elijah and prophesies the future coming of Elijah. “Rabbi Joshua said, ‘I have received a tradition from Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai, who heard from his teacher, and his teacher from his teacher, as a Halakah given to Moses from Sinai, that Elijah will not come to declare unclean or clean, to remove afar or bring nigh, but to remove afar those [families] that were brought nigh by violence.’ ”[21] The association between faithfully transmitted teaching and the ministries of Moses and Elijah is here evident.

Jesus As Final Elijah

The dominance of the Elijah motif in Mark adds detail to the picture of Jesus as eschatological Teacher.[22] Elijah is the prophet par excellence among the Former Prophets and the most prominent divine mouthpiece between Moses and Isaiah. Elijah is proportionately more dominant in Mark than the other Gospels, if not by much (there are nine references in Mark, by far the shortest Gospel, compared with nine in Matthew, eight in Luke, and two in John). What is striking, however, is not the frequency of Elijah’s mentions but his eschatological significance.

Elijah is mentioned in four different contexts in Mark. The first two (6:15; 8:28) concern the identity of Jesus in light of his supernatural ministry. In Mark 6, Herod hears about Jesus: “Some said, ‘John the Baptist has been raised from the dead. That is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘He is Elijah.’ And others said, ‘He is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old’ ” (vv. 14-15). People are assuming that one of the great leaders of Israel has come back. Jesus’s miraculous powers are taken to signify the dawning of the end; the only question is which of Israel’s past prophets has been “raised.”[23]

In chapter 8, Jesus has just performed the two-stage healing of the blind man at Bethsaida whose initially faulty vision parallels that of Jesus’s disciples. The disciples do not yet see that Jesus, who has been generally well received up to this point in Mark 8, will suffer and die. Thus Jesus is about to move into a cycle of repeated teachings, beginning in 8:31, that he will die and rise again. The bridge between this two-stage healing and the first announcement of Jesus’s imminent suffering and death is Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah:

And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. And on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ” (8:27-29).

Once again the three options put forward for Jesus’s identity are John the Baptist, Elijah, and “one of the prophets.” This time, however, a fourth option is on the table: “You are the Christ.”

Thus far one might conclude that Jesus is not John the Baptist resurrected, or Elijah, or one of the prophets; these are simply mistaken identifications. Instead he is the long-awaited Messiah, the one “whose coming marks the fulfillment of the divine promise and the realization of Israel’s hopes.”[24] At a historical level this is of course true. But as we consider the Markan references to Elijah we bear in mind that Elijah is not only the greatest of the Former Prophets but also one the Latter Prophets anticipate will come again. As the New Testament opens, in other words, Elijah is a figure not only of the past but also of the future. This is clearest at the very close of the Christian Old Testament, in Malachi 4.[25] After an injunction to remember “the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him” (v. 4), we read: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter desolation” (vv. 5-6). And with that Malachi’s prophecy ends. In Mark repeated references to Elijah lead up to the great day of judgment, the cross, the day of the Lord, the “utter desolation.”[26] Jesus is not literally Elijah redivivus,[27] but Jesus does sum up Elijah and fulfill the hope for an Elijah to come, to teach the people, and to turn the hearts of the children and of the fathers.[28] This comes out more clearly in the next two passages that mention Elijah.

We have already explored the biblical-theological significance of the cloud at the transfiguration in Mark 9, underscoring Jesus as eschatological teacher. We now note one further point concerning the Elijah theme in Mark.

Elijah is given particular prominence in the transfiguration event. This episode occurs in two parts: the events on the mountain, and the conversation coming down from the mountain. While Moses and Elijah figure equally in the first part, only Elijah is the subject of conversation as Jesus, Peter, James, and John walk down the mountain in the second part of the pericope.[29]

And they asked him, “Why do the scribes say that first Elijah must come?” And he said to them, “Elijah does come first to restore all things. And how is it written of the Son of Man that he should suffer many things and be treated with contempt? But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written of him” (9:11-13).

Here the hope of a future Elijah is clear. More than this, Jesus appears to identify himself as this Elijah. At one level Mark’s Gospel presents John the Baptist as an Elijah figure, as seen for instance in the leather belt that both wear (2 Kings 1:8; Mark 1:6). Yet from a deeper perspective Jesus is Elijah who was to come, as evidenced here in the merging of Elijah with the Son of Man. John the Baptist did not “restore all things”; as seen in Acts 3, Jesus is the restorer of all things (ἀποκαθιστάνω is used in Mark 9:12; ἀποκατάστασις in Acts 3:21). The Baptist came to prepare the way for the one who would restore all things. We see Jesus wrestling into his disciples’ consciousness two apparently conflicting realities: the coming of the final Elijah and the suffering of the Son of Man, the glorious figure of Daniel 7. Elijah has come—but not in the way the disciples expect. He has come to suffer. This reading fits with Mark 8-10, as these three chapters form the hinge on which the entire Gospel swivels from Jesus’s widely adulated ministry to the announcement that he will suffer and die (8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34).

The final mention of Elijah in Mark comes in the midst of this very suffering. Dying on the cross, Jesus cries out with the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34). Mark records:

And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down” (15:35-36).

On the one hand, the people mishear Jesus, since the Aramaic Eloi (“My God”) would have sounded like “Elijah.”[30] On the other hand, it is unlikely that Mark includes these sentences simply to note a misunderstanding, especially in light of the significance of Elijah to Mark more broadly. Mark has a quietly deliberate way of drawing on Old Testament themes to reinforce Jesus’s identity and eschatological significance.[31] Here at the moment of “utter desolation” (Mal. 4:6) the Elijah to come is himself drinking down the “day of the Lord” (Mal. 4:5). The true Israelite is absorbing Israel’s judgment. This is the literary crescendo toward which the whole Gospel has been inexorably hurtling.[32] With understated irony Mark notes that Jesus is not “calling Elijah” (Mark 15:35). Jesus is instead the Prophet whom Elijah’s own prophetic ministry prefigured. He did not need Elijah to “take him down” (15:36). Jesus came to “give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45), including Elijah. Sirach reflects on Elijah in light of Malachi 4: “At the appointed time, it is written, you are destined to calm the wrath of God before it breaks out in fury, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and to restore the tribes of Jacob” (Sir. 48:10). This is precisely what Jesus, the final Elijah, did on the cross.

Jesus is the great eschatological Prophet-Teacher of whom every preceding prophet is a shadow and a forerunner, from Elijah right up to John the Baptist, as the latter himself acknowledges (1:4-8). Keener sees Jesus’s miracles as evidence that he is fulfilling the roles of the final Moses and the final Elijah who were to come at the end of the age.[33] While Keener is correct, Jesus’s role as Israel’s teacher, for Mark, most decisively paints Jesus as the recapitulation of Moses and especially Elijah.

Conclusion And Application

After observing Mark’s recurring emphasis on Jesus’s teaching and words, especially those examples noted in the previous article, this article has considered the implications of this emphasis for understanding Markan inaugurated eschatology. Mark’s emphasis on the didactic underscores the eschatological atmosphere of this Gospel, casting Jesus as the final Prophet-Teacher who was to come. Mark’s focus on the didactic not only draws attention to Jesus’s ethical teaching but highlights Jesus as the launcher of the new age. Elijah, peerless among the ancient prophet-teachers of Israel, is recapitulated in Jesus; his prophetic office comes into full bloom. This picture of Jesus and his teaching works together with Mark’s portrayal of Jesus’s miracles, death, and resurrection to present Jesus as the bringer of the New Age.

This study carries rich implications for the Christian life. Not only must we “listen to him” (Mark 9:7) as we follow Jesus, but we do so because he is the Teacher of teachers, the Prophet of prophets. He ushered in the age in which we now live. When we listen to Jesus, we are listening to the final Voice, the giver of unerring truth who came at the height of human history to bring in the latter days. He is the truth (cf. John 14:6). Heeding his teaching, we flourish as the men and women God made us to be. This does not mean we can obey Jesus’s teaching out of our own resources. Not a step of obedience can be taken apart from God’s empowering grace. We first look to Jesus as Savior before we seek to carry out his teaching. Yet even his teaching often points to his own death and resurrection. Jesus taught that he came to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). This death and resurrection launched the New Age; his teaching is the fitting didactic accompaniment.

Notes

1. Dane C. Ortlund, “Mark’s Emphasis on Jesus’s Teaching, Part 1: A Neglected Motif,” Bibliotheca Sacra 174 (July–September 2017): 327-42.
2. Robert P. Meye, Jesus and the Twelve: Discipleship and Revelation in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968); R. T. France, “Mark and the Teaching of Jesus,” in Gospel Perspectives, vol. 1, ed. R. T. France and David Wenham (Sheffield: JSOT, 1980), 101-36.
3. Meye, Jesus and the Twelve, 17.
4. For example, C. H. Dodd argued that Jesus was an eschatological preacher and not a moral teacher (The Parables of the Kingdom [London: Nisbet, 1935]).
5. Mark’s use of the Old Testament has been underappreciated in recent generations of Markan scholarship, as represented by Alfred Suhl, who argued that Mark did not self-consciously place Jesus in a redemptive-historical trajectory begun in the Old Testament and fulfilled in him (Die Funktion der alttestamentliche Zitate und Anspielungen im Markusevangelium [Gütersloh: Mohn, 1965]). For a survey of the use of the Old Testament in Mark, see Holly J. Carey, Jesus’ Cry from the Cross: Towards a First-Century Understanding of the Intertextual Relationship between Psalm 22 and the Narrative of Mark’s Gospel, Library of New Testament Studies 398 (London: T. & T. Clark, 2009), 70-93.
6. Graeme Goldsworthy casts the prophets in roughly the second half of the Old Testament as recapitulating the essential promises and hopes of the first half of the Old Testament (Graeme Goldsworthy, Christ-Centered Biblical Theology: Hermeneutical Foundations and Principles [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2012]).
7. Beale suggests the teaching mentioned in verse 34 is the key distinctive element of the new covenant as presented in Jeremiah 31:31-34 (G. K. Beale, A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011], 733-34).
8. Meye, Jesus and the Twelve, 31.
9. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 155-82.
10. Cuvillier hears echoes of Deuteronomy 18:15 in the Father’s “Listen to him” in Mark 9:7 (Elian Cuvillier, L’évangile de Marc, Bible et face [Paris: Bayard, 2002], 180).
11. “True” is used here in the Johannine sense of “the final, recapitulated instance.” See Richard Bauckham, Gospel of Glory: Major Themes in Johannine Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015), 74-75.
12. Cf. Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 16-18. Mark 15:38, the tearing of the temple veil, is the only other place in Mark where σχίζω is used. Both uses of the word occur in events signaling the inbreaking of the eschaton.
13. Cuvillier, L’évangile de Marc, 34.
14. On Exodus 23 in Mark 1:2 see Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 22-23, though Hays does not draw attention to the theme of words/teaching. On the use of the Old Testament in the opening to Mark’s Gospel, see Rikki E. Watts, Isaiah’s New Exodus in Mark (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 53-90.
15. On understanding the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament by recourse to the Old Testament context, see C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Substructure of New Testament Theology (London: Nisbet, 1961); G. K. Beale, “Positive Answer to the Question Did Jesus and His Followers Preach the Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts?,” in The Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? Essays on the Use of the Old Testament in the New, ed. G. K. Beale (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 387-404; and Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 11.
16. Young S. Chae, Jesus as the Eschatological Davidic Shepherd: Studies in the Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and in the Gospel of Matthew, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament II 216 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006).
17. Simon Légasse sees Mark presenting Jesus as “le vrai berger” (“the true shepherd”) but “non spécialement nouveau Moïse” (“not especially the new Moses”) of Deuteronomy 18:15-18 (L’évangile de Marc, 2 vols., Lectio divina commentaires 5 [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1997], 395). It is probably not fitting to disentangle these two roles given the constellation of texts behind Mark 6:34 (Num. 27 and Ezek. 34), which Légasse acknowledges (pp. 394-95). Légasse does, however, see Deuteronomy 18:15-18 as the background to the voice from heaven in Mark 9:7, “Listen to him” (p. 531).
18. See William J. Dumbrell, The Search for Order: Biblical Eschatology in Focus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2001), 200-1, whose entire section on Markan eschatology (pp. 181-206) complements the present article.
19. Bärbel Bosenius, Der literarische Raum des Markusevangeliums, Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament 140 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 2014), 57-68.
20. See the discussions of R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Text Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 354-55; and James R. Edwards, The Gospel according to Mark, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 267.
21. m. ‘Eduyoth 8:7. The text goes on to quote Malachi 4:5-6. See discussion of this rabbinic text in Simon J. Gathercole, The Preexistent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 137-38
22. 2On Elijah as eschatological restorer (though not specifically teacher) of Israel, see Steven M. Bryan, Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgement and Restoration, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 117 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88-110.
23. It may be that people were simply describing Jesus as in continuity with the prophets of old, rather than saying that these prophets had in fact been raised from the dead (France, Gospel of Mark, 253; Robert H. Stein, Mark, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008], 300-2).
24. William L. Lane, The Gospel of Mark, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 291.
25. The Hebrew Scriptures conclude with Chronicles, of course, but one should not downplay the reasons for the Christian arrangement of the Old Testament. (Elijah also appears in the final book of the Hebrew Scriptures, 2 Chronicles, though not in the final few sentences but rather at 21:12.)
26. Hays speaks of “the day of the Lord” as a matter of judgment on Israel’s enemies but not a matter of the end of the world (Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 90-91), but these are not mutually exclusive. The day of the Lord in the prophetic literature is a matter of judgment as well as the end of the present world order and the ushering in of God’s reign. Jesus’s crucifixion accomplishes both.
27. This is one of the key problems of Alfred Suhl’s work (Die Funktion der alttestamentlichen Zitate und Anspielungen im Markusevangelium [Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohr, 1965]). He views the notion of promise-fulfillment in Mark only in terms of one-to-one correspondence, whereas Mark’s understanding of Jesus’s fulfillment role is richer and more multidimensional, seeing Jesus as the climactic recapitulation of a figure such as Elijah. Note the way a text such as Mark 14:49 speaks of Jesus’s arrest fulfilling the Scriptures without citing a particular Old Testament text (Etienne Trocmé, L’évangile selon Saint Marc, Commentaire du Nouveau Testament 2 [Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000], 350).
28. Edwards, Gospel according to Mark, 247-48; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 41.
29. Hooker notes that in the transfiguration story in Matthew and Luke, Elijah is placed before Moses, “suggesting that Moses is playing a subsidiary role” (Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel according to Saint Mark [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991], 216).
30. E.g., Stein, Mark, 716.
31. As shown at some length in Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, 15-103.
32. Peter G. Bolt, The Cross from a Distance: Atonement in Mark’s Gospel, New Studies in Biblical Theology 18 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004).
33. Keener, Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 42.