All authors employ names and titles to convey meaning in their work. The biblical writers are no exception.
I’m in the middle of a project examining the use of titles and names for Jesus in the Gospels. My first article laid out my methodology and looked at the top 10 titles of Jesus in the Gospels. I recently wrote about the titles of Jesus in Matthew, and today we turn to the Gospel of Mark.
Top 5 Titles
There are 61 titles used for Jesus in Mark, accounting for 13.8% of the titles used for Jesus in all four Gospels combined. As Mark contains 17.9% of the verses in the Gospels, we see that there are fewer titles in Mark than we might expect.
Here are the top five titles in Mark.
- Son of Man (14 times)
- teacher (12 times)
- king of the Jews (5 times)
- Christ (4 times)
- Rabbi (4 times)
The title “Lord” is missing from this list, as it is only used twice in Mark compared to 23 times in Matthew. (“Lord” is the second most-used title in Matthew.) We see “the king of the Jews” only show up toward the end of Mark; it is used three times by Pilate, once by the Roman soldiers, and once on the inscription above the cross.
Titles Used by Mark
The author of this Gospel himself used a title for Jesus five times. He called Jesus the “Son of Man” twice and referred to him as “Christ,” “Son of God,” and “Lord” one time each.
We should not skip past these references simply because they are small in number, as two of these titles occupy a key position in the book. Here is the beginning of Mark’s Gospel.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Mark 1:1)
As Peter Krol has shown in his interpretive overview of Mark, the two titles in this opening verse (“Christ” and “Son of God”) give a road map for the book. Mark aims to show his readers that Jesus is both the Christ (the Messiah) and the Son of God (the rightful king).
Titles and Mark’s Purpose
When writing about the titles of Jesus, I have emphasized that we cannot learn everything about a Gospel by looking at this small bit of linguistic accounting. And Mark’s writing provides an excellent example.
When Peter wrote about Mark for our feeding the 5000 and resurrection of Jesus series, he noted that Mark is more of a show you book than a tell you book. In other words, Mark uses narrative more than discourse to get his points across.
If this is true, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that Mark contains relatively few titles of Jesus. Many of the times when a character refers to Jesus by a title, it is in the context of a dialogue (often “Lord” in Matthew) or it precedes some extended instruction from Jesus (often “teacher” in Matthew). If Mark uses these narrative tools less frequently, then the use of titles will decrease as well.
But what about Mark’s main point? If he wanted to stress that Jesus is the king, wouldn’t we see more royal titles?
Again, Mark just doesn’t use titles very much. We have “king of the Jews” in the top five, but this is used questioningly or ironically each time.
I will write a separate post on this in the near future, but “Son of Man”—the most frequently used title in Mark—is a royal title. We often assume that “son of God” emphasizes Jesus’s divinity while “son of Man” emphasizes his humanity, but the difference is not quite this easy. Some scholars might even say that “son of Man” is the more exalted, divine title of the two.
While there are some interesting details to notice in Mark regarding the titles of Jesus, this book is a good reminder that titles were never meant to tell us everything. Names and titles are crucial observations to make when studying a passage, but we had better not stop there if we want to understand an author’s meaning!
Leave a Reply