The Hallel and Authenticity (Mk 12:10-11)
The Hallel and Authenticity (Mk 12:10-11)
Against some, various factors argue strongly for the authenticity of even Jesus’ concluding reference to Ps 118:22-23 (Mk 12:10-11).18 For example, Jewish parables typically did include a scripture citation;19 moreover, the citation appears in all three Synoptics (plus Thomas);20 Jesus draws his citation from the festal liturgy; “stone” might provide a Semitic play on words here with the “son” earlier in the parable;21 “Have you not read?” is unique to Jesus in the NT;22 and the collection of stone sayings in a variety of disparate early Christian texts supports a common authoritative source for diverse early Christian groups (Acts 4:11; Rom 9:33; 1 Pet 2:6-8; cf. Lk 19:38, 40, 44).
Most important among these arguments may be dependence on the festal liturgy. These lines belong to the Hallel, a series of Psalms (Ps 113-118) sung during Passover season. A later Gentile church would not have known to add precisely this detail at precisely this time. One could object that these allusions to the Hallel were added to the passion narrative by early Jewish Christians, who probably did continue to observe the Passover (cf. Acts 20:5-6, 16). (The Hallel surfaces even in Mk 14:26, although Mark makes nothing of it.)
But the same circles of early Jewish Christians also had some reason to associate Jesus’ death with Passover (1 Cor 5:7), and, most importantly here, early Jewish Christians were also the ones with the best access to the authentic traditions. That they merely invented Jesus’ execution during the Passover week is unlikely. We know that Jesus was a Galilean executed near Jerusalem; the likeliest time to find Jesus and his Galilean followers in Jerusalem would have been precisely at one of the three major pilgrimage festivals.
We have already argued that Jesus’ parables were widely remembered. There is a logical reason for consistently associating this particular parable with the passion narrative — namely, that it occurred then. It is this parable that, in our current Gospels, comes closest to unveiling what has been called the “messianic secret.”23 That Jesus would discreetly reserve such a revelation, obscure though it remains, for a public confrontation with Jerusalem’s elite might help explain why he was not detained and executed any earlier than he was.