Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

He swears those he heals
     to secrecy (Mark 1:43–45, 5:40–43, 7:32–36, 8:22–26). He veils himself in incomprehensible
     parables and goes out of his way to obscure his identity and mission from the crowds
     that gather around him (Mark 7:24). Over and over again Jesus rebuffs, avoids, eludes,
     and sometimes downright rejects the title of messiah bestowed upon him by others.
    There is a term for this strange phenomenon, which has its origins in the gospel of
     Mark but which can be traced throughout the gospels. It is called the “messianic secret.”
    Some believe that the messianic secret is the evangelist’s own invention, that it
     is either a literary device to slowly reveal Jesus’s true identity or a clever ploy
     to emphasize just how wondrous and compelling Jesus’s messianic presence was; despite
     his many attempts to hide his identity from the crowds, it simply could not be concealed.
     “The more he ordered them [not to tell anyone about him],” Mark writes, “the more
     excessively they proclaimed it” (Mark 7:36).
    Yet that assumes a level of literary skill in the gospel of Mark for which no evidence
     exists (Mark’s gospel is written in a coarse, elementary Greek that betrays the author’s
     limited education). The notion that the messianic secret may have been Mark’s way
     of slowly revealing Jesus’s identity belies the fundamental theological assertion
     that launches the gospel in the first place: “This is the beginning of the good news
     of Jesus
the Christ
” (Mark 1:1). Regardless, even at the moment in which Jesus’s messianic identity is
     first surmised by Simon Peter in his dramatic confession outside Caesarea Philippi—indeed,
     even when his identity is spectacularly revealed by God upon the mountaintop—Jesus
     still commands his disciples to secrecy, sternly ordering them not to tell anyone
     whatPeter confessed (Mark 8:30), and forbidding the three witnesses to his transfiguration
     to utter a word about what they saw (Mark 9:9).
    It is more likely that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus,
     though it may have been embellished and reconstructed in Mark’s gospel before being
     adopted haphazardly and with obvious reservations by Matthew and Luke. That the messianic
     secret may be historical helps explain why Mark’s redactors went to such lengths to
     compensate for their predecessor’s portrayal of a messiah who seems to want nothing
     to do with the title. For example, while Mark’s account of Simon Peter’s confession
     ends with Jesus neither accepting nor rejecting the title but simply ordering the
     disciples “not to tell anyone about him,” Matthew’s account of the same story, which
     took shape twenty years later, has Jesus responding to Peter with a resounding confirmation
     of his messianic identity: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah!” Jesus exclaims.
     “Flesh and blood did not reveal this to you; it was my father in heaven who did so”
     (Matthew 16:17).
    In Mark, the miraculous moment on the mountaintop ends without comment from Jesus,
     only a firm reminder not to tell anyone what had happened. But in Matthew, the transfiguration
     ends with a lengthy discourse by Jesus in which he identifies John the Baptist as
     Elijah reborn, thereby explicitly claiming for himself, as the successor to John/Elijah,
     the mantle of the messiah (Matthew 17:9–13). And yet, despite these apologetic elaborations,
     even Matthew and Luke conclude both Peter’s confession and the transfiguration with
     strict commands by Jesus to, in Matthew’s words, “not tell anyone that
he was the messiah
” (Matthew 16:20).
    If it is true that the messianic secret can be traced to the historical Jesus, then
     it could very well be the key to unlocking, not who the early church thought Jesus
     was, but who Jesus himself thought he was. Admittedly, this is no easy task. It is
     extremely difficult, if not impossible, to rely on the gospels to access Jesus’s self-consciousness.
     As has been repeatedly noted, the gospels are notabout a man known as Jesus of Nazareth who lived two thousand years ago; they are
     about a messiah whom the gospel writers viewed as an eternal being sitting at the
     right hand of God. The firstcentury Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up
     their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about
     the nature and function of Jesus
as Christ
, not composing a historical