What Has Mark’s Christ to Do with David’s Son? A History of Interpretation

It has become something of a commonplace within recent scholarship on the Gospels to hear that Mark the evangelist is ambivalent about Davidic sonship. Yet, rarely have scholars explored the rationale underlying this ambivalence. This article probes the status quaestionis on Jesus’ Davidic status in Mark’s Gospel via a history-of-interpretation survey of the Davidssohnfrage (Mk 12.35-37). It demonstrates that, despite their varying approaches and ideological commitments, all participants in the Son-of-David debate have assumed a foundational methodological principle: one assesses Mark’s position on Davidic messiahship by isolating pericopes with the name ‘David’. This explains why the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10.46-52) has long been fixed as the de facto crux interpretum for Davidic sonship in Mark.