A salvação pela humanidade: o Jesus de Mc 8,31-33

Abstract

Salvation through humanity. With this title our research aims to approach the first presage of the passion of the Gospel of Mark and the theology of this evangelist, with the goal of encountering the salvific meaning of the imminent death of Jesus. This is because salvation in this gospel must not be understood yet as the atoning death which redeems the human beings. Mark draws out a very human Jesus who possibly had not understood his death in the way Christian theology developed it throughout the New Testament. At least Mark did not understand it as such. The biblical text needs to be understood in its historical social environment. Therefore, in this approach, in the first chapter of our research we will situate Jesus in his environment: a Jew in the first century, who lived in a period in which the Romans dominated Palestine. Thus, upon analyzing how the Romans governed we will see how this form of government becomes the mentality, even for the governed. Jesus, however, did not submit himself to it and proposed the Kingdom of God as a different way of organizing the relations and the world. Besides this, the first chapter reconstructs the environment where the Gospel of Mark was written and received, as well as delineates some of his theological lines. The second chapter will show who the Jesus of Mark 8:31-33 is – a Jesus who realizes that death is imminent as a consequence of his options for the Kingdom of God. Through the exegetical tools of the historical-critical method, we will seek out its meaning taking the following steps: translation from the Greek text, textual criticism, literary analysis, the historical context of the pericope and, finally, the analysis of the content. The third chapter intends to “join together” the parts of the mosaic constructed in the first two chapters and delineate the salvific meaning of the death of Jesus presaged in the Gospel of Mark in a general vision of the three presages of the passion. We will analyze if there is a base for sustaining a soteriology in the second Gospel and what the base is. In this sense, the expression, Son of Man, with which Jesus refers to himself in Mark, will show not only his identity, but also how Jesus assumes it in practice. Finally, we will see what type of salvation we are talking about when we deal with it in the first written Gospel. Considering his death, our research will point to why Jesus is worthy of credibility for the people who aspire to live a new life, different from that imposed by the social patterns and models which govern the mentality of the majority of people and kingdoms.