The healing of the paralytic, Mark 2:5-7

Sources

• Mark 2:5-7, NASB. (opens in a new tab)

  Mark 2:5-7, NASB.

Objections & responses

“Your sins are forgiven” is in the passive voice, which in Jewish idiom means God has forgiven them. Priests declared forgiveness after sacrifices. How is this a claim to be God?

The divine passive is a real feature of Jewish speech, and if Jesus had stopped there the objection would be strong. The scribes, who knew the idiom, did not hear it that way. They heard blasphemy, because forgiveness was being pronounced without sacrifice, without the temple, and on Jesus’s own initiative. Jesus then heals the man so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, which claims the authority for himself rather than deflecting to God. A Qumran text (the Prayer of Nabonidus) has a Jewish exorcist forgive a king’s sins, so the category of a human agent of forgiveness existed; what is striking is that the scribes in Mark did not place Jesus in it.

In Matthew’s version the crowd glorifies God “who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9:8). Doesn’t Matthew himself read this as delegated authority, not divine identity?

This is the best text for the agency reading. Matthew 9:8 records the crowd’s reaction, and crowds in the Gospels regularly misunderstand; Matthew does not endorse their inference. But grant that Matthew allows the delegated reading. It still leaves the scribes’ own reasoning, who can forgive sins but God alone, unanswered except by a demonstration. Jesus does not say God has authorized me to announce forgiveness; he says the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, and proves it. Whether that authority is delegated or intrinsic is what the rest of the New Testament evidence is meant to settle, and this scene is one strand of it, not a proof on its own.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• Jesus forgives sins on his own authority, which his hearers recognized as something only God could do.