The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

by Marcus J. Borg

Mark does not understand the death of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin. Claims to the contrary can only point to a mistaken reading of the single passage we have just explored. How then does Mark understand Jesus’s death? As his story of Good Friday reports, he sees Jesus’s death as an execution by the authorities because of his challenge to the domination system. The decision of the temple authorities to take action against him was made after his disruptive act in the temple. These local collaborators handed him over to imperial authority, which then crucified him on a charge that was simultaneously and indissolubly political and religious: “King of the Jews.” As such, Mark understands Jesus’s death as a judgment on the authorities and the temple. The “chief priests, elders, and scribes” have killed him, just as Jesus said they would. Judgment is indicated by the fact that, as Jesus dies, darkness comes over the city and land, and the great curtain in the temple is torn in two. And a Roman centurion pronounces judgment against his own empire, which has just killed Jesus: “Truly this man—and not the emperor—is God’s Son.”