Decoding Mark’s Messianic Secret with Georg Simmel

This article examines the messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark, considering the paradigm shift within New Testament Studies, according to which the New Testament is to be regarded as part of Second Temple Judaism’s textual corpus, while viewing it against the backdrop of the First Jewish-Roman war. It draws on Georg Simmel’s Sociology of Secrecy, which remains a cornerstone text for theorizing secrecy, and ties in with Gerd Theißen’s thirty-year-old socio-epistemic attempt at an overall interpretation of the messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark. This article shows that a (messianic) secret must be explosive, as it certainly was in the context of Josephus’s war report, and seeks to reconstruct it for the Markan text in a historically plausible way, incorporating particularly Simmel’s distinction between relative and absolute secret. An introduction (sec. 1) is followed by methodological considerations (sec. 2) and a presentation of the historical events with particular focus on the topic of secrecy (sec. 3); together, these form the basis for a systematic analysis of the Markan secret (sec. 4). The investigation is rounded off with a summary and conclusion (sec. 5).