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for execution. Mark simply notes ‘they crucified him’ (Mark 15.24a), leaving all the pain and anguish suffered by the crucified victim to the imagination and memory of Mark’s audience. They would be well familiar with Rome’s crucifixion method. It is the next part of Mark’s statement that reminds Gospel auditors of the presumed nakedness of Jesus in this most humiliating moment and central story of the whole Gospel. The soldiers ‘divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take’ (Mark 15.24b–c).

Mark presumes Jesus’ nakedness, as do the Gospel auditors. It is a high point of Mark’s story and a low point of humiliation and sexual shaming of the evangelist’s central figure. In this context Jesus dies alone, misunderstood and experiencing a sense of divine abandonment, though retaining his faith in his God whom, despite everything, he names ‘My God’ (Mark 15.34). The centurion’s final words sum up the scene. They question the veracity of the one declared as God’s Son: ‘In truth, was this man God’s Son?’ (Mark 15.39). Even at the moment of death, Jesus’ identity remains obscured and undeclared.21 His humiliation continues.

      Much could be written about the evangelist’s purpose in presenting such a Christological portrait – of a sexually abused, solitary and misunderstood figure, crying out to his God to comfort him. Perhaps it can be briefly stated, as mentioned earlier, that this speaks into the realia of Mark’s audience: their own experience of abuse, maltreatment, rejection, loneliness and isolation in a Roman urban context of the 70s CE. The apparent silence of God in a time when some might have experienced violent sexual abuse warranted such a portrait.

      Luke’s Gospel

Living a generation after Mark and working initially with Mark’s narrative, the evangelist of Luke’s Gospel offers an altered Christological portrait. The purpose, similar to that of Mark, was to speak into the new realia of Luke’s Greco-Roman context experienced by a culturally diverse household of Jesus followers, located in a different time and place.22 Luke adds Jesus’ birth story to Mark’s beginning, redacts central narrative stories of Jesus’ healing activity, and develops on his teaching, especially in a ‘Sermon on the Plain’ (Luke 6.20–49). Luke also expands the centre of Mark’s Gospel with ten chapters of teaching (Luke 9.51—19.27) as Jesus and his disciples journey towards Jerusalem, to his passion and death. Martin Kähler’s statement that the Gospels are ‘passion narratives with a lengthy introduction’ is as pertinent to Luke as much as to Mark.23

      Luke’s ‘lengthy introduction’ presents Jesus as the revealer of God’s reign in word and deed. He heals, speaks and teaches in a more exalted manner than in Mark’s Gospel. Luke presents an elevated or heightened Christology. Rather than Jesus’ first words that recognize the closeness of God’s reign and invite disciples to ‘repent’, as in Mark 1.5, Luke has a 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple instructing its very teachers (Luke 2.46). In response to his parents’ dilemma as they search for him, Jesus speaks for the first time in Luke’s Gospel: ‘Did you not know that I must be in the things of my Father?’ (Luke 2.49b, author’s translation).

How interpreters understand the ‘things’ of my Father varies, from ‘the house’ (NRSV) to ‘the affairs’ (NKJV) to ‘matters’.24 Whatever ‘the things’ might mean, Luke portrays the young Jesus with a deep abiding relationship to his God that expresses itself early in his life. Luke’s is a very mature Jesus, even though the evangelist states later that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature (Luke 2.40, 52).

      The ‘infants’ in Luke’s Gospel

      Luke’s Christological portrait of Jesus as a child sheds light on the evangelist’s alteration to Mark’s equivalent scene in which people bring children to Jesus for him to touch (Luke 18.15–17). There are two noteworthy features to Luke’s episode.

First, in Luke, those brought to Jesus are called brephos, a change from Mark’s paidion. It is Luke’s favoured term.25 Brephos refers to an infant, even a child before birth, and therefore a creature significantly much younger and physically more immature and fragile than Mark’s paidion.26 The political and cultural status of the brephos deepens the fragility and social exclusion of the infant implied in Mark’s paidion. Jesus’ attitude to them in Luke would highlight his compassion and outreach to the most insignificant of society – a theme consistent throughout the Gospel.

      The second feature in Luke’s story is the response of the disciples to these infants. If there is any ambiguity in Mark, Luke retains Mark’s ‘rebuke’ language, but it is solely directed to those bringing the brephos to Jesus. Jesus is not indignant at his disciples, as in Mark, but simply instructs with the same teaching found in Mark, reverting to the language of paidion: ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child (paidion) will never enter it’ (Luke 18.17). Luke’s Jesus has no need to repeat this teaching. His disciples get it. They do not act with the same intense aggression as in Mark. Overall, Luke presents Jesus as welcoming the more socially fragile of society and the disciples as more receptive to those coming to Jesus. In a sense, Luke’s ‘cover-up’ of Mark begins here.

      The conviction of Jesus’ communion with God articulated in Jesus’ earliest boyhood years is repeated in his first words expressed as an adult. In his threefold temptation (Luke 4.1–13), Jesus counters Satan’s refrain (‘If you are God’s son’) testing Jesus’ fidelity to God with words drawn from Deuteronomy (Deut. 8.3; 6.13, 16; 10.20). Jesus’ communion with his God is solid and unwavering.

      The next words of Luke’s Jesus that follow are his programmatic declaration in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4.16–22). This outlines for Gospel auditors how his mission will unfold in the rest of the Gospel. Drawing on Isaiah, Jesus declares that he has come to bring release, healing and empowerment to the oppressed, captives and sightless. His mission is to reveal a God of hospitality to all who experience social and economic rejection. This insight lays out the primary criterion for a disciple that follows on from Jesus’ mission: disciples are invited to be witnesses of God’s hospitality and to enact it.

What for Mark is metanoia becomes for Luke hospitality.27 This expresses the nature of the God to whom Jesus witnesses as well as the foundational characteristic of the Lucan household. We have already seen something of this in Luke’s scene of Jesus welcoming the brephos. In a Greco-Roman world structured along hierarchical lines of economic and political convenience, a hospitable household characterized by friendship transcended socially defined boundaries. To outsiders, such a household could be interpreted as subversive. Luke’s agenda is to appeal to the wealthy members of the Jesus movement, a theme that suffuses the Gospel.28 The evangelist’s appeal shapes the Gospel’s elevated Christology and Jesus’ teaching on wealth and material ascetism. This agenda also explains the changed perspectives from Mark found in the Gospel as Luke’s construction of the Gospel’s portrait of Jesus emphasizes his dignity, cultural elegance and amicability. This further emerges in his interaction with his opponents.

      Jesus’ interchange with his opponents

Luke’s Jesus is incontestably without peer. This Christology appears in episodes in Luke where Jesus contests the opposition he experiences. The evangelist draws on and reshapes Mark’s equivalent scenes.29 A closer examination of these reveals Luke’s tendency to tone down the challenge–riposte cyclical strategy of agonistic contestation from the Gospel’s Marcan source. Three examples illustrate this.

First, when Jesus reads and interprets Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue to establish Luke’s Christology for the rest of the

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