Caesarea Philippi, the transfiguration, the title Peter used, and why Jesus told them not to repeat it
Who Do You Say That I Am?
Halfway through the first three Gospels the story turns on a question. Jesus asks his followers who people say he is, then who they say he is, and Peter answers with a title. What happens next is stranger than the answer: Jesus tells them to say nothing, and begins to speak of dying. Six days later three of them see him changed on a mountain.
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Lesson 7 of 12 · The turn
At the northern edge of the land, near a shrine to Pan and a temple to Caesar, Jesus asks his disciples who they say he is, and Peter says, you are the Christ. It is the hinge of Mark’s Gospel, placed at its exact middle: everything before has been works and crowds in Galilee, everything after is the road to Jerusalem and the cross. Matthew adds a blessing and a promise about a rock; Luke keeps it short. All three record the same odd sequel, that Jesus ordered them to tell no one, and then, for the first time, said that the Son of Man must suffer and be killed. Peter objected and was called Satan. Six days later, on a mountain, three of them saw him shining, with Moses and Elijah, and heard the voice from the Jordan say again, this is my Son, and add two words: listen to him. The title was right. What it meant was not what Peter thought.
The question
Mark tells it in four verses, and the fourth is the surprise.
Jesus went out, with his disciples, into the villages of Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” They told him, “John the Baptizer, and others say Elijah, but others, one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” He commanded them that they should tell no one about him. — Mark 8:27–30 · WEB
Read the comment on Who Do You Say That I Am?
On the way he asked his disciples, who do men say that I am? John the Baptizer, Elijah, one of the prophets. But who do you say that I am? Peter answered, you are the Christ. He commanded them that they should tell no one about him. The crowd’s answers are all honorable and all wrong: a prophet, a forerunner, a returned figure from the past. Peter’s answer is the title, and the response to it is a gag order. Matthew has Jesus bless Peter for it, and say that flesh and blood did not reveal it (Matthew 16:16-17); Luke has simply "the Christ of God" (Luke 9:20). All three have the silence.
Χριστός Christós G5547
from χρίω; anointed, i.e. the Messiah, an epithet of Jesus:--Christ.
Anointed; the Greek translation of the Hebrew mashiach, Messiah. In the Old Testament kings and priests were anointed with oil, and the anointed one, absolutely, came to mean the king from David’s line who would restore Israel. By the first century the word carried a program: victory, the end of foreign rule, a purified temple. That is what Peter meant by it, and it is why the next thing Jesus says, that the Son of Man must suffer and be killed, was intolerable to him. The word became a name, Jesus Christ, so early that Paul uses it as one; the Gospels still show it as a title, said by a fisherman who got the word right and its meaning wrong.
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Tell no one
The command to silence runs through Mark, and readers have argued about it for a century.
Jesus silences demons who name him, tells the healed to say nothing, and here forbids the disciples to repeat the title. The old explanation is that the title was politically loaded: a man announced as Messiah in Galilee would have drawn a crowd looking for a war, and Rome would have ended it. A second explanation is in the text itself: the title could not be understood until the cross had redefined it, so it was not to be said until then. A third, from a German scholar in 1901, held that Mark invented the silences to explain why Jesus had not been called Messiah in his lifetime; that reading has lost ground, but a reader will meet it. The Gospel gives the second: from this verse on, every time the title is used, suffering is mentioned in the same breath.
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The mountain
Six days after the question, in all three accounts, comes the answer from a different source.
A cloud came, overshadowing them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” — Mark 9:7 · WEB
Read the comment on Transfigured, and a Faithless Generation
A cloud came, overshadowing them, and a voice came out of the cloud, this is my beloved Son. Listen to him. Peter, James and John have seen his clothes turn white and Moses and Elijah talking with him, the law and the prophets standing beside the one they wrote about, and Peter has offered to build three shelters, which Mark says he said because he did not know what to say. The voice repeats the words of the Jordan, now to the disciples rather than to Jesus, and adds a command. What they are to listen to is what he has just begun saying: that he will suffer. The transfiguration is not a reward for Peter’s confession. It is the confession corrected by heaven, and the correction is "listen."
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The same question in John
“Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 16:16–17 · WEB
You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you: Matthew’s fuller form, with the second title added and the blessing that only he records.
“Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”” John 6:68–69 · WEB
Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God: John’s version of Peter’s confession, at Capernaum after the bread of life, when many had left.
“She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, he who comes into the world.”” John 11:27 · WEB
Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, he who comes into the world: the same confession in John, made by Martha at a graveside, before Lazarus is raised.
“He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Mark 8:31 · WEB
The Son of Man must suffer many things, be rejected, be killed, and after three days rise again: the sentence that follows the confession in all three synoptics, and the first time it is said.
John has no Caesarea Philippi and no transfiguration. He has Peter say the words after a sermon that emptied the room, and Martha say them at a tomb, and in both places the confession is made by someone with nothing else left to hold. That is John’s reading of what the title costs.
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What the question asks
It asks to be answered in the first person. Jesus did not ask the disciples what the consensus was; he asked them, and Mark puts the question at the center of his book so that the reader reaches it having seen everything Peter had seen. The answer is a title, and the title was right. The rest of the Gospel is what it meant, and Peter did not know that when he said it, and neither does a reader who has only reached chapter 8.
Read Mark 8:27-38. Write down what Peter said, what Jesus said next, and what Peter did about it. Then say in one sentence what Peter thought Christ meant, and what the next verse said it would mean.
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