Why Jesus is NOT the King of Jews in Mark: the Titulus crucis

[Giuseppe]

The Titulus crucis is strictly connected with the two crucified thieves. Both the items serve to point out that Jesus and only him is the King of Jews. A third item serves to do the same recognition: the crown of thorns (allusion to the burning bush in Sinai). All those labels are designed to define the identity of Jesus in the eyes of his killers: he is the davidic king since he claims this identity.

The irony is not that the Jesus is really their king, as usually a judaizing apologetical exegesis interprets the three items above in order to comfort itself about the Jewish nature of the Jesus in Mark.

What escapes this distorted exegesis is that those labels connecting Jesus with the figure of the davidic king are applied on Jesus at the height of a carnival. Hence at the maximum of the blindness of the killers of Jesus. Ad the logic goes, if they are blind, how can they see right just in that moment of maximum blindness?

Even the man Jesus is blind. He invokes YHWH, but just as the people around believe wrongly that he is invoking Elijah, so Jesus believes wrongly that the power who has just abandoned him comes from YHWH. The Messianic Secret reaches his maximum when even Jesus doesn't know who is the spiritual Christ.

When really the spiritual Christ who abandoned Jesus on the cross comes from a higher god, distinct from the god of the Jews.

Hence the immediate context (the festival reduced to a carnival and a parody) and the Elijah/Eloí misunderstanding make it more probable that Jesus is not the davidic king in Mark.

[Giuseppe]

The two crucified thieves insulting Jesus as "King of Jews" are derived midrashically from:

• “counted among evildoers” of Isaiah 53:12

• the two sons of Zebedee

• Psalm 78:17-18:
  
  And they sinned yet more against him by provoking the most High in the wilderness. And they tempted God in their heart by asking meat for their lust
  
  

• 1 Kings 21:10
  
  But seat two scoundrels opposite him and have them bring charges that he has cursed both God and the king. Then take him out and stone him to death.
  
  

If Jesus is really the king of Jews, then Barabbas is really the true Son of Father.

A→B logically implies ¬B→¬A

It may be that the fugue of Barabbas is an anticipation of the not-suffering of the spiritual Christ of Mark(="Cerinthus"). But it is more probable that Barabbas is a polemical parody of the marcionite Christ, per Couchoud.