Love Your Neighbor with All of Your Mind, and/or Understanding/Intelligence

A post that was basically a jape over at Doug Chaplin's home actually raised an interesting question. My question has to do with the exchange between Jesus and the scribe in Mark 12:29-33 (cf. Mt. 22:34-40, Lk. 10:25-28). Jesus' expansion of the command from Deut. 6:4-5 is interesting enough as Jesus adds the phrase "kai ex oles dianoias sou” to the Deuteronomic formula before his addition of Lev. 19:18. Now without looking at various commentaries and so forth, this seems likely to have explanation in Jesus' interpretation, Markan community tradition, or what have you. I am not all that puzzled about this addition.

What I find fascinating is that only in Mark do we find the scribe adding this phrase in Verse 33: "kai ex oles tes suneseos". The other attributes follow the same formula in which the genitive possessive second person is removed in favor of the article alone. Not only is this another interpretation to the commandment from Deuteronomy, it is a re-interpretation of what Jesus just told him! Why doesn't the scribe ask Jesus where he got the part about "mind"? And Jesus' response in kind is, "Ou makran ei apo tas basileias". So this scribe does not seem to have quite got the message Jesus just gave him and the Greek tells us why – I think. (My Greek is about as rusty as Greek can get.) In short, the scribe's response here seems strange not only because he does not question Jesus' addition of kai ex oles dianoias sou but that he adds his own spin on the addition with kai ex oles tes suneseos.

Now as a teacher, if a student of mine reflects back to me something I said and they paraphrase incorrectly, I correct them. Rabbinical teaching practices a similar kind of argumentative, Socratic method. So Jesus' response here also seems a bit puzzling since he is clearly in the teacher role in the dialogue (didaskale). But rather than say, "Not quite got it my child, try again", he says that the scribe "answered wisely" (oti nounexos apekrithe).

It seems that the passage is didactic in nature as something that Mark is doing to instruct the reader. But it also seems to be an odd little dialogue to me.

So… four questions, and I would love to hear what you think. I will check this out at a later time with resources I don't have at the moment:

1. Why does Jesus add tes dianoias to the formula?
2. Why does the scribe change the use of tes dianoias to tes suneseos?
3. Why does the scribe not refer to these attributes with Jesus' level of specificity (tes…sou) and instead uses a more general article (tes)?
4. Why does Jesus not correct the scribe right there since the scribe has clearly not got what he said quite right?

Related posts:

1. ken silva's reading problem