It’s Jeopardy in the first century.
“High Priests for 200, Alex.”
The question pops up. Who was the high priest when David was running from King Saul?
Jesus quickly buzzes in, “Who is Abiathar?”
The buzzer sounds and the host informs Jesus that it was not Abiathar as the high priest. After nobody else buzzes in, the host is able to give the answer, “It was Ahimelech.”
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To be clear, Jesus wasn’t actually on Jeopardy in the first century. That is obvious. But he did give the same answer when he is talking to the religious leaders about Sabbath observance. Check out Mark 2:26,
“…how he entered the house of God, in the time of Abiathar the high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence…”
The event to which Jesus is referencing comes from 1 Samuel 21:1-7. It clearly says that Ahimelech was the priest and there is no mention of Abiathar.
What do we do with this? Did Jesus miss the Jeopardy question? Did the Son of God need to dust up on his Jewish history a little before this debate with the religious leaders?
Potential Solutions
What options do we have here? One option, simply, is that either Jesus or Mark were wrong.
Most would lay the blame at Mark’s feet. It’s a simple error by Mark. But what would this do to our view of inerrancy? Can we say that Mark was unintentionally wrong?
It is possible that the text itself is wrong? Perhaps there was a copyists error somewhere along the way. Does it matter that Abiathar isn’t mentioned in either Matthew or Luke’s rendition of the story? But the omission would be easier to explain than the assertion. It’s not likely that this is a textual problem.
So, what other options do we have?
Craig Blomberg has suggested that we should read this as “the passage concerning Abiathar”. It was customary to refer to only a section of a book or story that would recall the whole. The problem, though, is that Abiathar appears a decent amount later. It wouldn’t make sense to make Abiathar the header to the story and not Ahimelech.
There are a few others suggestions but these leave us unsatisfied. We might be left to conclude with Thomas Lindsay’s words from 1883: “Various explanations of the difficulty have been given, none very satisfactory.” 1
Intentionally Wrong?
There is one other option, though. What if Jesus was intentionally “wrong”? What if he referenced Abiathar to make a different argument, one that would not have been lost on his original audience?
We must understand that Jesus and his contemporaries held the Bible and history and such differently than we do in the West. Chronology was not nearly as important. Their interpretive methods were not as wooden and literal as our tends to be.
To put it a different way, they didn’t use the Scriptures as fodder for Bible Trivia. Jesus wouldn’t have been playing Jeopardy with these questions. It was more lively. It was telling a story. And so in order to aid a story or a key theological point, he might say something like “Abiathar”.
This wouldn’t be as acceptable to us. We would say that this is an error. But for Jesus’ and his contemporaries it’s not an error if you know what you’re doing and you are doing it intentionally to make a point.
What point was he making?
Who was Abiathar? He is Eli’s great-great-grandson, the one who would eventually be removed because of his wickedness. Abiathar, in some sense, is parallel to Saul the rejected leader.
This, then, would fit much of what is happening in Mark. They are trying to get Jesus to fit into their preconceived mold of who Messiah is, and what Messiah is supposed to be. But in reality they are fighting for a kingdom that has been rejected. He parallels King David and his opponents are Abiathar.
Andrew Wilson, in my opinion, says it well:
All of this means that Jesus mentions Abiathar rather than Ahimelech for good reason. He is saying, “I am David, these are my men, and the current priests are Abiathar. They are in charge now, but in just a few years their priesthood will end, just like Abiathar’s. And my kingdom will be established, just like David’s.”
I think that’s wonderful. The Holy Spirit didn’t put discrepancies in Scripture to provide fuel for skeptics, employment for commentators, or annoyance for evangelical Christians. He did it to make us think, search, meditate, read, learn—and be ever filled with awe.
Conclusion
Jesus didn’t miss a history question in Jeopardy, because he wasn’t playing that game. He was doing something entirely different. He was referencing Abiathar, who was mentioned only a few verses later in 1 Samuel, because he fit the purpose of his story even better.
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Photo source: here
1 Thomas M. Lindsay, The Gospel according to St. Mark (Edinburgh: Clark, 1883) 91.
