Did Jesus openly declare who he was, or keep it secret?

The difference is real, but it is less sharp than it first looks, and it turns on audience, timing and the kind of claim made. In Mark, too, Jesus makes very large claims openly. He says that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins, which his hearers held that only God can do (Mark 2:7–10); he calls himself “Lord also of the sabbath” (2:28); and before the high priest, asked if he is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, he answers, “I am” (14:62). What he held back for a time was the public use of the title ‘Christ’, which in that day stirred hopes of a political king. Straight after Peter’s confession he began to teach that the Son of man must suffer (8:31), and he told the three disciples on the mountain to tell no one “till the Son of man were risen from the dead” (9:9). The silence had a time limit.

John shows the same caution. When the crowd wanted to make him king by force, Jesus withdrew (John 6:15); he went up to the feast “not openly, but as it were in secret” (7:10); and late in his ministry the Jews still asked, “If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly” (10:24). His great sayings about himself come mostly in debates with opponents in Jerusalem, or in private with the disciples on the last night, not in preaching to the crowds of Galilee. The first Gospels also have sayings very like John’s, such as “no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son” (Matthew 11:27). John, writing so that his readers “might believe that Jesus is the Christ” (John 20:31), chose to gather the discourses in which Jesus spoke most fully about himself; the other Gospels chose more of his public teaching on the kingdom.

The ‘messianic secret’

In 1901 William Wrede argued that Mark invented Jesus’ commands to silence to explain why Jesus had not been known as Messiah in his lifetime. Many scholars since have doubted this, noting that the ‘secret’ keeps leaking out in Mark itself (Mark 1:45; 7:36) and fits a real teacher’s caution in a land where messianic claims could start a revolt.

Christian scholars differ over how far John’s long discourses give Jesus’ words as spoken and how far John has put Jesus’ teaching into his own style. Those who hold John to be fully reliable can still allow that, like the other Gospel writers, he gives the substance of what Jesus said, probably spoken mostly in Aramaic, in his own Greek.