34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
'Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?'
which means, '
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'
There are three criterion that would argue that these are the authentic words of Jesus:
--the criterion of dissimilarity
--the criterion of embarassment
--the criterion of orality
While the dominate view of Jesus has him predicting and accepting his death in the expectation of a resurrrection, the speaker of these words did not want to die nor did he expect to die. The two portrayals are dissimilar from each other.
The criterion of embarrassment is built upon the idea that the church would not invent a saying or action of Jesus that it would find to be somehow embarassing. It is embarassing to think that Jesus thought that his god had abandoned him.
The problematic word, 'eloi, is not attested as either Aramaic or Hebrew and puzzled the hearers. I would say that 'eloi is a conflation of the Hebrew 'eli and 'elohi. The speaker did not quote Psalm 22:1 accurately, which reads, 'eli. This kind of mistake is more likely to occur as a mistake of read speaking rather than
writing as it is less likely that a scribe would mistake a form he could have had in front of him. This is supported by Matthew's rendition of the words where he corrects Mark to the Psalm.
The larger context in Mark of this saying is also dissimilar to dominate Christian teachings about Jesus insofar as Jesus consternation is to be understood in his prediction to the high priest that the high priest (and everybidy else) was [about] to see the fulfillment of Dan 7:13-14 to which he alluded as support for his claim that he was indeed the Messiah. But the soon expected miraculous establishment of the messianic kingdom with Jesus as king, obviously did not happen, to which Jesus responded with these last words of despair.
gMark portrays Jesus as a failed messianic pretender who nevertheless was regarded as a uiou theou by the centurion in charge of the crucifixion, thereby providing the dramatic conclusion of gMark and the "proper" assessment of Jesus according to the author of gMark. It is also noteworthy that the author presents a high view as being spoken by a Roman, a centurion, Jesus' own executioner.
The question of debate: Does Mark 15:34 probably contain the words of a historical Jesus?
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