Mk 1:1-3. A Later Addition to Mark's Gospel?

The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger; Oxford: OUP, 2012), 108-120. , 2012

African Journal of Kingdom Education , 2023

Although previous scholars have discussed and come to widely accepted conclusions about the background to the gospel of Mark in terms of authorship, purpose, characteristics, structure, date, settings, and recipients of Mark's gospel, its genre as well as Sources of Mark's Gospel; which is a fact that this paper does not dispute. Yet, the essence of this paper is to reexamine some salient issues regarding the background of the gospel of Mark in terms of the author and recipient. John Mark is widely regarded as the author of the fourth gospel, but not so for the reason stated here in this paper. Although the recipient of the book is attributed to Galilee, Syria, the Decapolis and Rome; this research supports a Rome possibility because of the universality of the place and the influence of Paul on John Mark. This is the gap that we are filling here.

New Testament Studies 37 (1991), 621–629., 1991

The American Journal of Theology

In the spring of 1910o I published a little work called The Earliest Sources for the Life of Jesus, forming one of the series called "Modern Religious Problems" edited by Dr. A. W. Vernon. In a work of 131 small pages much must be assumed rather than proved, and I am very grateful for the opportunity afforded me by the editors of the American Journal of Theology to explain more at length and in detail the view of the Gospel according to Mark which I sketched in my little book. I am inclined to believe in the traditional authorship of this gospel, and that a chief source of the information possessed by the author consisted of what he had heard from Simon Peter. Now-a-days such an opinion calls for some detailed defense. At the present moment there is going on in Germany a prolonged controversy about the general historicity of the New Testament under the title "Hat Jesus gelebt ?" ("Did Jesus ever live?"). The leading skeptics are Professor Jensen, the Assyriologist, and Professor Arthur Drews; the defenders are "liberals" such as Professors Jiilicher and Weinel. I do not propose to follow this controversy here, but I mention it to show that an investigation of the historicity of the Gospel according to Mark is not out of place.' ' See on this controversy the article by Professor Case in the last number of this Journal, pp. 20-42. i6g 'Ata0ois, or something similar. In any case, "the parts of Dalmanutha" do not belong to real geography. s "Banereem filii tonitrui, quod conrupte Boanerges usus optinuit" (Lagarde, O S, 669). 6 According to Eusebius (O S, 282:83), this is ; Macye&dhn, a then known locality in the neighborhood of Gerasa. That it does not quite fit the context only shows that Matthew's emendation was not based on authentic tradition. 7 So the Greek minuscule numbered 28 (sic) and the Sinai Palimpsest (Syr. S). This piece of Greek evidence is fatal to Wellhausen's conjecture that N'1. in Syr. S does not mean "the hill" (Wellhausen's Marcus, ed. 2, p. 6i).

Oral Tradition, 2010

Jewish and Christian, and especially Protestant Christian, emphasis upon the sacred book and its authority have combined with scholarly interests and techniques, as well as the broader developments in the modern West. .. to fix in our minds today a rather narrow concept of scripture, a concept even more sharply culture-bound than that of "book" itself.-William Graham (1987) Mark's Gospel. .. was composed at a desk in a scholar's study lined with texts.. .. In Mark's study were chains of miracle stories, collections of pronouncement stories in various states of elaboration, some form of Q, memos on parables and proof texts, the scriptures, including the prophets, written materials from the Christ cult, and other literature representative of Hellenistic Judaism.-Burton Mack (1988) It was not necessary that the Gospel performer know how to read. The performer could learn the Gospel from hearing oral performance.. .. It is quite possible, and indeed even likely, that many Gospel performers were themselves illiterate.. .. It was certainly possible for an oral performer to develop a narrative with this level of structural complexity.. .. In Mark the number of interconnections between parts of the narrative are quite extraordinary.-Whitney Shiner (2003) The procedures and concepts of Christian biblical studies are often teleological. The results of the historical process are assumed in study of its early stages. Until recently critical study of the books of the New Testament focused on establishing the scriptural text and its meaning in the context of historical origins. Ironically that was before the texts became distinctively authoritative for communities that used them and were recognized as Scripture by Oral Tradition, 25/1 (2010): 93-114 established ecclesial authorities. Such teleological concepts and procedures obscure what turn out to be genuine historical problems once we take a closer look. How the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Mark, came to be included in the Scriptures of established Christianity offers a striking example. On the earlier Christian theological assumption that Christianity as the religion of the Gospel made a dramatic break with Judaism as the religion of the Law, one of the principal questions was how the Christian church came to include the Jewish Scriptures in its Bible. We now see much more clearly the continuity of what became Christianity with Israel. The Gospels, especially Matthew and Mark, portray Jesus as engaged in a renewal of Israel. The Gospel of Matthew is now generally seen as addressed to communities of Israel, not "Gentiles" (Saldarini 1994). And while Mark was formerly taken as addressed to a "Gentile" community in Rome, it is increasingly taken as addressed to communities in Syria that understand themselves as the renewal of Israel (Horsley 2001). Far more problematic than the inclusion of the Jewish Scripture (in Greek) is inclusion of the Gospels in the Christian Bible. The ecclesial authorities who defined the New Testament canon in the fourth and fifth centuries were men of high culture. The Gospels, however, especially the Gospel of Mark, did not meet the standards of high culture in the Hellenistic and Roman cultural world. Once the Gospels became known to cultural elite, opponents of the Christians such as Celsus, in the late second century, mocked them for their lack of literary distinction and their composers as ignorant people who lacked "even a primary education" (Contra Celsum 1.62). Fifty years later, the "church father" Origen proudly admitted that the apostles possessed "no power of speaking or of giving an ordered narrative by the standards of Greek dialectical or rhetorical arts" (Contra Celsum 1.62). Luke had asserted, somewhat presumptuously perhaps, that he and his predecessors as "evangelists" had, in the standard Hellenistic-Roman ideology of historiography, set down an "orderly account" of events in the Gospels. Origen, who knew better, had to agree with Celsus that the evangelists were, as the Jerusalem "rulers, elders, and scribes" in the second volume of Luke's "orderly account" said about Peter and John, "illiterate and ignorant" (agrammatoi kai idiotai, Acts 4:13). Nor would the Gospels, again especially Mark, have measured up as Scripture on the model of previous Jewish scriptural texts. The Gospels stand in strong continuity with Israelite-Jewish cultural tradition; indeed they portray Jesus and his followers as its fulfillment. Yet they do not resemble any of the kinds of texts included in the Jewish Scriptures or other Jewish scribal compositions, whether books of Torah (Deuteronomy), books of history (Judges; 1-2 Kings), collections of prophecies (Isaiah, Amos), collections of instructional wisdom (Proverbs 1-9; Sirach), or apocalypses (Daniel). Rather the Gospels tell the story of a popular leader they compare to Moses and Elijah who focused on the concerns of villagers in opposition to the political and cultural elite and who was gruesomely executed by the Roman governor. Consideration of the oral and written aspects of scripture may be one of the keys to addressing the question of how the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Mark, became included in the Bible by the ecclesial authorities of established Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries. Only contemporary with or after the Gospel's official recognition as part of Scripture do we find Christian intellectuals producing commentaries that are more than spiritualizing allegories or moralistic homilies on Gospel passages. Research in a number of interrelated (but often separate) areas is coalescing to suggest that the Gospel of Mark developed in a largely oral communication 94 RICHARD A. HORSLEY