THE STRUCTURE OF MARK’S GOSPEL: CURRENT PROPOSALS

Peter Lang, 2014

This commentary demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a result of a consistent, strictly sequential, hypertextual reworking of the contents of three of Paul’s letters: Galatians, First Corinthians and Philippians. Consequently, it shows that the Marcan Jesus narratively embodies the features of God’s Son who was revealed in the person, teaching, and course of life of Paul the Apostle. The analysis of the topographic and historical details of the Marcan Gospel reveals that they were mainly borrowed from the Septuagint and from the writings of Flavius Josephus. Other literary motifs were taken from various Jewish and Greek writings, including the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato. The Gospel of Mark should therefore be regarded as a strictly theological-ethopoeic work, rather than a biographic one.

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

The Gospel of Mark is foundational to a minimal historical approach. The methodological approach of this brief introduction is to provide the position of critical scholarship for comparison to the early church perception of the Gospel of Mark. This study is to follow the critical position to the brink of faith that Jesus is the Son of Man. Furthermore, critical academics leave Mark open to the resurrection when female disciples found Jesus’s tomb empty. The accounts of the early church stand firm and yet in contrast to critical scholarship that continues to search for conclusions.

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).

Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, 2003

THE GOSPEL OF MARK, WHICH FOR CENTURIES lived in the shadow of the other gospels, has become the center of intense investigation. Scholars have written such a plethora of books and articles that it is nearly impossible to keep pace with their literary output. Nevertheless, the student of Mark will welcome the recent arrival of two new commentaries. While neither book provides an exhaustive survey of scholarly research, both are suitable additions to any pastor's library. The first, by Edwards, is in a series whose stated goal is to produce commentaries designed to "loosen the Bible from its pages." As D. A. Carson writes in his introduction, authors in the series "interact with the most important informed contemporary debate, but avoid getting mired in undue technical detail" (p. x). Edwards succeeds admirably in achieving this goal. His commentary is thoroughly informed by recent scholarship, as the footnotes clearly document, but his reading of Mark's gospel is focused on the exposition of its message against the backdrop of first-century Palestine.

This ground-breaking book is the first major work on Mark's use of Matthew and Luke since William R. Farmer's The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis. It is a commendably ambitious demonstration of how Mark used Matthew and Luke, a hypothesis advocated by Johann Jakob Griesbach in eighteenth-century Germany and revived by William R. Farmer in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context, 2004

Revised Standard Version, apart from those instances in which the author felt the need to propose an alternative translation of the passage quoted. The author wishes to offer a special word of thanks to Prof. dr. H.J. de Jonge for his valuable comments and advice. Acknowledgement should be given also to Dr.

In 1958, prof. Morton Smith discovered a copy of a letter that claimed to be written by Clement of Alexandria and described a longer version of the gospel written by Mark, including two quotes. This small and incomplete letter and two minute quotations have given rise to extensive discussions, both scholarly and popular, and often in mixed form. Partly because Morton Smith drew far-reaching conclusions in his first publications based on the scarce material, major controversies arose on the authenticity of the letter and the gospel it describes. After an interlude of almost a decade in which no new methodological elements appeared, Scott Gregory Brown studied the gospel fragments from a literary critical perspective, relating their literary and narrative structure to the canonical gospel of Mark. His PhD thesis brought a fresh scholarly perspective in the discussion. Brown proposes that the Longer Gospel of Mark was an Alexandrian expansion of the canonical gospel, intended to give a more profound understanding of the “mystery of the kingdom of God”. The present paper first seeks to verify Brown’s claims that the Longer Gospel of Mark uses the same narrative framing techniques applied in the gospel that was included in the canon. Then the consequences for the interpretation and background of the Longer Gospel are considered. Based on another literary feature shown by the canonical gospel, an alternative primary purpose for the Longer Gospel is proposed: releasing the suspense created by the narrative reticence in the canonical gospel.

Review of Biblical Literature, 2024