The Gospel of Mark at a Glance

Currents in Biblical Research, 2004

For many decades now Markan scholarship has struggled to uncover the structure of Mark's gospel. With the advent of literary/narrative criticism the struggle has intensified to understand how the gospel unfolds in order to tell its story of Jesus. This article surveys recent and current proposals that have been advanced for Mark's gospel. Some scholars have judged that there is no structure; others have found a highly complex web of interrelated sections. While many proposals use a mixture of principles to derive the alleged structure, an attempt has been made to classify the proposals based upon the primary principle used. These categories include: topography/ geography; theological themes; Sitz im Leben of the recipients; literary factors.

Evangelical Quarterly, 2019

The textual status of Mark’s Gospel, specifically the fact that the beginning and end of this gospel were lost at a very early stage, sheds light on the period of time when the stories concerning Jesus’s ministry, death, and resurrection were being transmitted orally. It is proposed that during this time the oral history of Jesus came to include an overarching ‘gospel’ structure, and that Mark’s Gospel is essentially a snapshot of this oral history, marginally altered as Mark personally retold the account of Jesus within the bounds permitted by those exercising control over the oral history. Support for these interrelated proposals comes from the fact that Mark’s Gospel sustained damage and was not immediately repaired: it was not seen as replacing the oral history of the eyewitnesses. However, later (when the eyewitnesses were dying out) Mark’s Gospel was rescued, copied, and circulated, but only in its already damaged form.

Writing with Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark, 2022

Nathanael Vette proposes that the Gospel of Mark, like other narrative works in the Second Temple period, uses the Jewish scriptures as a model to compose episodes and tell a new story. Vette compares Mark's use of scripture with roughly contemporary works like Pseudo-Philo, the Genesis Apocryphon, 1 Maccabees, Judith, and the Testament of Abraham; diverse texts which, combined, support the existence of shared compositional techniques. This volume identifies five scripturalized narratives in the Gospel: Jesus' forty-day sojourn in the wilderness and call of the disciples; the feeding of the multitudes; the execution of John the Baptist; and the Crucifixion of Jesus. This fresh understanding of how the Jewish scriptures were used to compose new narratives across diverse genres in the Second Temple period holds important lessons for how scholars read the Gospel of Mark. Instead of treating scriptural allusions and echoes as keys which unlock the hidden meaning of the Gospel, Vette argues that Mark often uses the Jewish scriptures simply for their ability to tell a story.

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

This is the third chapter of my contextual introduction to the New Testament, From Crisis to Christ (Nashville, TN: 2014), 51-74. It was published on the Bible and Interpretation site, May 2015 as an example of my new approach to biblical studies, which I call "second criticality." That essay is also posted on the Bible and Interpretation site.

2018

This paper seeks to explore the historical character of the Gospel of Mark. It attempts to review and discuss such important aspects of the Gospel that fall within the framework of critical-historical study of an ancient document. Major areas explored and critiqued in the paper are, for instance, the genre, historical accuracy, mythical elements, compatibility with contemporary literary trends, possibility of concurrent sources, dominant religious discourse, and the intended primary audience

2003

Mark’s Gospel does not follow the rules of Hellenistic “lives”, which usually began by praising the ancestry and education of the main character. This is due to the fact that the data available to Mark were inappropriate for that purpose. Nonetheless, the beginning of Mark’s Gospel has the same purpose as the beginnings of other contemporary biographies: to show the ascribed honour of his character. According to Mark, Jesus’ honour does not come from his human family; it is due to his being God’s Son. Through a ritual process, centred upon a liminal stage of revelation and testing, the evangelist shows Jesus’ true identity as a holy man, capable of brokering God’s patronage on his people.

For centuries, the Church paid little attention to the Gospel of Mark because it was considered as merely an abbreviated version of Matthew, with little value of its own. Some other biases against Mark included: Mark is an indirect witness, and therefore, less important than Matthew and John; It has little material of its own; It is the shortest of the gospels; does not show any theological development (Luke deepens in mercy, Matthew in the expected Messiah, John in Christology). These views changed radically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when Mark came to be viewed as the first Gospel written and so of significant historical value. Mark was now considered the oldest of the Gospels with few interpretations of the editor and would subsequently turn into a historical source closer to the facts. In recent years, scholars have come to appreciate Mark’s Gospel as a unique literary work with its own narrative structure, theological themes, and Christological purpose. The Gospel reveals a fascinating and unique portrait of Jesus, an important contribution to the Church’s understanding of Jesus the Messiah and the Son of God. In what follows we shall attempt a summary of the basic historical, literary and theological questions around the Gospel according to Mark.