Kata Markon

["Rikki E. Watts" <rwatts AT interchange.ubc.ca>]

Title: Re: [gmark] Re: Mark's Young Man is Homer's Elpenor

Joe wrote...

> My interpretation has been guided by a single theory: Mark went out of his 
way to convince readers that Jesus was the one the Lord said would sit on the 
throne of the house of David, and that he was as holy, or holier, than other 
holy men in scripture, and almost as holy as the Lord.  He scoured the Old 
Testament for things the Lord did, and events in the lives of persons that he 
could have Jesus emulate.  And, he did I pretty good job, as far as I can 
see.  Virtually every event in Mark is has an Old Testament antecedent.  

** a bold hermeneutic, but I suspect Larry is right this is pushing a good thing to an extreme.  But even so, what evidence is there that Mark’s primary aim is to have Jesus sit on the throne of David?  Mark begins his gospel with a reference to Isaiah the prophet, and much of the imagery is taken from Isaiah 40-55 and 63-65 (please pardon me, but see my ISAIAH’S NEW EXODUS IN MARK and also Joel Marcus’ WAY OF THE LORD, Mary-Anne Beavis, Sharon Dowd, etc.).  There’s very little David material here—not to say there’s none—but I doubt if it plays the central role you ascribe to it.  Nor can I see much evidence for Mark portraying Jesus as a holy man.  

More to the point though, if we are talking about doing history then surely we have to ask (as has been discussed on the Xlist recently) where are the cultural antecedents for presenting someone within the horizons of Israel’s story and then constructing or inventing recent history in order to claim fulfillment of scripture?  I can find no analogy or precedent for this, and would like to know just how someone like Joe would explain the emergence of such a radical move, why they would do it, and whom they would hope to convince.  Until that is done, I think the suggestion that Mark or Matthew constructs stories wholesale is a castle in the clouds and quite without historical or cultural foundation.  Add to this what Kenneth Bailey’s work in the NE found about the tenacity of oral tradition concerning these kinds of events and the idea of free reconstruction becomes even more odd and out of joint with the culture.  It is one thing to look at some texts and come up with possible allusions and theories as to how they arose, but if this can’t be reconciled with the larger matrix of social and cultural norms then we have a very serious problem.  I don’t have any difficulty with Mark or Matthew casting their traditions about Jesus in a biblical light in order to emphasize various aspects or to highlight a connection, nor that they did history according to first century canons.  But that is a long way from the kind of free-wheeling creativity Joe seems to ascribe to them.  I think I can see good cultural reasons for the former, but Joe’s reconstruction seems quite foreign to the first century Jewish worldview.  

Matthew tried to do the same thing, but he was clearly overly ambitious, and 
he made some hilarious errors of interpretation of scripture, such as in his 
virgin birth prophecy-fulfillment story, the potter's field story, and the 
donkey and colt story, to name a few.  But, that's Matthew, and this is Mark, 
so we won't get into that. 

** I’d also differ on your reading of Matthew, as you know, having sent you a copy of my Isaiah 7 in Mt paper (SBL, 2000).  I think you’ve seriously misconstrued Matthew’s appeal to Isa 7 and, having spent my academic life working on how the NT authors use the OT, I am quite convinced that they are far more sophisticated (and I don’t mean ingenious) than we give them credit for.  I am reminded of a similar dismissal of rabbinic exegesis that was rather common among NT scholars until just recently when we suddenly realized that the joke was on us; we’d not in fact understood what they were doing.  Work like Instone-Brewer’s on the rabbis provided a salutary reminder that it is better first to seek to understand.  You are right, there might be something to smile about here, but I’m not sure it’s Matthew. 

Regards 

Rikk