Kata Markon

["Sid Martin" <smartin AT webzone.net>]

Today is April 25, St. Mark's Day.  The proper Collect appointed in the Book
of Common Prayer thanks God for Mark's "witness" and prays that "we may be
firmly grounded in its truth."  The key question is, to what truth does Mark
testify, and in what manner does he bear witness?  Is the truth that which
the Church professes, or at least professes to profess, or some other?  Is
his witness to be read on the surface of the text, or is it buried somewhere
beneath the surface story?  Surely Mark is testifying to something he thinks
is true, even if we do not always understand what he is saying.  In one form
or another, this is the issue underlying all critical study of Mark's
Gospel.

Genre

Surely it is wrong to say that anything in Mark's Gospel which is not
literally, historically accurate is a "lie" or to call Mark a "charlatan"
because he speaks in the language of faith and not science.  Mark's method
may be at least be described as quasi-midrashic.  Surely midrash in some
form is a part of early Jewish culture and by extension could become "gospel
truth."  Whether there is any other example of this precise use of the
technique in first century Jewish literature does not tell us whether this
is how Mark wrote the original Gospel.

To assume that we can be certain what Mark is getting at because we know the
"genre" in which is he writing begs the question.  We have to know what he
is getting at in order to know what genre we may call it.  This is
particularly the case when, as generally agreed, Mark pioneered the gospel
genre, which is necessarily sui generis.  If new forms of expression were
never invented, there would be no culture to begin with.  Certainly it is
easier to believe that Mark created a new mode of expressing religious
truth, or modified an existing modality, than it is to believe that, for
example, Jesus rose from the dead or ascended into heaven.  I find the
miracle of "midrash" less unprecedented than that.

On the other hand, we have no examples of Jewish "Lives" from that era, and
have no reason to think that Jews were particularly interested in biography.
The only exception might be the autobiography of Josephus, which is more
Roman than Jewish in genre.  No coherent account exists of the lives even of
such luminaries as Hillel and Johanan ben Zakkai, and the search for their
real historical personas must go on.

By contrast, "Tobit", which takes the form of an autobiography, and "Judith"
, written in the style of Herodotus, both begin with identifying data as if
the story were told as true, yet both are relegated to the "Inter-Testament"
by Protestants, and dismissed as religious fiction, or "apocrypha" by most
scholars.  Similarly, the apocryphal Protevangelion of James, which was
highly regarded by the Church Fathers, concludes with a postscript which
states that, "I, James, wrote this History from Jerusalem," yet no one takes
this story of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph seriously today.  There is no reason
to suppose that Mark's Gospel is a "Life" of Jesus in any more historical a
sense than these other works.

Fact and fiction

There are different levels of literality a work may have, from point by
point facticity through fact which has been fictionalized to a greater or
lesser extent, to fiction based more or less loosely on fact, and on to pure
fiction.  Fiction may be mixed in with fact or it may figuratively reflect
fact.  Facts may be set in a fictional sequence of events or may be
transposed to a fictitious setting as to time or place or person.  A
character may be factual as to some aspects of his persona and fictional as
to others or a fictional composite of factual or fictitious persons.  Any of
these fact-to-fiction relationships in any fact-to-fiction ratio could
conceivably be true of the gospel genre and could comprise all or part of
any of the canonical Gospels.

Just because a book tells a story does not mean that the story is true, or
that the storyteller means to say it is true.  Purporting to tell true tales
may itself be a literary device.  That Mark got the right prefect in office
and had figs growing at the best time of year, along with some rather
jumbled geography, in the background does not prove that the story in the
foreground itself is true.  We must not prejudge the author's
historiographic intent based on the narrative format or assume that we may
predetermine the degree of literality based purely on its formal properties.
Nor can we assume that Mark is doing history merely because Luke claims his
own story is in some sense true.  Maybe Luke misunderstands Mark, or maybe
we misunderstand Luke.

Burden of proof

To say, with Sanders, that the burden of proof is on the person who want to
prove something is true, but trivial.  Outside of math and logic, of course,
there really is no such thing as "proof".  What we call proof is simply
evidence that someone finds convincing.   Who it is that must be convinced,
and how convinced they must be, is an open question.  That is why we have
juries.  The jurors are the only ones whose opinion matters.  In the world
of scholarship, unfortunately, there are no juries, and nothing is ever
really "proven".  Even scholarly consensus is a poor guide to conviction.
In the field of Bible scholarship particularly, consensus shifts with the
fashions of the day.

Oral tradition

Many attempt to bridge the gap between the supposed life of Jesus and the
writing of the Gospels with an oral tradition transmitted from the first
followers of Jesus down to the evangelists.  This is, however, only a
theory, no different from any other.  There is no direct evidence of any
oral tradition, which is as much a hypothetical reconstruction of church
history as is the life of Jesus reconstructed from the supposedly authentic
elements remaining after the "kerygma" is removed.  The difficulty with any
reconstruction is that it necessarily depends on speculation, which is at
most an educated guess.

There is nothing to verify that the presumed prehistory of Mark's Gospel,
generally conceded to be the original account of Jesus' life, is accurate.
Scholars are forced to rely on criteria of reconstruction which are at most
intuitive, and some, to my mind, counterintuitive.  Even Paul, assuming the
authenticity of his Epistles, provided remarkably little "data" about the
historical Jesus.  In the end we are forced to rely on Mark and on sources
later than, and apparently dependent on, Mark.

Certainly it proves nothing that modern peasants in the Middle East can tell
stories which are faithful to detail when they chose to do so.  There are
more than a few examples of Middle Eastern legends surrounding popular holy
men through the ages.  One of them may well have been Jesus.

The very notion of oral tradition itself derives from a perception ca. 1900
that Mark's Gospel, previously believed to be the earliest and most reliable
account of the life of Jesus, was composed of discreet pericopes, "pearls on
a string", which somehow got broken and the pearls spilled on the floor,
gems which Mark, rather carelessly, has restrung without knowing which came
before which.  These pericopes, it was assumed, must have circulated
independently by word of mouth.  Along came Mark and pasted the by-now well
refined story units willy-nilly into a scrapbook labeled "Gospel".  The
emphasis shifted from the life of Jesus to the role the story of Jesus had
played in the life of the church, with Mark a mere collector of clippings.

Around the middle of the century, the focus shifted again to the evangelist
as at least a creative editor, if not an actual author, and then in recent
years has shifted still further to the Gospel as a story in its own right,
without regard for anything that may have gone before it.  This had the
effect of restoring the unity of the text with the result that the whole
piecemeal approach, and the very concept of oral tradition itself, may be
called into question.  Narrative analysis along with rhetorical, social, and
similar analyses now has a place in Markan studies.

A comparative approach

As others have suggested, an alternative to speculative reconstruction in
the study of Markan origins may lie in the comparison of Mark's Gospel with
cultural material which would have been known to Mark and which he might
have borrowed, reworked, and incorporated into his Gospel, for whatever
reason.  The Old Testament is one obvious source.  Homer has been suggested
as another.  The mystery cults have long been mined for raw material.
Babylonian astrology, Greco-Roman philosophy, Roman Imperial ideology, among
other sources, have been suggested.

The appreciation of first century civilization has informed much of modern
study of the historical Jesus.  It can also be of great use in studying the
literary Jesus as well.
The search for the real literary Jesus is at least as interesting as the
search for the real historical Jesus, and story of Jesus research is as
intellectually respectable an enterprise as life of Jesus research, maybe
more so.  The latter, after all, represents only one hypothesis to explain
the origins of Mark's Gospel.  It might be more constructive to understand
the literary Jesus first, and search for the hypothetical historical Jesus
later.

Exploration of what might be termed the "meta-narrative", the larger world
beyond the story world which must be understood before the story itself can
be understand, forms a legitimate part of  broad-based Markan research.
Understandably, however, there may be some concern that to work outward from
Mark would not necessarily lead back to Jesus, hence the desire to begin
with Jesus and work forward.  To do so, however, is not only intellectually
dishonest but avoids a valuable means of testing the validity of the
historicizing approach.

A comparative approach to the study of Mark has a distinct advantage over
the reconstructive method because it is based not on speculation but on
observation.  The student can see the parallels between the Gospel on the
one hand and the posited source on the other and need not guess at what
events transpired before the Gospel was written.  Observed comparison,
unlike speculative reconstruction, is empirically based, and does not rely
on theoretical hypothesizing to the same degree.  The degree of similarity,
and its possible impact on the author, to be sure, is a matter of personal
opinion.

Naturally, if the observer goes further and affirmatively claims that other
methods, including the reconstructive method, are unproductive, or even
counterproductive, then he must come forward with the evidence and argument
to support that denial.  The opposite is also true.  If the comparative
analysis is sufficiently compelling, furthermore, the need to posit a
conjectured account of the pre-Markan past may be precluded.  At some point
an historical Jesus might become a superfluous hypothesis.

The historical Jesus

While it is fashionable today to say that we do know something about the
historical Jesus, both the content and the source of such consensus is
uncertain, and may vary from the merely existential a la Bultmann to the
hyperliteral.  In between we may have any variety of Jesuses -- wonder
worker, cynic sage, rebel king, or what have you.  Thomas Jefferson produced
a harmony of the Gospels in which he literally cut out with a pair of
scissors anything which suggested that Jesus was more than a mere man.  He
used a "common sense" approach.  Anything he would believe about another
figure in ancient literature, he would believe about Jesus; anything else he
cut out.  Somewhat surprisingly, this left nearly all of the material
intact.

Using the "folk tales" approach of oral tradition, however, very different
results have been reached.  Virtually everything Jefferson kept, the Jesus
Seminar leaves out.  Mack has gone so far as to treat Mark's Gospel as pure
fiction, a "myth of innocence", relying instead on Q and Thomas, or early
layers of same, to reconstruct an entirely different sort of Jesus
altogether.  Given non-Markan sources, one obtains non-Markan results and a
non-Markan Jesus.  Quite often the author's conclusions may tell us more
about his "Jesus agenda" than anything else.

Some proposed parallels

On the other hand, it is quite possible for observers to begin from
different perspectives and yet see the same thing in the Gospel.  My own
interest is in historical events and cultural phenomena more or less
contemporaneous with Mark's Gospel.  I have long thought that Mark's account
of the passion is based on a triumphal procession in Rome which culminated
at the Capitolium or "Place of the Head" just as the crucifixion takes place
at Golgotha or "Place of the Skull" in Mark.  To me, Mark was writing
fiction, yet Thomas Schmidt, an evangelical scholar, has come to the same
conclusion based on the assumption that Mark has simply selected material
that suits his purposes without inventing anything, even Calvary's Hill.
What may seem a radical method may still lead to a conservative conclusion.

My critique of Schmidt's thesis, if anyone is interested, may be requested
by email.  An attempt on my part to apply the "current events" approach to
chapters 3 and 4 of Gmark, using material from the Dead Sea Scrolls, may be
found at the following links, which Joe Alward was kind enough to post on
his website:

http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Withdrawal_to_the_Dead_Sea.htm
http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Mysteries_of_the_Kingdom.htm.

"He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Sid Martin
Tulsa, OK




Sid Martin