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gmark - Re: Mark 14:38 as a Key to the Markan Audience

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Subject: Kata Markon

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  • From: "Mark Goodacre" <M.S.Goodacre AT bham.ac.uk>
  • To: crosstalk2 AT yahoogroups.com, synoptic-L AT bham.ac.uk, gmark AT franklin.oit.unc.edu
  • Subject: Re: Mark 14:38 as a Key to the Markan Audience
  • Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 13:45:43 +0100


Many thanks, Jeffrey, for making a draft of your SBL paper available.
As always with your stuff, I thoroughly enjoyed the flowing prose,
the calm but robust authority with which you make your case and the
way in which you engage the reader's imagination: you patiently
argue the case over a key verse and then extrapolate to a broader and
very interesting thesis on Mark's audience. I find the case for the
meaning of Mark 14.38 convincing, but would like to ask one or two
questions on the issues connected with Mark's audience.

(1) Let me quote a part of Section V:

> To put this another way: if we accept that the situation that Mark
> places the disciples in at Gethsemane is parallel to what Mark's
> community was facing when Mark wrote, then the audience to which Mark
> writes was one that was being seduced into thinking that God
> authorized his faithful to embrace the ideology and the praxis of holy
> war.

This is a big "if" and I wonder if it could be fleshed out a bit?
How do we know that the situation of Peter, James and John in
Gethsemane parallels the situation of Mark's community at the time of
Mark's writing? Is this a general principle of reading Mark
(disciples' situation = Mark's community's situation) or is it
something that comes more sharply into focus in the Passion
Narrative? I'm actually reasonably sympathetic with the idea that
there must have been parallels between the experiences of the actors
in the narrative and the experience of the first readers of Mark, and
I'd take my lead from 13.37, "What I say to you [i.e. Peter, James,
John, Andrew], I say to all". Is that the kind of thing you are
thinking of? I realise you deal with Chapter 13 later in the paper,
and touch on the issue of the relevance of that chapter to the reader
of Mark (especially with the citation of Mark 13.14), but wonder
whether you could more explicitly draw out the reasons for seeing
Mark as attempting to parallel the readers' experiences in 68-69 with
the characters' experiences in Mark 14.38?

(2) In view of Bauckham (ed.), _The Gospels for All Christians_, I'd
be interested to see a defence of the idea that Mark is writing "to"
a "community", a community to which the author apparently belongs.
I'm wondering if your postulation of a Markan community *to* which
Mark is writing is unduly limiting your thesis. The message you see
for Mark's Gospel has general applicability for early Christians who
might have been in this situation, so why delimit so tightly to a
Markan community? My own feeling is that you could have your cake
and eat it by postulating a Markan community from which or out of the
which or against the background of which the Gospel is written, but
see the intended audience of the Gospel as being those who are likely
to be facing the same trials as that Markan community.

(3) How does your thesis fit in with Marcus's stout defence of the
view that Mark was produced during the Jewish war? Has Marcus missed
a trick here?

(4) The narrowness of the window (68-69) raises questions about
Mark's audience's perception of the Gospel post 68-69. Many of its
readers would not have heard the Gospel until 70+; do you have any
reflections on how this specifically 68-69 relevant material might
have been perceived by the post-70 reader?

(5) Related to the previous point, what do we make of the reading of
Mark by Matthew and Luke here, not least given that they retain Mark
14.38? In their Gospels is there a fresh crisis for which this is
now relevant or is it simply retained as a loyalty to source
material? On the assumption of Markan Priority, I am interested in
the question of how Matthew and Luke "read" Mark and at looking at
this in relation to later readings of Mark in the light of Matthew
and Luke (on which more anon in my Mark paper!).

(6) Finally, I couldn't resist drawing attention to the following
sentence in Section IV. Even by the standards of your long
sentences, you have excelled yourself here!

> And since, for Mark, the "way of the cross" entails endurance rather
> than infliction of suffering on one's opponents (cf. Mk. 8:34-37;
> 9:35; 10:43), service to, rather than being served by, "sinners"
> (2:17; 10:45), a refusal to engage in or accept as paradigmatic, let
> alone divinely sanctioned, the dominating and imperial behaviour
> characteristic of hOI DOUKOUNTES ARXEIN TWN EQNWN and hOI MEGALOI
> (10:43) toward subject peoples, and the willingness to give up one's
> life in a way that brings benefit rather than destruction upon the
> "lawless and the ungodly" (10:45)(19), then to "deny" or "to be
> ashamed of" the "way of the cross" involves advocating as "of God",
> and therefore something incumbent upon all who would be faithful to
> him, the adoption of a pattern of behaviour which in effect is the
> opposite of Mark's vision of the hODOS KURIOU -- one which in the name
> of God sanctions the infliction of suffering on one's opponents, the
> domination of "sinners", the acceptance of the lordly and
> "imperialistic" ways in which hOI DOUKOUNTES ARXEIN TWN EQNWN and hOI
> MEGALOI typically conduct themselves when dealing with those they
> consider their subjects as a legitimate model of governance, and the
> willingness to give up one's life in the service of bringing
> devastation and destruction upon the "lawless and the ungodly".

Thanks again for sharing your stimulating paper
Mark
--------------------------------------
Dr Mark Goodacre mailto:M.S.Goodacre AT bham.ac.uk
Dept of Theology tel: +44 121 414 7512
University of Birmingham fax: +44 121 414 4381
Birmingham B15 2TT UK

http://www.bham.ac.uk/theology/goodacre
http://NTGateway.com





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