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gmark - some responses

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Subject: Kata Markon

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  • From: "Jeffrey B. Gibson" <jgibson000 AT attbi.com>
  • To: Kata Markon <gmark AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: some responses
  • Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 22:04:56 -0500


Joe,

You asked for some responses to your “critique” of my views, your own
interpretation of Mk. 14:38, and the “arguments” you have mounted in
defense of your views. I do not have time to take into account all that
you have said and claimed. But here, in no particular order, are a few
things that have come to mind.

1. You claim that my view on how Mark intended Mk. 14:38 to be
understood cannot be true because it is (reputedly) something that no
other biblical scholar has seen in 2000 years. I note with interest
that the same criticism may be applied to **your** view. Show me any
scholar who has read has read Mk. 14:38 as you do.

2. You say you are engaged in a simple surface reading of the text.
Leaving aside the questions of

(a) whether your “surface reading” involves eisegesis and

(b) whether you beg the question when you claim, as you do, that Mark is
as simple a narrative as you wish it to be (the biblical allusions,
quotations, theologically loaded and connotative language, sandwiching
techniques, the contextualizing of the overall story within a Isaian/New
Exodus theme that appear there all mitigates against this), and

(c) whether one can even come to any kind of minimal understanding of
what is **on** the surface without understanding and taking into account
what you call the “esoterica” of Koine,

the fact of the matter is you do no such thing. In order to get out of
the text the message you think is there, you resort to allegorization of
that text. It does not really refer to the disciples in Gethsemane who
are (on the surface level of things) physically tired and who wait for
Jesus less than an hour. It refers to those who have been waiting for
Jesus for 70 (sic!) years and have grown "spiritually" weary, etc. .
Every element in the story represents something other than what it
appears to be on a "surface level" reading of the text. Moreover, it
cannot be understood with out reference to other texts in the gospel
which are also interpreted by you allegorically.

3. You say you are basing your views on a “common sense” understanding
of the context that Mark, by giving certain signals within the text of
the Gethsemane story, indicates is the setting from which the text’s
context is to be found and, in the light of which, Mark intended the
Gethsemane story to be read -- namely, Mk. 13:35, the lesson drawn
from the parable found in Mk. 13:34 about the how servants left in
charge of a household and a door keeper who is to keep alert at his post
should not slack off in, or cease to be diligent about fulfilling their
assigned duties by thinking essentially that “since the cat's away, they
can now play”.

The parable reads:

"It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his
servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to
be on the watch."

And this is all well and good, **since I make the same claim myself.**

But what you fail to notice is, as numerous commentators both ancient
and modern have observed, that in the parable (as well as in the
material which immediately precedes and follows it, i.e. the admonition
“Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come” and the
notice “And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.") Mark explicitly
takes up and echoes both the language and the form as well as the intent
of the command he has Jesus utter at Mk 13:5 and thus -- again as
numerous commentators both ancient and modern have observed -- shows
that Mark intended the parable to be seen not only as a bookend to all
that precedes it, but also as deriving its referents with respect to
what one is to “stay awake” over and to “watch out” for is that which
Jesus commands watchfulness and wakefulness over **from Mk 13:5 up
through 13:34**.

Notably, this is the danger NOT of yielding to literal sleepiness, or
even of getting disappointed that the parousia had not come. It is the
“elects’” thinking that they would be following God, rather than denying
him, if they accepted the claims of false Christs and false prophets
who, appealing to Daniel 11, said that, “the people who know their God
shall stand firm and take action”, rather than flee Jerusalem, when they
saw “the abomination of desolation” standing where he ought not to
stand.

So on your own grounds that we are to derive the meaning of what Mark
says in one passage by referring to another passage that Mark himself
has indicated as containing the clues of how the first passage should be
understood, your interpretation of what is being said in Mk. 14:38 will
not wash.

4. You fail to notice that those who knew Koine, who use Mark for
**their** telling of the Gethsemane story, and who would have
understood certainly better than you not only the “esoterica” of Koine
but “the plain sense of what Mark was saying” -- i.e., Matthew and Luke
-- do not give any indication that they see Mk. 14:38 as saying what you
so confidently assert it is saying. On the contrary, they see the
command in terms of the last petition of the LP (note how they change
Mark’s wording to conform to what they have Jesus say at Matt. 6:13 and
Lk. 11:4 respectively). Now whatever you want to make of the object of
the PEIRASMOS petition in the LP with respect to who it is that is
envisaged there as the object of PEIRASMOS (e.g., the pray-ers, as
many, but not all scholars have argued, or God, as I, others, and now
Tom Wright maintain), one thing is certain. Matthew and Luke did not
see that prayer -- and therefore the prayer in Mk. 14:38 -- as a prayer
for strength to avoid giving in to a tired body and falling asleep. And
if they did not see it this way, one wonders just how plain and common
sensical and contextually demanded your understanding of the prayer in
Mk. 14:38 is!

5. Another thing you do not take into account is something I noted in an
article on the Lord’s Prayer that was published last year in Biblical
Theology Bulletin -- which, by the way, did cause lots of hands to be
raised when its pre publication form was delivered at the Boston SBL a
few years back -- but curiously so that those raising them (including
Bruce Malina) could express their essential agreement . And this is the
fact that each and every time Jesus is presented within the synoptic
tradition as urging his disciples to pray it is **always** for divine
aid to avoid becoming like, or going over to the side of the “wilderness
generation”. In the light of this, there is a prima facie case that the
prayer Jesus urges upon his disciples at Gethsemane would also have
this same object.

6. You are not really engaging the arguments that I mounted in defense
of my case. You have not shown on the basis of lexical study that I have
misinterpreted the evidence with regard to the semantic range that
PEIRASMOS possessed at the time Mark wrote. Nor have you shown on the
basis of hard data that **your** understanding of the term has any basis
in fact. Not have you provided any evidence from texts contemporary
with Mark's that indicate that the grammatical construction MH + a form
of ERCESQAI had a range of meaning, or was ever taken or used by
someone in Mark's time to connote anything other than "do not engage
in".

7. If you want to make an claims about what words and expressions did
and did not mean in the ancient world, then provide evidence -- not
speculations based on "common sense" -- of actual usage It would after
all, given the American frame of reference with regard to the meaning of
the expression "first floor", be "common sense" to conclude that when
you heard an Englishman speak of the "first floor", he meant "the ground
floor" as Americans do when they use it.

But you'd also be dead wrong. In British usage, the "first floor" is
"the first floor up from the ground floor, i.e., what Americans
designate as the "second floor".

And if you were to go on to say, should you be making a claim about what
terms or expressions mean when they appear in literature written by
Brits, that anyone who provided a counter claim that was based upon
what British usage indicates the terms or expressions mean to Brits, was
illegitimately appealing to "esoterica" which one need not take into
account, you'd be judged a fool not only by Brits but by those who know
the language.

8. Your posts -- especially those that claim one way or another that
grammar and lexicographical evidence is secondary to "common sense" when
trying to determine the meaning of a Greek text -- lead me to believe
that you have no, or little grounding in Greek. I wonder if you would
tell us all just whet your level of expertise in this language is?

So, now that I've at least made a good faith effort to do what you seem
to think I was obliged to do, perhaps you'll answer Larry's questions.
His position is, after all, **his** position, not mine, even if we
overlap, and does not deserve to be put off with the excuse about what
might happen if you answered **him** only to find out that that I held a
different views on the matters at hand . It seems to me a bit churlish
on your part to say your answering him was dependent upon something
happening (my responding) over which he had/has no control.


Yours.

JG
--
Jeffrey B. Gibson, D.Phil. (Oxon.)
1500 W. Pratt Blvd.
Floor 1
Chicago, Illinois 60626
e-mail jgibson000 AT attbi.com
jgibson000 AT hotmail.com






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