Kata Markon

["Carl W. Conrad" <cwconrad AT artsci.wustl.edu>]

At 9:46 AM -0800 11/11/02, Lou Heron wrote:
>I have a tyro's question about Markís gospel. One often hears it said that
>Markís Greek is crude and obviously that of someone not very comfortable
>with the language. Even I can see that his constructions often appear
>clumsy and that he employs colloquialisms. Nevertheless, some of the crude
>constructions and unusual usages seem to serve Markís purpose very
>effectively. Based on this, I have been attempting as an exercise to
>translate Mark in such a way as to reflect not only what he says but how
>he says it. I had hoped to allow his voice to sound different from that
>of, for instance, Luke. I thought I could do so by constructing sentences
>which were true to the original but which sounded conversational and with
>vulgarisms rather than polished and sophisticated. This turns out to be
>rather difficult, at least for a beginner like me. Markís word choices
>seem often (but, perhaps, not always) to be those of a sophisticated
>writer of the language rather than those of someone searching for the
>correct term. My assumption that he would generally use a simpler and less
>precise word rather than a more subtle one does not seem to be working.
>His sentence structures also seem often to only appear clumsy but actually
>to serve a particular purpose.
>
>I would appreciate the opinion of those whose knowledge of Mark and of
>Greek is superior to mine regarding whether Markís gospel seems to be
>written by a person not particularly adept at using the language. Does he
>appear to you to be thinking in Aramaic and then translating into Greek to
>write? Do you suppose that the view of Jesus we get from Mark accurately
>reflects a particular view of Jesus, or is it heavily influenced by
>linguistic difficulties?  Could Mark be a sort of J.D. Salinger, giving
>profound messages with language which seems deceptively mundane and
>unskillful?

Opinions may differ on this matter; there was a time when I was fond of
saying that the author of GMk wouldn't have passed a first-year Greek
composition course. Some careful reflection following upon some comments by
Edward Hobbs a few years ago brought me to the view I now hold on this
matter: (1) I DO think that Mark's gospel is the earliest of the genre and
that it is based very heavily upon oral tradition; (2) I think that the
"solecisms" in GMk derive fundamentally from the pericopes or oral
tradition received by the author and altered only sufficiently to fit into
his redactive framework, and I suspect thst the bulk of the problematic
usages derive from scarcely adequate conversion of Aramaic traditions into
Greek formualtions; (3) In passages that seem most evidently to be the
author's own redactional compositions, the Greek is really quite good.
Obviously this is a matter of judgment: as to where the seams are between
traditional elements and redactional elements and/or compositions. At any
rate, it seems to me that the author/redactor of GMk did nothing akin to
the wholsesale stylistic recasting of the phraseology of traditional
elements that we see both in Luke and in Matthew with a view to making the
narrative smoother and more readable.
--

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad AT artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad AT ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/