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  • From: "E Bruce Brooks" <brooks AT asianlan.umass.edu>
  • To: "GPG" <gpg AT yahoogroups.com>
  • Cc: GMark <gmark AT lists.ibiblio.org>, WSW <wsw AT yahoogroups.com>, Crosstalk <crosstalk2 AT yahoogroups.com>
  • Subject: [GMark] The Primitive Markan Narrative
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:21:45 -0500

To: GPG
Cc: Various (with apologies for cross-posting)
On: The Primitive Markan Narrative
From: Bruce

Folks,

With the Groundhog already breathing down our necks, we need to move as best
we can. I have accordingly uploaded to the usual page a three-color version
of what I currently take to be Layer 1 of Mark: the Primitive Markan
Narrative. The colors are so you can find your way more easily among the
Historical Presents and their connections: events in blue, Jesus sayings in
red, and the sayings of others than Jesus - a distinctly motley crew,
including disciples and also enemies such as Judas, the High Priest, and
assorted demons - in green, bilious green.

Given the color, the PDF's in question are humongously large. I nearly
destroyed my scanning program on first attempting to make a single file of
the reconstruction. That is why the reconstruction file as finally posted is
broken down into: p1 (Preface, explaining the conventions), p2-5 (Mk 1-9),
p6-9 (Mk 10-15), and p10 (an Appendix in which Mark's First Life of Jesus is
outlined for convenience).

FORM: THE FIRST LAYER

The break in the text proper was thus necessitated by software limits, but
it happens to make a structural point that I thought I would notice
specifically. It is this: the Layer 1 narrative falls very naturally into
two parts of equal length, the first located in Galilee and to the north,
and climaxing in the so-called Confession of Peter, and the second
comprising the trip to Jerusalem and Jesus's death there. It will I think be
obvious that, if this is indeed the earliest version of Mark, its author has
constructed it to have a beginning (the Isaian prophecy of 1:2, which
defines the logic of this Messianic story); a middle (the Confession of
Peter at 8:29, the first open recognition of Jesus's identity in this
version of the story), and an end (the tearing of the Temple veil at 15:38,
with which Adela Yarbro Collins and I concur in thinking that the original
narrative concluded - though I depart from her in that I decline to
recognize the cheerful interpretation of this event in Hebrews as cogent for
Mark).

The two halves into which these markers seem to break the story can be
described (see the Appendix) as a movement from the Jordan (near Jerusalem)
northward to Galilee and beyond in the first part, and a movement from
Galilee to southward to Jerusalem in the second. This probably intentional
formal layout may be something like a remote precursor of Luke's three-way
scheme, in which the Journey section is expanded to take up fully a third of
the story, and the Crucifixion section is similarly expanded to take up
another third, yielding a structural triple, of which the middle member is
transitional between the other two.

CONSECUTIVE RE-FORMS: THE NEXT TWO LAYERS

So the Original Narrative, as I currently see it, had a planned artistic
middle. A breakpoint; a turnaround. Very good. But the trouble with Mark is
that it has TOO MANY middles. All of them are portentously significant, but
in different terms.

Thus the middle of the Messianic Layer 1 is the announcement that Jesus is
in fact the Messiah. Nothing very strange here, though it is undeniably
effective; its power persists even in the later overwritten Mark, and no
commentator known to me fails to remark on it.

The middle of the Layer 2 or Son of God overlay text is naturally the
Transfiguration Scene in which God announces that Jesus is his Son, this is
flanked by new beginnings and endings proclaiming the same thing (God at
Jesus's baptism, and the Roman Soldier at his death). Just so no one will
miss the point, or will be led astray by the old Isaianic beginning of the
story at 1:2, this layer has added a superscription, 1:1, in which the
Gospel as a whole is said to be that "of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." Here
we have a symbolic reworking of an already symbolic, but *differently*
symbolic, previous document.

And the third layer, the Son of Man layer, which introduces the Resurrection
as a new and important idea, naturally has its center too: as readers of
commentaries will know, it is usually located in the Three Predictions of Mk
8, 9, and 10. And those too are flanked front and back in more or less
symmetrical fashion by the Three Desert Temptations of Mk 1 and the Three
Gethsemane Temptations of Mk 14 (I give Adela full credit for beating me to
a form of this particular insight, on which I gratefully acknowledge her
help), and of course backed up thematically by the appended Empty Tomb scene
in Mk 15-16, which is now the end of Mark.

EVIDENCE FOR ACCRETION

One need not have read Aristotle to appreciate the wisdom of giving one's
story a beginning, a middle, and an end (a little babysitting suffices), and
one need not have lived one's life as a lutanist to recognize the power of
the ABA songform, which is basic to so much artistic construction, both
literary and musical. There is accordingly nothing strange about ANY ONE of
these sets of beginning, middle, and end markers being present in Mark. What
is against all probability is that one author, at one time, should give his
work THREE DIFFERENT AND OVERLAPPING beginnings, middles, and ends. The
presence of these mutually redundant and thematically conflicting formal
signals is to me one of the strongest arguments for a stratified Mark. The
logic of these three layers was reduced to a diagram on p3 of the Handout
for the Nov 08 SBL special meeting on Accretional Mark. A PDF of that
handout is still available on the NT Quest web page abovementioned. I think
it makes its point rather efficiently, but I have ventured to restate it
here, just in case.

ENVOI

So there it is. Comments on the reconstructed Layer 1 are now very much in
order, if anybody has the time (and I fully recognize that the crowds of
Groundhog shoppers in the stores and on the streets very much slow down our
already busy schedules). I don't pretend that the reconstruction as it
stands is perfect, either in the sense of being wholly accurate, or, even IF
accurate, of being literarily complete. It looks to me, indeed, as though
some text has been lost through overwriting at points of special emphasis,
chiefly the Lord's Supper, for reasons that I hardly need to spell out, and
perhaps at a few other spots as well. The thing thus has its bumps and
corners, but is not the less realistic for that, like the occasionally
defaced character in the Tang Stone Classics, that lets you know you are
looking at a rubbing and not a typesetting. Let me know if anybody spots
trouble of this kind, or of any other kind, or indeed any points of interest
at all.

Best wishes of the pre-Groundhog days, and good health and weather to all.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst




  • [GMark] The Primitive Markan Narrative, E Bruce Brooks, 01/13/2009

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