Kata Markon

["E Bruce Brooks" <brooks AT asianlan.umass.edu>]

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