Kata Markon

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

To: GMark
Cc: WSW; GPG; Klyne Snodgrass
On: The Parables in Mark (and Mencius)
From: Bruce

Markan priority or no, very few people seem to approach the Parables by way 
of Mark, though this ought in principle to be the best way to see how the 
parable genre developed, and what it developed from, in early Apostolic 
times.

Klyne Snodgrass gives (at p568) a list of all Markan uses of the term 
"parable:"

3:23 "And he said to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?" There 
follow several similitudes, eg "if a kingdom be divided against itself," 
etc. KS calls these "riddles;" I prefer his second translation "analogies."

4:2. "And he taught them many things in parables." This introduces a string 
of longer comparisons, eg the Mustard Seed. Same function as above.

4:10-20. This long interruption is clearly meant to reinterpret the 
preceding text in later, Apostolic terms. I ignore it for the present.

4:30 "With what can we compare the Kingdom of God, and what comparison shall 
we use for it?" There follows the Mustard Seed. This is its separate 
introduction, refuting the idea (4:2) that these parables were delivered on 
the same occasion; see next. What we have in 4:1-4:33 is a collection of 
typical crowd parables.

4:33. "With many such parables he spoke the Word to them, as they were able 
to hear it." Ending summary; reveals the series to be an anthology rather 
than a literal transcribed sermon; see preceding.

4:34 "He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own 
disciples he explained everything." This esoteric passage is on the same 
level as 4:10-20, and should be regarded as part of the same insertion.

7:17. "And when he had entered the house, and left the people, his disciples 
asked him about the parable." Same situation as 4:10-20, same comment. We 
might call this strain in Mk the "apostolic secret."

12:1 "And he began to speak to them in parables." Introduces the Wicked 
Tenants, the only story parable in Mk. See following discussion.

12:12 " . . . for they perceived that he had told this parable against 
them." Same as preceding, a framing statement.

13:28. "From the fig tree learn its lesson [PARABOLHN]." Evidently meant as 
an exemplary analogy, not something told, but something implicit.

CONCLUSION

All of these except the Wicked Tenants in 12:1-12 amount to nonce 
comparisons, implicit parallels, and homely similitudes. Save for 12:1-12, 
there is no warrant for thinking that the earliest recorded memories of 
Jesus had him telling anything like a story parable. I have recently 
suggested other grounds (stylistic, theological) for regarding 12:1-12 as 
not only late, but VERY late, in Mk. This note is meant to document in more 
detail the typological anomaly of that parable. It stands out. It relates 
not to the rest of Mark, but rather to the standard story parable that was 
to be exploited in Matthew, and still more independently in Luke.

It is interesting that the typologically most advanced of these pieces is 
also the only one to be explicitly set in a controversialist context. See 
further below.

CHINESE CODICIL

I suggested last year, in my review of Klyne's book on the Parables, that 
classical Chinese scholars might profit from noting his typology of 
"parables," and I venture here to repeat that suggestion. Not that it's 
necessarily the last word, but that it is suggestive to see how far it 
applies to other data, and what further categories might turn up in 
examining that data. Without going into rhetorical details, I note that as 
far as the accretion model of Mencius goes, we seem to see the same 
developmental trajectory as suggested for the Markan material above: from 
simple comparison to full-fledged exemplary story.

(1) The historical Mencius in MC 1A1B says to the King of Lyang, "I beg to 
take an example (yw) from warfare." He then sets up a scene where some 
soldiers flee a short distance, and some a longer, and interrogates the King 
as to their relative guilt.

(2) The pseudepigraphic Mencius in MC 1A7 tells the King of Chi that he is 
going about the task of world conquest in the wrong way. "It is like 
[pejorative yóu] climbing a tree to catch fish."

(3) Mencius, whether real or pseudepigraphic, is jettisoned in  MC 4B33, and 
the narrative voice simply tells a story about a fraudulent person who 
pretended to be rich, but actually lived by scavenging food from funeral 
offerings (many details of his livelihood are in resonance with part of the 
bitterly anti-Confucian Mwodz 39, which is from the same period). At the end 
of the story, it is again not the pseudepigraphic Mencius who draws the 
moral, but rather "a gentleman." [Somebody in the camp of the northern 
Mencians has been reading Dzwo Jwan in their spare time]. We here have the 
most beautifully developed piece of short fiction in the whole of the 
Mencian writings. That Mencius himself did not reach that level of literary 
subtlety is perhaps ill news for whose who are inclined to gather all 
excellences under the wings of the word "Mencius," but it will seem like an 
intelligible development to everyone else, particularly in view of the 
parallel development of the sardonic anecdote (some of the best of such 
involving phony or hypocritical behavior typologically akin to MC 4B33) in 
the contemporary Jwangdz. Not contemporary with the historical Mencius, that 
is, but rather contemporary with the middle phase of the posthumous 
development of Mencian thought.

It is interesting that the typologically most advanced of these pieces is 
also the only one to be explicitly set in a general rather than a specific 
interpersonal context. See further above.

Not that either Jesus or the historical Mencius lacked for opposition in 
their time; far from it. But the age of *lateral* opposition, of pressure 
not from the oppressors of the people (the Roman occupation forces; the 
toughnosed reward-and-punishment statecraft philosophers of China) but from 
other theorists addressing essentially the same questions (the Jews vs the 
Christians; the Dauists and Micians, not to mention the cryptoConfucian 
Sywndz, vs the Mencians) against similar pressures which all parties were 
still feeling from above, may perhaps have had its own character, and 
(pending further investigation) may have been somehow especially favorable 
for the development of a freestanding exemplary story form.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project
University of Massachusetts at Amherst