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  • From: "E Bruce Brooks" <brooks AT asianlan.umass.edu>
  • To: "GMark" <gmark AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: GPG <gpg AT yahoogroups.com>, Klyne Snodgrass <ksnodgrass AT Northpark.edu>, WSW <wsw AT yahoogroups.com>
  • Subject: [GMark] The Parables in Mark (and Mencius)
  • Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:08:28 -0500

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




  • [GMark] The Parables in Mark (and Mencius), E Bruce Brooks, 01/13/2009

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