Kata Markon

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

To: Crosstalk

Cc: Other Previously Addressed Venues

In Response To: Jeff Peterson

On: The Earliest Markan Narrative

From: Bruce

 

JEFF: Bruce, I hope you'll pardon me for jumping in medias res, but can you specify briefly the philological criteria that justify dispensing with the resurrection as a secondary accretion in Mark?

BRUCE: I already did it briefly, but I know it is counterintuitive for many, and I don't mind doing it again. First, though, an objection: I don't "dispense" with anything whatever. I am not out to identify, *and then exclude,* spuria in the text. I am out to see how the text came into being, and as part of that task, to identify any different strata it may contain. All the strata, the early and the late, are evidence for history. The task of history is simply to assign each part of the evidence to its correct place on the timeline, and thus to its correct place in the course of the development. From the evidence, as thus arranged, we can hope to read such history as the text may be witness to.

JEFF: On the face of things, it would seem to me in narrative terms that the titulus of the work, promising the reader "the origins of the gospel of Jesus Christ" (1:1) and the early evocation of the binding of Isaac 
in the voice from heaven at the baptism ("my beloved Son," 1:11) are fulfilled precisely in the declaration, "He is risen" in 16:6; and the PARRHSIA(i) of 8:32 marks this motif as the disclosure of the "secret of the kingdom of God" intimated in Jesus' ministry (4:11-12). I'd be interested to know just what you see in the text that closes off this line of interpretation.

BRUCE: Nothing closes it off. That interpretation works fine. It very well summarizes the passages it is based on. But to my eye, it is based on passages culled from several different layers of the text. The composite sense of any such combination will normally tend to be the sense of their most recent members. The final point reached by the developmental sequence, accordingly, is the one which will tend to emerge from any inclusive reading of the final product.

 

But we can also read that final product analytically. Here is where the "philological evidence" comes in. How would one read the text analytically?

 

There are a score of ways one might begin, but try this one. There are a lot of names for Jesus in Mark. Among them are Son of David, Son of God, Son of Man. Are these just synonyms, or have they different associations in the text? We won't know until we check them out. If we begin by grouping passages with those terms, we get roughly the following:

 

SON OF DAVID

 

The Son of David passages are concerned with Jesus's qualification to be himself the restorer of the Davidic Kingdom in Israel. He himself deals with an objection to his qualifications in  12:35f. Later tradition, not satisfied with this rather forced argument, actually provided Jesus with standard Davidic credentials: lineal descent and a birth in David's city Bethlehem. Blind Bartimaeus, not waiting for later tradition, acclaims Jesus as Son of David in 10:47. The crowd, shortly thereafter, is a little more careful with their terms, and merely cries "Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father David that is coming!" Jesus himself, in a carefully prearranged way, enters Jerusalem in a manner intended to evoke prophetic precedent. All this looks to the restoration of sovereignty in Israel, not to the death of Jesus. The return of God to Israel is very openly announced as the theme of the work, with the Malachi/Isaiah quote which heads it, in Mk 1:2-3. So far the beginning. Is there a middle? Yes, in the declaration of Peter at 8:29, "You are the Christ." To a Jew of the time, and Peter was himself presumably a Jew of the time, the meaning of that term could only have been a national saviour. This declaration occurs at the halfway point of the Gospel. So this group it items not only runs from first to last (I suggested earlier how the initially disappointing last line might be read), it is signaled by the writer of the text itself as his structural intent. We have then:

 

Beginning: Mk 1:2-3 (God)

Middle: Mk 8:29 (Peter)

End: Mk 15:38 (Rending of the Veil = God again)

 

All this David stuff is utterly beside the point of later Jesus theory. It is literally an embarrassment in the text. And by what is sometimes called the Criterion of Embarrassment, it is unlikely to have been devised and inserted by the later Church, whose beliefs were of a different sort. The only plausible option left is that these passages are remnants of early belief, or perhaps even of historical memory.

 

What is interesting is that (1) if we assemble all the explicitly Davidic passages, and add to them the passages which are *not doctrinally in conflict with them,* we get what amounts to a consecutive narrative, running from the Isaiah epigraph through John the Baptist to the final moment of the Crucifixion; and (2) no passage of this Davidic narrative shows signs of being interpolated into anything else. It all looks, philologically speaking, like narrative bedrock.

 

SON OF GOD

 

I will now be briefer. Like the Davidic set, the Son of God set has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Jesus is so labeled, or so addressed, in the opening statement 1:1 (though I would rather say "beginning," as a reciter might do, not "origin") and in the Voice from Heaven at Jesus's Baptism (though with some others, including Rikk Watts in Beale/Carson 2007 p122f, I see the allusion in Mk 1:11 as to Psa 2:7, not to Isaac). It has an even more dramatic middle in the Transfiguration of 9:1f (God again). And it has a verbally explicit ending in the Roman soldier's exclamation, "Truly, this man was a Son of God." The early and the heavenly powers, and the powers beneath the earth, join in saying so. Here then is a groundplan for a Gospel of Jesus as the Son of God, overlaid on the already literarily complete groundplan for the Gospel of Jesus as the Son of David.

 

Philologically, (1) the passages which can unambiguously be associated with the Son of God group, including as a first approximation all the exorcisms (the Davidic Jesus confined himself to healings), DO NOT form a consecutive narrative by themselves; they rely on the substrate Davidic Messiah narrative to constitute a complete story. And, (2) these passages are at some points interpolated into the Davidic narrative. By the standard presumption obtaining in all fields where texts are examined in this way, the Son of God layer as a whole is thus to be construed as later than the Son of David layer. In theological terms, (3) it represents a divinization of Jesus, a development which is easily seen between the successive Gospels (Mk > Mt > Lk > Jn). The big news here is that this same divinization development can also be seen *within Mark.*

 

SON OF MAN

 

More or less ditto the above. These are associated with predictions of Jesus's coming death. There are beginning, middle, and end:

 

Beginning: Temptations to Desist (Mk 1:12-13)

Middle: Three Predictions of Death (8:31, 9:31, 10:32)

End: Three Temptations to Avoid (Mk 14:34-41)

 

Matthew, enchanted with this design but seeing how it could be improved still more, brought Satan onstage in his equivalent of Mk 1:12-13, and thus made this incident a triple one also. Envious Luke, eager to improve on Matthew whether the result was actually better or not, arranged the Matthean temptations in what for him was a more climactic order.

 

There is also a magnificent coda in this layer, going beyond anything preceding it. The theme of the Son of Man layer is Jesus's sacrificial death, with its promise of salvation for those who believe in Jesus. The coda, Mk 15:40-16:8, goes beyond his Crucifixion to portray, or sufficiently to suggest, his Resurrection. This is the only fully optimistic ending in any layer so far. No wonder it quickly eclipsed in popularity the first two attempts to make historical and operative sense of Jesus.

 

Philologically, (1) The Son of Man passages, and those that can plausibly be associated with them in theme, do not make a complete narrative, and rely on the previously existing (now already composite) substrate for their narrative continuity. (2) There is also interpolation evidence that the Son of Man layer is secondary to the underlying previous substrate narrative. (3) To the divinization of Jesus in Layer 2, there is here added the further theological complication of the salvific meaning of Jesus's death. This gives rise to several famous controversies among the faithful, such as, Is one saved by works (as in Judaism and in Layers 1 and 2) or by faith in the salvific death of Jesus (as increasingly in Layer 3)? Luther  (with Paul) answered, Sola Fide, by faith alone. The Epistle of James, which has no use for the Resurrection (earning Luther's contempt in the process), ridicules this notion. Paul in turn . . . but everyone will recognize this controversy. I only wish to point out that the controversy could only have arisen between a previously works-based belief (as with John the Baptist, and indeed with the early Jesus as described in Mk 1:14-15) and a new faith-based belief. Both these incompatible beliefs are attested within Mark. The faith-based option is found within Mark at such places as the unbelief of the epileptic boy's father in 9:22-23, the promise to those who left everything "for my sake and the Gospel" (Mk 10:29), the curse on those who cause "one of these little ones who believe in me to sin" (Mk 9:42), and the promise of eternal damnation for those who do not believe in Jesus's post-Crucifixion presence, in Mk 3:28-30.

 

Mark is here not a whit less angry at the opposition than Paul at his most vituperative. At bottom, I suggest, it is the same argument. In both Mark and Paul, we have at this point made the transition from the religion of Jesus (what Jesus himself believed, which concerned God) to the religion about Jesus, in which (not to borrow a phrase from the books of Larry Hurtado and others) Jesus himself comes more and more to occupy the God spot in the believer's scheme of things.

 

ENVOI

 

Mark is a simple text, if we take its most vehemently argued highlights and construe the rest in their light. It is a complicated text if we notice its internal differences and indeed contradictions. But it becomes simple again once we recognize that the differences themselves make a pattern, and that we have before us in Mark, not a single-theory interpretation of Jesus, but a whole succession of such theories, the latest of which have the merit of being recognizable in the orthodoxy of the present time, which is always reassuring, and the earliest of which have the merit of reflecting the point from which that orthodoxy began to grow, which is of curious interest to at least a few, and the rest of which have the charm of being transitional from the one to the other: of showing theological history in the very process of happening.

 

(Sorry for the length of this, but it seems that the previous notes, also long in their way, didn't quite work, and this one may perhaps more exactly meet the questions of at least one interested party).

Bruce

 

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project

University of Massachusetts at Amherst