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FINDINGS III
A Primer on According to Mark
By Harry T. Cook
 | | Harry T. Cook |
For most of the next 12 months we will be reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting passages from a document from the mid-to-late- first century C.E. known as According to Mark. Most New Testament scholars -- including this journeyman one -- do our work based on the hypothesis that this document was the first thing of its kind and set the pattern for at least According to Matthew and According to Luke. One notable exception is C.S. Mann whose research convinced him that Matthew, Luke and Mark came ad seriatim. Mann thought that the roughly parallel passages in Matthew and Luke suggest the two came first and second, respectively, and that Mark and According to John were more closely related than most scholars assume. Withal, the "Mark First" hypothesis will lie at the base of the commentaries that follow in this 52-week series. Mark is briefer than the other two synoptics. It includes neither birth nor resurrection narratives, and it covers only a few months in the public exposure of the character Jesus. The very first Markan passage to be considered in this series is redolent of the epoch-making events around the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., suggesting that the document was written and compiled some time following those events -- perhaps not very long after, but after them nevertheless. Doctrine-driven commentators are anxious to prove that Mark was written before the Jerusalem debacle and in chapter 13 foresees it. It is this exegete's hypothesis that Mark was written at least in part in response to the 70 C.E. events, that the author was aware of the existence of what we now call "Q" -- being the collection of Jesus sayings found variously found in The Gospel of Thomas, Matthew and Luke. A sub-hypothesis is that those sayings were, with some of the epistolary material contributed by Paul, the primary literature of the earliest communities of Jesus Judaism. I think whoever wrote and edited Mark decided in light of 70 C.E. that those sayings, brilliant and to the point as they were, lacked a story (μϋθος in Koine Greek, fabula in Latin), i.e. a narrative, or, in Homeric literature, "recital" -- perhaps closer to the point. The author(s)/editor(s) of Mark, perhaps convinced that the ethical sayings of Thomas and Q would not bear up the new communities adequately, gave us the first "recital" of a story that would go on to become the heart of the gospel. The Markan author(s)/editor(s) may have concluded that, to compete in the rich bazaar of Graeco-Roman myth religions, the new movement needed its own μϋθος, which they provided beginning with "Jesus came preaching." The disappearance of Zion's cultic center and sacrificial apparatus was to first-century C.E. Palestinians devout and otherwise like the death of respected public figure or the destruction of an ancestral mansion. That cultic center had become a Ground Zero of a complex story that bound even the avant-garde Jesus Judaism to itself. But now the new communities needed a mythos of their own. Hence was created out of bits and pieces of oral tradition a story with neither Israel nor its patriarchs and other heroes at its center, but one "Yeshua." Recitals of the dying and rising sons of the gods abounded in the religious marketplace. Every religion that would compete in that market needed one such story. Someone who was called or took the name of "Mark" either wrote that story by gathering, arranging and in some cases creating various sub-stories -- leaving Thomas and the Q people to do their work while he did his. The result is the remarkable and somewhat jagged piece of work we know as According to Mark, which was probably compiled by a Greek-speaking Jew or Gentile convert to Jesus Judaism shortly after 70 C.E. maybe in or around the Galilean community of Capernaum where the gospel depicts Jesus' recruitment of followers (1:16ff) and quite quickly thereafter the inaugural teaching in the Capernaum synagogue, the exorcism of a demon and the ministry to Simon's feverish mother -- all in 10 verses (1:21-31). * * * * * Advent I-B -- November 27, 2011 Mark 13:24-37 We begin Year-B with its singular Markan passage that signals the beginning of an end. The "days" of 13:24 are those alluded to earlier in ch. 13 when "many will come in my name, saying 'I am he!' and they lead many astray." Those days will seem like everything is at sixes and sevens: "suffering" (θλϊψιν - in Aristotle "pressure," in Koine Greek "tribulation," "stress," "afflicition." The verb form suggests the process of blowing mud through a thin straw. Think of a good-sized baby coming down the birth canal. And not only that but "the desolating sacrilege," perhaps more accurately, "the sacrilege that lays waste." Luke comes right out and says it in 21:20: "Jerusalem surrounded by armies." Although Mark puts these words of warning on Jesus' lips, they are clearly addressed to Jesus Jews in the early part of the last third of the first century C.E. All three of the synoptic gospels now introduce science fiction into the recitals as sun, moon and stars stop doing whatever it is they normally do and start doing the abnormal. Luke includes "the roaring of the sea" and people "fainting away with fear." These images cannot be reckoned as forecasted events. They must be understood as extravagant, over-the-top metaphors for how it felt for Jews of all stripes to have the whole fabric of their cultic life rent into tatters. To the Markan writers and editors and to others like them, the real-time events of September 70 C.E. must have seemed as if Isaiah at 13:10 and 34:4 had foretold them, hence Mark's and Matthew's almost verbatim borrowing of the prophet's imagery. Daniel at 9:27, 11:31 and 12:11 had spoken of the "abomination that desolates," which we are to assume sparked the Maccabean revolt. Those who saw the 70 C.E. events from the standpoint of their loyalty to Jesus Judaism and Jesus' ethical teaching might have viewed them as part of the undoing of traditional Judaism which Mark's Jesus seems so set against. Such sentiment can quickly turn to apocalyptic, which is exactly what happened to this passage and others like it -- as if Jesus had not yet come, or had not come quite as some wished he had. Now maybe he will come "in clouds with power and great glory." As Charles Wesley (1707-1788) envisioned it: Lo! He comes with clouds descending, once for our salvation slain; Thousand thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train: Alleluia! Alleluia! Christ the Lord returns to reign. Every eye shall now behold him, robed in dreadful majesty; Those who set at nought and sold him, pierced, and nailed him to the tree, Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, shall the true messiah see.* Withal, the Markan text works as well as any to set one up for Advent, to temper the pre-Christmas hoo-hah enough to able to see the larger picture. The mythic recital of the end of the story will precede its telling from the beginning, at least as Mark saw the beginning. And the end's metaphoric recital serves to prompt us to "keep awake," as the last words of the Advent I gospel lection bid us do, i.e. to keep focused on the larger picture of a world awry and, in particular, what its tragedies, disasters, threats and injustices call upon us to do. * Hymn 57, The Hymnal 1982, New York, Church Publishing Co. |
