To begin this introduction to some writings about the Gospel of Mark, I want to contrast the approach I take here with so-called “Quests for the Historical Jesus”.
The beginning of these quests coincided with the beginning of modern, evidence-based historiography in the late 18th century. This brought with it a questioning of the Gospel stories of Jesus, long accepted by Christians as literal accounts of the life of the historical Jesus. Evidence-based Quests for the Historical Jesus, began with a posthumously published work by Hermann Reimarus in 1778, and continue unabated until present times. (The 3 “Quests” for the Historical Jesus gives An account of three phases of this quest.)
Recent quests for the historical Jesus cite a great deal of evidence for conditions in Palestine under Roman rule at the time of Jesus, trying to place the historical person Jesus in this context. But as for the individual Jesus himself, we have practically no evidence for his life outside the Gospel stories. So to try to piece together accounts of the life of the historical Jesus, such accounts have to do a great deal of selection and interpretation of individual Gospel stories, selecting some and dismissing others, and interpreting them in a way that fits some story line favored by a modern author.
In writings on the Gospel of Mark I am posting here, I take a different approach. The writings posted here are best looked on, not as one more attempt to create one more of the hundreds of pictures of Jesus on which Christians have based their lives, or should base their lives. Look on them rather as an attempt to give an account of the historical and motivational origins of what became mainstream Christianity, and to use the Jesus story presented in the Gospel of Mark as the main evidence on which to base an account.
The general approach I take is based on a particular account of the earliest history of Christianity. In this account, Jesus probably did gather a large following in Israel. But the fact that neither Jesus nor his followers in Israel have left us any writings to serve as reliable historical evidence for Jesus’s story and teachings makes it difficult to reconstruct them. The Gospel of Mark is probably the earliest still surviving writing which attempts to tell the story of Jesus. It was most likely written by and for a group of Greek-speaking Jesus-followers who were members of a Jewish synagogue community gathered somewhere in the Mediterranean world outside of Israel proper. This is the context out of which grew what we know as historical mainstream Christianity. It thus served as a foundational document giving us a good picture of the worldview of the Christian movement that survived and spread throughout Europe and North Africa. Historical Christianity began among Jesus-followers in synagogue communities who never met Jesus. They were converted, not by Jesus, but by stories of Jesus such as we have in the Gospel of Mark, and preaching about Jesus such as we have in the letters of Paul. If the story and message of the historical Jesus and his immediate followers in Israel is different from the story and message presented to us in the Gospel of Mark–as questers for the historical Jesus claim–then we have to say that the historical Jesus was not the founder of mainstream historical Christianity.
So in the writings on the Gospel of Mark presented here, I will not be using selected passages from the Gospel of Mark as evidence for an attempt to create the real story of the real Jesus. I will take seriously the entire Gospel of Mark, as a founding document for a community of Jesus-followers in a Jewish synagogue community. These Jesus-followers are the intended audience for which Mark is writing his Jesus-story. I will be asking about this audience itself: What must have been the assumptions, preoccupations, and concerns, which made the Gospel of Mark so moving to them? If their lives were changed by this story, what must this change have looked like? (In days before the existence of printing presses and publishing houses, the only way a document like this would only be preserved and widely dispersed if considerable numbers of people felt motivated enough to undertake the laborious task of hand-copying the text of the Gospel of Mark, and passing it on to others to copy.)
On this view, while “Quests for the Historical Jesus” situate this quest in the context of Palestine at the time of Jesus, what became mainstream Christianity did not have its origins in this context, but in the context of Jewish synagogues spread throughout to Mediterranean world outside Israel. Among other things, attitudes to Roman rule among members of these Jewish synagogues were most likely very different from attitudes to Roman rule among Jews living in Israel at the time of Jesus.
While many Jews in Palestine resented Roman rule over their homeland and agitated against them, people living under Roman rule in the Mediterranean world generally had a very different experience of Roman rule. Romans just kept law and order, and groups from a wide diversity of ethnic groups formed small clubs to preserve their cultures in other lands, taking advantage of this general Roman umbrella. Jewish synagogue communities constituted only one example of such ethnic clubs dedicated to preserving the Jewish tradition by study of Jewish scriptures. The Jesus movement outside Israel began as one faction in these communities, battling other factions over what should be the true version of Jewish tradition. The original audiences for Mark’s Gospel and for Paul’s preaching were members of these synagogue communities. This, not Palestine, is the context in which we should try to understand the Gospel of Mark and the letters of Paul.
I have included here some key selections of a work by Burton Mack, giving a good description of social conditions in the Mediterranean world under Roman Rule, and situating Jewish synagogue communities in this context. (These are selections from the first chapter of Mack’s book Who Wrote the New Testament?)
The Mediterranean world under Roman rule.
The Romans were rather good at keeping order throughout the Mediterranean world, building roads, quelling civil disturbances, and ridding the lands and seas of pirates and bandits (hence the so-called pax romana). They were also good at public works. What they added to the cities where their legions took up residence were aqueducts, civic buildings, and baths. They did not demand ideological loyalty of their provinces, only cooperation with their Roman governors and the payment of taxes (hence procurator, meaning both governor and procurer). And they developed a practical approach to legislation that made it possible for them to mediate in matters where ethnic and cultural strife threatened social harmony.
But law and order is one thing, building public works another, and creating a common culture still another. None of their subject peoples was fascinated with Roman history, religion, and culture. Roman law and order were cold. Some said ruthless, but that overlooks the limited interest Rome took in the peoples they governed. The Romans were more efficient than ruthless. They had no desire to create either fear or loyalty on the part of their subjects. Thus the city on the Tiber was respected, but it was not loved. And even though a provincial people might be thankful to the Roman legions for clearing their territories of bandits and highwaymen, no one appreciated their obviously superior and repressive military presence. The Romans did not inspire loyalty, and the empire they created did not have a cultural soul. Law and order are never enough to keep a people dancing.
What were the people to do, living in such a mixed-up world? Many found themselves transplanted throughout the large empire of cities, peoples, and different cultures that resulted from the wars of the Greco-Roman age. Warring was constant from the death of Alexander in 323 B.C.E. to the annexation of Egypt as a Roman province in 30 B.C.E. However, these wars were localized and spotty, leaving vast areas of the empire to govern themselves as best they could as long as they caused no trouble and paid their taxes. So being transplanted by force of a foreign power was not the only way dispersion occurred. Many people moved of their own accord to seek a better livelihood in one of the Hellenistic cities that had sprung up, armies and ethnic tensions notwithstanding. And those still living in their own lands were not deprived of the mixing of peoples taking place. Foreign presence and military power, contact with other peoples, and the need to deal with cultural conventions that differed from their own were all too obvious for that.
Thus the mix of peoples, cultures, and political powers was the single most obvious and challenging feature of the times. Not only were peoples of all ethnic extractions living together in cities without a common culture, the histories of incessant warring and rapid political changeovers settled into convoluted layers of bitter memories and hatreds. How to live in a multicultural world that lacked adequate guidelines for such cross-cultural transactions was the challenge.
Reactions among the common people, creating smaller alternative communities.
So what were people to do? At the surface level, people responded in all of the ways one might expect. Most understood that the situation and its terms were a fait accompli, learned enough Greek (the lingua franca) to get by…. Some even found the diversity invigorating and took it as an opportunity for esoteric adventures or entrepreneurial activity that traded on the breakdown of traditional institutions.
But the breakup of established social units and the erosion of conventional territorial and cultural boundaries created some raw edges as well. Social tensions rooted in culturally conditioned values, taboos, and attitudes toward the other are not easily overcome. And so, beneath the surface, serious cultural conflict swirled around such issues as homosexuality (a moral problem for Jews, for instance, but not for the Greeks); prostitution (accepted by the Greeks as a fact of city life but regarded by the Jews as threatening family values); the laws that governed marriage, divorce, and the treatment of slaves; the cultural and cultic significance of foods and family meals; the public role of women; proper attire; and attendance at the baths, athletic events, banquets, civic feasts (“sacrifices”), and festivals.
Differences in codes of purity, propriety, ranking, honor, and shame created friction for people of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Lifestyles, gestures, and behavioral characteristics otherwise taken for granted among one’s own people were now on display as features that marked an ethnic minority. Ethnicity was the common coin for stereotyping…. People tended to seek out their own kind in foreign cities and form communities where familiar signs of recognition prevailed. In Alexandria, for example, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and others tended to live in ghetto-like districts of the city known as their quarters.
How to keep one’s culture alive was the question. The artifacts of erstwhile societies were in fragments, and any conscious attempt to reconstruct a “little Syria” or a “little Egypt” in one’s own quarter of a foreign city had to work with the transportable bits and pieces that remained. One would have to take a few of these pieces, cluster them as signs that the group’s traditions were not dead, and create a center for people to meet in mutual recognition of their common cultural heritage. Movable artifacts included books, rituals, calendars, statues, symbolic attire, and adornment. Social conventions that could be kept alive in distant lands included special foods, the structure of family life, kinship arrangements, patterns of hospitality, and traditional ways of resolving conflict internal to the group.
But without the support of one’s own land and its institutions, innovation was called for. Innovation was on display everywhere during this period. Shrines popped up in memory of or in devotion to traditional gods or heroes…. Schools, libraries, oracles, and healing cults also spread throughout the Mediterranean basin from origins specific to particular lands and localities. Professional entrepreneurs of divination, dream interpretation, and magic capitalized on the demise of ancient religious institutions where functions such as these had formerly been integrated into and controlled by the regular round of cultic activity integral to a society (Brown 1971; J.Z. Smith 1993, 172–89).
It was also during this period that the famous mystery cults spread, complete with myths, rituals, priests, and priestesses (Burkert 1987). These cults are best understood as replications away from home of religious institutions that were once located in a particular land and people. The “mysteries” of Isis, Osiris, Serapis, Attis, Adonis, Mithra, the “Great Mother,” and the Syrian Goddess are examples of diaspora cults that represented archaic religions and cultures rooted in other times and lands…. We have accounts of the priests of Isis processing through a town in lands far from home. They would go down to the sea on the yearly navigium Isidis, the festival of Isis, protectress of ships at sea, and everyone would have to acknowledge the power and presence of the Egyptian goddess.
Creation of ethnic clubs and Jewish “synagogues.”
Of even greater importance for the early history of Judaism and Christianity was another way to create a small social unit within a larger urban environment. Variously called fellowships (koinoniai), festive companies (thiasoi), or clubs (collegia), associations sprang up wherever people got together regularly around a common interest. Interests ranged from ethnic fellowship and craft guilds, through societies that aimed at the preservation of cultural traditions and the care of religious shrines, to funeral associations and mystery cults. The basic pattern of association was the same. Members would meet approximately once a month, share a common meal in the midafternoon (the usual time for the “evening” meal), invoke the patron mascot or deity, acknowledge the club symbols, conduct business, and spend the rest of the early evening socializing. Associations elected officers, charged dues, and took steps to protect their interests. Associations often substituted for societies that had been destroyed. Signs and symbols of the homeland culture could be displayed. A little taste of home away from home could be cultivated in the cuisine. With the doors shut, conversation could turn to matters unfit for the public arena.
And building a network of associations from city to city was a distinct possibility. Guests and friends from afar could be received and entertained at the meetings of the association and at the homes of members of an association. Networks provided hospitality for members who traveled to other cities and created the sense of belonging to a people who had spread throughout the empire.
In the case of Jewish associations, at first called “houses of prayer” and later “synagogues” (from the Greek synagoge, gathering), buildings were actually constructed to serve as educational, religious, and social centers. There is even some evidence for a banking system centered at the temple in Jerusalem and supported by synagogues throughout the empire.
…. the individual was now left standing in the midst of a large and confused universe to negotiate with the gods and the uncertain forces of human destiny as best one could… Some despaired of integrating religion and society, culture and the present political system, or even of imagining the world as a divinely ordered home for human habitation… Plato’s myth of the creation of the world by a divine craftsman (demiurgos) who followed the plans in the mind of the highest god was very popular.
Jews used Plato’s myth to imagine how the world could have gotten so out of shape when it was God’s wisdom that had planned it. It was the demiurgos [not the real God] who did it, or perhaps it was the material that was faulty, or maybe humans had just been too dense or contrary to see the perfect pattern behind it all. Surely the failures of human societies cannot have ruined God’s perfect plan for the world. The world created by wisdom must indeed exist. Perhaps it exists as a spiritual realm known only to those who could “see through” the corruption of the physical world by means of divine inspiration.
Slowly, however, it dawned on people that the universe might not be all that friendly. The only thing about the universe that seemed to be ordered was the movement of the stars. And that movement was like clockwork, unfeeling and predetermined. But it was calculable. Astrology flourished. There was also much talk about tyche, the goddess of fate, and fortuna, the goddess of fortune. Unfortunately, both of these divine powers were fickle.
And there was great interest in dreams and magic; dreams because they might at least give you a chance to know ahead of time what would befall, and magic because it gave you a slight chance to be in control of something in an otherwise capricious world. So with the elision of the city from the ancient equation of cosmos, polis, and anthropos, the world itself was no longer comprehensible, and human existence was threatened with insignificance.
The human spirit is amazingly creative and resilient. Not to be overwhelmed by the unfeeling forces of fate in the universe, and the fact that the Romans were firmly in control of their soulless empire, many intellectuals refused to give up on the quest for a social model fit for the times.
The quest took two quite different directions. Some turned to the schools of Greek philosophy in order to get started, while others turned to the national epics to re-search the wisdom of the past….
Jewish Scriptures as Epic Narrative, attractive to many who were not ethnic Jews.
Two epics attracted the most attention, and competition between them was fierce. Homer had the edge because the dominant culture was Greek.
But the story of Israel also created a great deal of interest even outside Jewish circles. That is because Jewish culture drew upon its epic tradition in order to undergird a set of ideas and values that, although threatened by the Greco-Roman age, were still found attractive. The concepts of a righteous god, a divine law, a creation designed to enhance both wonder and morality, a vision of society based on social justice, and rituals for the observance and celebration of sane, rational, family-centered life could all be gathered from their epic. It was a story of the people that stretched from the creation of the world to the construction of the temple-state in Jerusalem. It was a reasonable contrast to the stories of fickle gods and arrogant heroes with which the Greeks had to make do. And Moses, the author of the five books called torah (instruction), was clearly a match for Homer. Some said Moses was earlier than Homer, that he had lived somewhere near the very beginning of human history, and that whatever Homer knew, he must have learned from Moses.
But the more important advantage was that the “law of Moses” was not just law, even though everyone had learned to translate torah with nomos, but real epic. Creation, the origin of the species, and culture bringers, along with violence, folly, the rainbow’s promise, patriarchal legends, eternal covenants, and the destiny of a people all took shape before laws in the narrower sense ever entered the picture. It was something to think about.
And many did. Scholars with social questions in mind became obsessed with the books of Moses as the second-temple history ran its course. Some retold the story at length in the interest of saying how grand the history of Israel had been and how respectable the Jewish people were (Josephus, Jubilees). Others highlighted aspects of the story that gave the present shape of society its epic constitution, leaving out the parts that did not fit (Sirach 44–50; Mack 1985). And others still read Moses and the prophets to lift up a forgotten ideal, use it to criticize the status quo, and say what had to happen in order to set things right (Qumran). In every case, the strategy was the same: revising the epic in light of present circumstances from a particular point of view to support a critical judgment about the present state of affairs.
Historians of religion would say that these Jewish scholars followed a typical pattern of mythmaking. This pattern works in the following way. The current state of affairs is not living up to the promise of the past. The recent past comes under critique. The stories of the more distant past are rehearsed to make sure of the promise. The aim is to see the promise more clearly, more precisely, and test the reasons for having thought that it was true. This brings focus to bear upon a certain moment, epoch, or feature of the history that can serve as a key to its fundamental logic and promise. Reseen, and lifted from its ancient history as an ideal model, the figure can then be used as an image of what the people and their culture were, are in essence, or should be. The image can then be used as a contrast to the present situation in order to render a critique, provide a model for rebuilding, or project a hopeful future. In our time, this pattern of thinking can be recognized in the frequent reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the American dream, or the Constitution of the United States.
In second-temple times, the epic of Israel was a rich reservoir of ideal types, and all of them were used at one time or another in the process of mythmaking. Adam, Abraham, the covenants, Moses, the exodus, the law, the temple charter in Leviticus, the entrance into the land, David, Solomon, the building of the temple, the kingdoms, the prophets, and so forth could all be cast as icons of Israel’s sociology and used for comparison and contrast with the contemporary situation.
The Jews did not need to learn a new set of tricks to use their epic this way. Jews had been revising their epic history since the time of David and Solomon. Reimagining the past was their way of mythmaking. The past provided standards for contemporary social critique. It could also lend authority to proposals for shaping society anew….
We now know that non-Jews found diaspora synagogues to be a very attractive subcultural association, and that gentiles did gather around to study the scriptures, rehearse the epic, honor the one God, celebrate the feasts and festivals, and learn to keep the Jews’ laws with their high ethical standards. Naturally there were debates galore about whether the gentiles would have to go all the way in order to belong to the association of Israel. That would have meant being circumcised, keeping whatever form of kosher was in practice, and perhaps paying a temple tax. Some Jews said yes, they should go all the way. Others said no, it did not matter.
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