The formation of Gospel of Mark
Most modern critical scholars are agreed on a general thesis about how the Gospel of Mark was composed.
The basic building blocks for the Gospel consisted of bits of tradition–mainly stories and sayings–handed down orally in the early Christian community. These stories and sayings were told and retold because the points they make were of continued interest to the Christian community. And as the concerns and interests of the community changed, the way they told the stories and sayings changed correspondingly.
In the oral tradition, these stories and sayings were told independently of each other. The (otherwise unknown) author of the Gospel of Mark was the earliest one we know about to try to string this oral material together into a continuous story. In arranging the material, it is unlikely that he is proceeding according to historical remembrances of exactly what happened when. His story is not a biography to satisfy curiosity; the story itself is “Gospel”, in Greek eu-angelion, “good-announcement”, i.e. preaching aimed at “converting” an audience to a new way of life. The stories are arranged for dramatic effect, to make a certain impression on the reader, conveying an impression about what Jesus meant to Mark and his community.
This account of the Gospel’s origin dismays many modern readers, disappointed that they are getting Mark’s interpretation of Jesus, rather than “the real story.” There is no cure for this disappointment: We have no access to the real uninterpreted story. The disappointment also rests on mistaken thinking. First, it imagines that there can be a story of Jesus’ life that is not an interpretation of this life; but every retelling of a person’s life is an interpretation of that life, conveyed in the selection and arrangement of facts, and the perspective from which the facts are viewed. Secondly, it takes it as a given that the real Jesus, and his real life, must be a more “pure” source of Christian ideals than any early Christians’interpretation of Jesus; it does not realize that early Christian interpretations of Jesus are themselves the source of this very impression. Their accounts of what Jesus meant to them are our only basis for our impressions about Jesus’ greatness. Finally, it makes the philosophical mistake of trying to derive an ought' from an is’. If it is anything, the Christian message is a message about what we ought to do with our lives. No bare and neutral facts about anyone’s life can serve as a valid basis for drawing conclusions about such `oughts’. Any account of what we ought to do with our lives needs to stand or fall on its own merits. The critical question we most need to ask about the Gospel of Mark is not about the historical accuracy of its story, but about the substantive merit of its implicit message about what we should regard as of overriding importance in human life.
Implications for Hermeneutics
This thesis about the origins of the Gospel has two important implications for hermeneutics. [“Hermeneutics” is an academic field, theory and method in the interpretation of writings.]
First, it implies that in reading the individual gospel stories, we must avoid our natural tendency to regard this as a “biography” of Jesus in the manner of modern biographies, aiming to bring the reader back into Jesus’ own times, to understand the course of events that influenced his personality and attitudes, and the way that he himself influenced his contemporaries. Neither the story-tellers who shaped the individual stories about Jesus in the oral tradition, nor Mark himself, operate with this objective, fact-oriented hermeneutics, aiming to take the reader out of her own time and bring her back into Jesus’ time. The stories are probably based on real memories of Jesus, but they have been told and retold in order to bring “Jesus” into the lives of the hearers and readers of the story. Relevance to issues of importance to later Jesus-followers, not issues of importance to Jesus in his own lifetime, is the decisive factor governing the way the stories are told. What we must ask, then, in reading the story, is not, “What were Jesus’ motives for doing X?”. We must ask, rather, “What issues of interest to later Jesus-followers does this story address, and what point is the storyteller trying to make for this audience in telling the story this way?” The best method of making conjectures about this is the one valid for most writings from distant cultures: Look carefully at the stories themselves and try to guess what issue the storyteller seems to think is important; then try to match this up with what we know from other sources about issues important to early Jesus-followers.
Consider Mark 2/18-22. The passage opens with the question as to why Jesus’ disciples do not fast on certain days like the Pharisees and other Jewish groups do. The story as it stands has Jesus making two different and contradictory replies. The second reply asserts that Jesus’ followers don’t fast because they belong to a radically new movement that wants to emphasize its difference from customs other groups regard as “traditional” (“don’t pour new wine into old wineskins”). The first reply, however, gives a reason why some group of Jesus’ followers, after his death, did take up traditional fasting-customs, contrary to Jesus’ own practice: Jesus’ physical presence was a cause for celebration, as at a wedding, and one does not fast at a wedding-celebration; once the “bridegroom” [Jesus] has departed, however, then it is appropriate to take up the usual custom of fasting. The contradictory nature of the replies is evidence of the complex history of this story in the oral tradition. The defense of not fasting may or may not go back to Jesus, but in any case the story was kept alive in oral tradition because some group of Jesus-followers needed to defend their departure from customs widely practiced by other Jews at the time. At some later stage however, the story came to be told in a group of Jesus-followers who did follow these fasting customs, but who were also conscious that this practice was a departure from the way traditional stories represented Jesus. They then added what is now the first reply, putting into the mouth of Jesus a rationale for their own practice. This does not represent the simple “lying propaganda” that it might seem to us. It represents rather the fact that Jesus-stories as a genre function in these communities as indirect speech, a kind of indirect language by which groups carried on discussions and debates as to the proper interpretation about what it means to be a Jesus-follower. Mark continues this tradition. His longer Jesus-story is his attempt to address issues of importance to the later community of Jesus-followers whom he is addressing, probably to take sides in some debates within a group of Jesus-followers, or between this group and others with whom they were in contact and conflict.
Two Layers of Material
Secondly, the thesis that Mark’s composed his gospel by stringing together many stories and sayings from an oral tradition he did not create, means that there are potential differences between these two layers of material, the stories from oral tradition on the one hand, and the use Mark wants to make of them on the other. Mark would not select and include some piece of oral tradition unless there were something in it that is useful for his message. But he is not necessarily interested in every element of every story he selects. He is probably fairly conservative in relation to the orally transmitted stories, repeating them as he has heard them, there may be some elements and some wording in these stories that are not closely related to his actual intention. They are there only because they are part of the oral tradition, not because they further Mark’s own interests. If our intention is to try to understand Mark’s message, we have to try to follow carefully his story line, and the themes that tend to recur often or receive emphasis, and try to conjecture what elements of any given story are important for his overall message, and what their importance is.
(A note on Mark’s relation to the gospel of Matthew and Luke, stories of Jesus’ life also found in the New Testament: The common opinion among modern scholars is that these gospels are later than Mark, and that their authors both knew of the Gospel of Mark Mark and incorporated its Jesus-story into their compositions. They altered Mark’s story at various points to bring it into accord with their versions of the Christian message, and they also filled in Mark’s story with large blocks of explicit teaching ascribed to Jesus [by comparison, Mark is noteworthy for his focus on the Jesus story, and his lack of extensive accounts of what Jesus taught.] Since Matthew and Luke seem to share large amounts also of this teaching material, scholars have hypothesized that there must have been one other written document besides Mark which both Matthew and Luke are drawing from, a document consisting mainly of teachings. Scholars call this hypothesized document “Q” [from the German Quelle, “source” of sayings-material]. There seems to be widespread agreement today that there was such a document, although no independent traces of it have ever been found.)
The mind-set and concerns of Mark’s original audience.
Mark chose to preach his “Gospel” in the form of a narrative. Narrative is capable of dealing with fundamental issues–as in what we call “serious fiction”. Serious fiction deals with fundamental issues indirectly, by dramatizing them in the interplay of its characters. Mark is best looked upon as “serious fiction” dramatizing issues of concern to his audience. We need to try to reconstruct the mindset of this audience, and the issues of concern to them, primarily by careful attention to the way he tells the story itself, but also by correlating this with some plausible life-setting in the world of early Jesus-followers.
The broader socio-historical context.
Most attempts to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus place the Jesus story in the context of Palestine. I think this is an unlikely context for Mark and his audience. More likely, the Gospel of Mark had its origins in some synagogue community/communities in the Mediterranean world outside of Israel, similar to the synagogue communities to which the letters of Paul were addressed. The following is my description of conditions in this world that would have shaped the mentality of Mark’s audience. (A similar account, elaborated on more fully, can be found in Burton Mack’s Who Wrote the New Testament p. 19-43.)
The eastern Mediterranean had been torn for several centuries by wars between great imperialist powers: First the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Greeks (under Alexander the Great), and then the Romans. This meant that local cultures were constantly faced with the problem of illegitimate political power: The imperial powers ruled over these local cultures by force of military might, lacking any legitimate grounding in the traditions of the local cultures themselves. This could easily lead to feelings of extreme alienation: The actions of the imperial powers often worked to disrupt or destroy the development and healthy functioning of local cultures, but failed to replace this with any community life that individuals could feel was worthy of their allegiance and participation.
At the same time, the image of the all-powerful and quasi-divine “ruler of the world” that played such a role in Persian, Greek, and Roman political thought, gave rise to counter-images of the all-powerful hero who would overthrow these illegitimate rulers and establish a universal kingdom of justice and peace. This phenomenon grew gradually worse in the four centuries preceding Jesus: The Persians maintained a relatively “hands off” policy so far as local cultures were concerned. The successors of Alexander the Great more aggressively pushed what they thought were the “universal” values of Greek culture, to which they tried to convert all “barbaric” non-Greeks under their control (leading to the Maccabean revolt in Israel, 167-170 b.c.) The Romans pursued this conversion process more insistently and accompanied it with more oppressive interference in local community life, enforced by more brutal military force.
I believe that the German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) grasped well the main relevance of this situation for the origin and character of earliest Christianity. The following quotes are taken from his Philosophy of History (Dover 1956)
The distinction between the Roman and the Persian principle is exactly this–that the former stifles all vitality, while the latter allowed of its existence in the fullest measure. Through its being the aim of the [late Roman] State, that the social units in their moral life should be sacrificed to it, the world is sunk in melancholy: its heart is broken, and it is all over with the natural side of this Spirit [that Hegel thinks flourished in classical Greece], which is [now] sunk into a feeling of unhappiness. Yet only from this feeling could arise the supersensuous, the free Spirit in Christianity (278)
Great individuals [like the Roman Emperors] now appear on the stage…It was from the disruption of the [late Roman] state, which had no longer any consistency or firmness in itself, that these colossal individualities arose, instinctively impelled to restore that political unity which was no longer to be found in men’s dispositions (310).
In the [Roman] republic…there was no longer any security; that could be looked for only in a single will…Caesar (312)
The will of the Emperor was supreme, and before him there was absolute equality.(315)
The political organism is here dissolved into atoms–viz. private persons. Such a condition is Roman life at this epoch: on the one side, Fate and the abstract universality of sovereignty; on the other, the individual abstraction, “Person,” which involves the recognition of the independent dignity of the social unity–not on the ground of the display of the life which he possesses–in his complete individuality–but as the abstract individuum.(317)
Christianity arose among those most alienated from the Roman state, but in many ways it is the reverse mirror image of this state. In place of the all powerful triumphant Emperor it puts the figure of the rebel-king, a crucified “loser” in this world but all powerful on a different and more real dimension. The late Roman state combined the image of the completely autocratic and all-powerful Ego of the Emperor, with the idea of the equality of all citizens before the law. This combination effectively erased any concept of meritocracy, the idea that certain people merit a higher status because of some personal qualities or personal achievements that are honored in a given local culture (“the display of concrete life which he possesses”).
This idea, radicalized among early Christians and combined with ancient Jewish criticisms of all “human” pretensions, gave birth to one of the most fundamental themes bequeathed by Christianity to Western civilization: The idea that each person as a person–an “abstract individual”, apart from any qualities, merits, or achievements–is of equal value. This is the idea that many modern Christian scholars call “theocratic egalitarianism”. The “theocracy” (lit. “god-rule”) in question is one in which God has no human representative; the assertion that only God is king is meant to undermine the claim that some people deserve to have authority over other people because of some inherent qualities or status they possess. Theocratic egalitarianism is evident in the very earliest material in the Old Testament (c. 1200-100 b.c.), reflecting a period when the ancestors of the Jews were small bands of peasants revolting against the rulers of the city-states in Palestine. It was kept alive in the many criticisms of social injustice directed by later Hebrew prophets against the theocratic monarchy established by king David. It is probably also reflected in Mark 9/33-42 (see the commentary).
The specific context of Mark’s readers.
We have no reliable direct information about who “Mark” was, or about the circumstances in which this Gospel was written. We must piece together some conjectures on this matter based on clues in the Gospel itself, and on what we know from other sources about possible contexts. The following are some considerations.
There was no unified “Jewish culture” at the time of Jesus, even in Palestine. There were rather many Jewish groups severely at odds with each other over the question about the nature of “true” Judaism, and about how to remain true to the Jewish tradition in the context of Roman domination. No group was able to establish and impose its answer to this question as the authoritative one, because foreign rule robbed all indigenous Jewish groups of the power to establish themselves as political authorities in any locality. The most successful Jews in this regard were those who collaborated most with foreign rulers and took on foreign ways, but this produced alienation and provoked immense anger and rebellions among the masses of Jews who wanted to remain faithful to their traditions. Jesus, and some early Jesus-followers, constituted one among many competing groups claiming to represent the one true way of relating the Jewish heritage to contemporary conditions. Many of these groups were highly contentious, fighting aggressively among themselves over the issue of who had the right answer. This is true of struggles between Jewish groups before Christianity, of struggles between early Jesus-followers and other Jews who did not follow Jesus, and of struggles between groups of Jesus-followers themselves who had widely differing views as to what it meant to follow Jesus.
Further, there was a large body of Jewish emigres who had left Palestine and settled in many other parts of the Mediterranean world–in modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and North Africa, Greece, and Italy. These were called Jews of the “diaspora” (literally “scattered about”). Many communities of Jews in the diaspora not only absorbed many elements of non-Jewish tradition (such as Greek philosophy) into their Judaism, but also actively sought to convert non-Jews. Several scholars think (though this is difficult to prove) that they were tremendously successful at this–one cannot account for the enormous numbers of “Jews” in the Roman empire by emigration alone. Scholars estimate there were about six million “Jews” in the Roman Empire, compared to a population of two million in Palestine. self-identified “Jews” thus formed one seventh of the population of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus. (See D. Georgi, The Opponents of Paul in 2nd Corinthians Fortress 1986, p. 83.) Most of the following account is also taken from this book. The modern Jewish historian E. Bickerman is of the same opinion about large numbers of non-Jews converted to Judaism before the advent of Christianity. See his article in The Columbia History of the World [Harper & Row, 1981] p. 216.)
If this is true, enormous amounts of non-Jewish people in the Roman empire must have been attracted to Judaism. This can partly be accounted for in that conditions in Palestine were not unlike conditions elsewhere at this time. Roman rule tended everywhere to disrupt and destroy socio-political structures expressive of local cultures, and to try to impose by force a “Roman” culture that itself had gradually adopted a ruler-ideology taken from Eastern Mediterranean theocratic monarchies, which regarded the ruler as a quasi-divine “son of God”; this resulted in the forced “emperor worship” in the late Roman empire (regarded by many in Rome itself as an abandonment of earlier Roman “republican” traditions). This emperor worship was probably never a popular movement, especially among the lower classes. These, deprived of their local cultures and hating Roman rule, turned to various “Eastern religions” (in a way not dissimilar to the adoption of Asian religions by alienated Americans today, or the adoption of Islamic names and customs by American Black Muslims). Cults such as that of the Greek god Dionysus, the Egyptian goddess Isis, the pseudo-Persian god Mithras, sent out missionaries and strove with some success to become international religions at this time. Judaism was one of these “Eastern religions” that also sent out missionaries and was successful in gaining converts among non-Jews alienated from their own local traditions and from the officially promoted Roman culture, and came to identify with the Jewish tradition; they learned the main concepts and symbols central to Jewish religion, and read Jewish scriptures as a repository of sacred wisdom. Thus diaspora Jewish gatherings (“synagogues”, Greek for “coming together”) were a focal point for a great deal of discussion and conflictual debate, among both ethnic Jews and others attracted to Judaism, about how to cope with life under the Roman Empire; and these debates took place within a framework in which Jews and non-Jews assumed an authoritative status for the Jewish tradition contained in Jewish scriptures, so the debates were conducted as debates about how to interpret this tradition and relate it to the present circumstances.
These synagogues had a rather loose organizational structure; many gatherings were open to the general public, and were indeed looked upon as means to convert outsiders. In the late first century a.d. there was no central recognized authority able to impose its version of “Judaism” on all synagogues. Some of the most influential synagogue teachers and leaders were travelling preachers going from synagogue to synagogue trying to convert people to their version of Judaism. An amazing variety of options were proposed by different people, drawn from a grab-bag of a wide variety of traditions current in the Mediterranean world: philosophy, magic, astrology, miracle working, charismatic preaching, and mysticism were all combined in almost every imaginable combination, and joined with ideas taken from, or read into, Jewish scriptures, the main unifying factor in all synagogue discussion.
On the present account, earliest Christianity outside of Palestine had its beginnings in groups connected with these diaspora synagogues. Jesus-followers initially formed one group among many in this milieu presenting their version of what “true Judaism” consisted in, connecting their version with traditions about the Palestinian Jesus. Since there was no centrally controlled Christian organization at this time, and a great diversity of conflicting beliefs about what Jesus stood for, I will refer to this very loosely defined group as “Jesus-followers” rather than as “Christians”.
(The traditional Christian account pictures Jesus teaching twelve apostles, and these twelve founding a church that was unified in teaching and organization from the beginning, although there were small groups of obviously deviant and vicious “heretics” who taught unauthorized versions of Christianity. Modern scholarship has shown this version of history to be a fiction created by the version of Christianity that gradually won out and declared itself to be the one “orthodox” church. In the earliest century of Christianity’s existence (about 50-150 a.d.) groups claiming to follow Jesus held an amazing variety of opinions as to what Jesus stood for and what it means to “follow Jesus”. W. Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity is one of the earliest books to show this; Bauer’s work is part of the basis for Elaine Pagel’s more recent book The Gnostic Gospels, which draws on more recent finds of “heretical” early Christian writings in Nag Hammadi in Egypt.)
The earliest leaders and teachers outside of Palestine were wandering preachers, converting synagogue-connected groups to a Jesus-centered version of Judaism. Paul is the best known of these. (Paul was an ethnic Jew born in southeastern Turkey, who became a Jesus-follower probably around 37-45 a.d., and soon after became one of the most influential of these wandering preachers, starting groups of Jesus followers all over the Mediterranean world. In the authoritative anthology of writings called “The New Testament”, more space is given to letters he wrote to these groups than to any other single author.) Paul says that he himself originally belonged to a group called the Pharisees, and that he at one time he had persecuted Jesus-followers (Phillipians 3/6), probably in diaspora synagogues on the Mediterranean coast north and west of Palestine. This may be part of an attempt by a Pharisee party to impose their view of Judaism on these synagogues. They were eventually successful in this. After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the remnants of Jewish political and religious organization, they became the chief authorities for international Judaism, and the founders of “rabbinic” Judaism as it existed in Europe after this period. The books called the Mishnah and the Talmud set down this authoritative rabbinic Judaism. But this only took place gradually in the course of the second and third centuries a.d. We should not assume either that the Pharisees mentioned in the Gospel were recognized “authorities” among all Jews at the time, or that they adhered to the very large and complex body of religious laws set forth in the Mishnah and Talmud.
All this is relevant to modern discussion about Mark’s original audience: What questions and issues are of greatest concern to them, and hence what issues does Mark mean to dramatize and address in the way he tells his story? A few recent scholars place the Mark-communities in close proximity to Jesus and his early followers, supposing that the Gospel was written for Jesus-followers in Galilee not too long after Jesus’ death (See Chad Myers’ commentary on Mark; I believe Richard Horsley also tends toward this view). In this case, the situation directly pictured in the story is not too different from the situation of the readers themselves. The more common opinion is that Mark is addressing a community outside of Palestine, and is writing at least 40 years after Jesus’ death. (Jesus died about 33 a.d.; the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 a.d.) Older opinion on this was based on an unreliable statement in an early Christian writer (Papias) that Mark was Peter’s secretary and wrote down Peter’s memories for the Christians in Rome. (This is seen by modern scholars as a later attempt to provide all authoritative Christian traditions with a connection to one of the Twelve Apostles.)
(One primary basis on which more recent scholars opt for a non-Galilean origin is the fact that Mark seems to make some serious mistakes about the geography of Galilee and northern Palestine. He has Jesus make a journey from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee by way of Sidon (7/31); but the Sea of Galilee is southeast of Tyre, and Sidon is about 30 miles due north. He has Jesus cross the Sea of Galilee and come to “the land of Gerasenes”(5/1); but the village of Gerasa to which he is referring is thirty miles southeast of the Sea, with many other small villages in between. (See further references in D. E. Nineham The Gospel of Mark [Penguin 1963], p. 40.) Mark also tells one story (7/1-13) involving Jesus’ opposition to some Jewish religious customs, but he has to inform his readers that “the Pharisees and all the Jews” follow these customs, assuming seemingly that his audience was not previously acquainted with this fact, i.e. that they are in a situation different from the situation pictured in the story.)
In the commentary given on this website, I will assume that Mark is writing for an audience outside of Palestine, an audience that has some connection with diaspora Jewish synagogues. Their situation is somewhat different from the situation of the earliest Jesus-followers in Palestine, and the issues that most concern them are also somewhat different. This means that the situation of the audience is potentially quite different from the situation directly pictured in the story. Mark is indirectly addressing issues of concern to his audience, by telling them stories about Jesus’ adventures in Palestine. (This was not an unusual practice. The story in the Book of Daniel, for example, is set in the time of the Babylonian Exile [586-521 b.c.]. But modern scholars have shown that the book was written much later (c. 150 b.c.), and that stories about the conflicts between loyal Jews and the evil Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar are really about conflicts between Jews and foreign Greek rulers in the time of the author.) For example, the stories drawing a strong contrast between what Jesus stands for and what the Pharisees stand for are about conflicts within a diaspora-synagogue-related community, over what true Judaism consists in. These may be conflicts between some Jesus-followers and others who actually do call themselves “Pharisees”, and who (like Paul in his early days) are actively trying to combat the influence of Jesus-followers on others in a diaspora Jewish community. But we cannot rule out the possibility that the “Pharisees” in the Gospel represent a certain mentality present among some group of Jesus-followers, and that stories about Jesus/Pharisee conflicts are meant to address indirectly disputes among Jesus-followers.
In the hermeneutics I practice here, when it comes to “Pharisees,” the difference between a Palestinian and a non-Palestinian location for Mark’s audience matters somewhat less than it might at first appear. In either case, I think it does not matter so much what any concrete historical group of “Pharisees” actually stood for–which we might try to find out about by examining sources outside the gospel concerning Palestinian or non-Palestinian Pharisees. It matters much more what Mark thought “the Pharisees” stood for. What he thought they stood for is the actual foil over against which he defines the “true” message of Jesus. And what he thought they stood for is what is made most evident in the stories he tells. Trying to base our interpretation of Pharisee-stories in Mark on reconstructions about actual historical Pharisees is more speculative; and it also tends to substitute the modern historian’s interpretation of the Pharisee/Jesus contrast, for Mark’s own interpretation.
A first task for an ambitious hermeneutics of the Gospel of Mark.
I think hermeneutics ought to set itself a more ambitious goal than is usual in biblical interpretation. That is, interpreters often confine themselves to trying to describe the content of the ideas presented in any given biblical writing, without trying to reconstruct some plausibly good substantive reasons why a sensible person would believe these ideas. Some interpreters implicitly assume that no reason can or ought to be given for Christian belief–it is a matter of “blind faith”. Other interpreters give various non-cognitive explanations of Christian belief. By “non-cognitive” I mean explanations of the social or psychological causes that lead a person to adopt a belief that has no substantive basis in reality. (E.g. a person believes that Jesus will return soon because she likes to feel optimistic.)
On the first point: Completely blind faith is relatively rare. A person usually has some reasons for selecting the ideas she chooses to believe in, even though she herself may have difficulty consciously articulating these reasons. On the second point: It could of course be that early Christians did adopt their beliefs for non-cognitive reasons. But I think that, as a matter of general hermeneutic principle, this should be our explanation of last resort. We need to first exert all the effort we can to devise a cognitive explanation. We ought to do this to counter our tendency to offer non-cognitive explanations for any beliefs that appear to us on the surface to be unusual and implausible. Non-cognitive explanations are quite easy to devise, and are a dime a dozen. Cognitive explanations of foreign beliefs require much more imaginative effort, and we should do the best we can before we give up and decide none is possible or plausible.
Assuming that a “cognitive explanation” is one which gives other people’s beliefs a plausible basis in reality, it might seem difficult for modern rational people to give cognitive explanations for beliefs involving such things as supernatural beings and an imminent and catastrophic end of the world. I suggest this problem in hermeneutics can be solved by a basically “pragmatist” approach. Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition (associated with C. S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey) that questions the assumption of most modern philosophy, that rational analysis requires us to reduce every question to a question about the objective truth or falsity of some fact or logical principle. Pragmatism asserts instead that every human question is ultimately a question about how to react to some particular concrete human situation. What we need to ask about is the implication some supposed truth has about how people should react–this is the “cash value” of the supposed truth, as Wm. James put it. It is this implication, not the “objective” truth itself, that one needs to back up with good reasons.
Consider for example Mark’s talk about the end of the world in this light. What we should ask first of all is not “Is it true?” (it clearly isn’t). We should ask first of all about the cash value of the images of the end that Mark presents. What concrete implications did Mark want his readers to draw from his images of the end of the world? The answer to this is not difficult to guess. Mark makes it pretty clear: One ought to remain true to the values Jesus stands for, despite the fact that this stance puts one at odds with the powers dominating the world. One should live uncompromisingly in this unjust world as though one were living in a perfectly just kingdom that is to come. This implication of the end-of-the-world image is what one needs to find good reasons for. And this sets us a hermeneutic task: What could early Christians have experienced that would give them a basis-in-reality for reaching this concrete conclusion? We ought to see if it is possible to construe the Gospel in such a way that it would provide us with some experiential basis supporting this conclusion, using whatever clues the Gospel itself provides us with.
What is said here about the theme of the end of the world could also be said about the claim that Jesus is “the Lord”, the “Son of God”. We should not ask whether this statement represents a literal objective truth. We should ask first what concrete implications Mark draws from this claim–what changes would be brought about in a person’s life if she accepted this claim? And then we should ask whether the Gospel suggests some basis in early Christian experience of reality that would support this claim.
This is the first task an ambitious hermeneutics of Mark ought to set itself: How can the “cosmic” claims of this gospel be given a plausible basis in reality–those claims implicit in the assertions that Jesus is the Son of God and that he will rule a kingdom coming soon after the end of this world as we know it?
This is a question not very often raised by modern scholars. These divide largely into two groups. One group consists of Christian believers who simply assume that these claims are basically true–their truth has its basis in some version of Christian doctrine which these scholars hold to be true as a matter of religious faith. If others agree with Christian believres in their beliefs about what is true, then their beliefs require no explanation–the reason they hold them is that they are true. A second group of scholars come to the bible as “objective” outsiders, and simply ignore the question about possible bases in reality for the beliefs of early Jesus-followers. Some believe in what Z. Bauman calls “the ideology of culture”: Cultural and religious beliefs are all literally “creations of the human mind”. People simply arbitrarily decide to believe in some things, or are “conditioned” by others into believing these things, and ultimately no reason can be given beyond this simple decision or conditioning. All we can do is describe the content of what early Jesus-followers decided to believe. (This approach is easy to combine with the Christian “blind faith” explanation.) Others in this group take a “social science” approach: “Explanations” of what people believe consist in explanations of non-cognitive causes that led them to believe these things; or they consist in explanations of the instrumental “usefulness” of certain beliefs in furthering the interests of certain persons or groups. (E.g. persons or groups will believe anything that tends to bolster their claims to superiority over other persons or groups. This is the only explanation of cultural and religious beliefs that is possible or necessary.) Some social-science interpreters maintain a neutrality in these explanations. Others, most notably those in the Marxist tradition, are more partisan: There are certain groups (oppressed lower classes) whose cause we know is right, so that beliefs that further their interests are “good” beliefs. There are other groups (oppressive upper classes) whose cause we know is not right, so that beliefs furthering their interests are “bad” beliefs.
Complex issues are involved in one’s choice of hermeneutic approaches, and I cannot adequately discuss them here. Let me simply make one major argument in favor of trying to discover a plausible basis in reality for early Christian beliefs by trying to reconstruct the particular and unique originating experiences underlying these beliefs. All the other approaches mentioned above eliminate from the start any possibility of critical confrontation between the beliefs of early Christians and the beliefs of the modern scholar. Modern Christian scholars assume the validity of some modern version of Christianity, and this tends to govern their selection and interpretation of biblical passages. They do not conduct an independent investigation of the basis for early Christian ideas, and set these side by side with the basis they have for their modern beliefs, for critical comparison. Rather, their own modern beliefs are simply assumed to be true, and so to represent the only “basis in reality” that early Christian beliefs can have. In this context, the modern believer’s ideas cannot be fundamentally challenged by anything she discovers in studying the Bible.
The social-science approach likewise sets up a framework in which the social-scientist’s views and values cannot be fundamentally challenged by anything she discovers by research on early Christianity. The key fact here is that the social-scientist gives non-cognitive explanations to all cultural beliefs except social science itself. We explain all other cultural beliefs by talking about the function they perform, the interests they further, for those who hold them. We do not treat social science as an aspect of “human culture”, and ask about the function it performs or the interests it furthers. (Freudian psychologists do not give Freudian explanations for their belief in Freudian ideas.) The many assumptions underlying social science are not just part of modern “human culture”, “creations of the human mind”; these assumptions simply represent a true picture of reality as it is, and so need no further explanation. The reason people believe them is that they are true. And again this assumption of the truth of modern social-science serves as a framework within which one studies early Christian ideas. When this is done, early Christian ideas cannot possibly serve as a challenge to the views of the interpreter about value-priorities and how to live one’s life. This is true also of partisan Marxist social-science. Before one reads any ancient texts, one already knows what the most fundamental real issues are (economic realities and class conflicts), and what people in all ages and cultures should have been struggling for (an egalitarian society with no domination). This serves as a hermeneutic principle by which one discovers the “real” underlying meaning of biblical texts; one again discovers their real meaning by measuring it against one’s own views about what is true and right and what is not. Engaging in this kind of hermeneutics precludes the possibility that one could discover in the text anything that could be a challenge to one’s own Marxist views.
The hermeneutics I want to engage in here involves two steps. In the first step, one ought to try to enter as much as possible into the unique worldview of the author of a text, understanding the text on its own terms and putting the best face possible on what it says, imagining the most plausible basis in reality as the author experienced it. In the second step we ought to compare and contrast this view with our own most deeply held convictions about human life, seeing how the basis for our beliefs holds up against the basis for the beliefs of the text’s author. The ultimate purpose of studying classical writings is to provoke a critical confrontation between their views and ours. “Critical confrontation” itself should be taken seriously, and this means its outcome should not be predetermined by previous commitments either to the truth of modern views, or to the truth and relevance of ancient views.
A second task for hermeneutics, set by the Gospel of Mark.
A second task for an ambitious hermeneutics
The second task an ambitious hermeneutics of Mark’s gospel ought to set itself, is one more or less explicitly put by Mark himself. That is, in many places throughout his gospel Mark indicates that there is a hidden meaning to the story of Jesus’ life that he is telling. In this gospel neither the crowds that gather around Jesus nor his own disciples are able to grasp this hidden meaning, and this is attributed to their spiritual blindness. Mark directly addresses his readers at several points (“He who has ears to hear, let him hear”) indicating that he wants the reader to be sure and try to get this hidden message in the story that the crowds and disciples failed to get.
Puzzlingly, Mark never says in his gospel directly, clearly, and explicitly exactly what the hidden meaning of the Jesus-story is. This “Markan secret” has been a central issue for scholarly discussion of Mark ever since the German scholar Wilhelm Wrede drew attention to it in a book published in 1901. There is no agreement at all about exactly what the secret is, or why it plays such an important role in Mark’s gospel. Wrede himself gave a social-science explanation: The secret is that Jesus is the Messiah. Later Jesus-followers made up the idea that this had been kept secret during Jesus’ lifetime, because this fiction served their interests. Outsiders were asking them why they followed Jesus as a Messiah, when no one during Jesus’ lifetime had recognized him as Messiah. The idea that Jesus had deliberately kept this secret during his lifetime was part of their way of defending the validity of their claims to be the one group who was following the true Messiah. It was simply a very elaborate way of defending this claim against an obvious objection to it. In this explanation, the idea of a secret meaning has no bearing on what actually distinguishes this group from other groups, what they thought they stood for in contrast to what other groups stand for. By inventing the idea of the secret they were simply inventing an idea that would bolster their own group’s claim to be superior to other groups, without presenting anything at all that could be construed as a real basis for this claim.
More recent scholars have abandoned this explanation, and tend to settle on the idea that the Markan secret is at least closely related to his idea that the Messiah must suffer. This in turn is closely related to what Mark obviously thinks is something central to the Christian message: one shows one is a true Jesus-follower by one’s willingness to suffer, “taking up the cross and following [Jesus]” (8/34). This is a truth that the disciples in the gospel refused to accept, and in this sense it was a “hidden truth” they could not understand.
The Markan secret does indeed seem to be related to the “necessity of suffering”, but this idea itself is a rather puzzling one. It is not too difficult to understand why someone would hold in high esteem “martyrs” who are willing to suffer for their convictions. Very many traditions revere such figures. People who suffer for their loyalty to the Jewish tradition at the hands of foreign Greek persecutors are much admired in the Book of Daniel (and compare the importance that Plato accords to Socrates’ death, the martyr for True Philosophy.) But Mark seems to intend more than this. It is not merely that Jesus-the-Messiah must suffer because there is something else that he stands up for (like Jewish traditions, or true philosophy) that brings down persecution and suffering. The “necessity of suffering” is an important constituent of what it is he stands for. He is held to be a Messiah because he suffers, not because he stands up for something else that brings suffering on him. In Mark, the only other thing he conspicuously stands for that brings him persecution and suffering is negative: he is in favor of not keeping certain Jewish traditions favored by “scribes and Pharisees”. It is hard to believe that the “necessity of suffering”, either for Jesus or his followers, ultimately comes down to a willingness to suffer persecution for not adhering to some religious laws that some Jews held in high esteem. (After all, millions of gentiles and probably some liberal Jews already held this position.) It seems that somehow Mark sees something positive in suffering itself that he thinks validates his claim that Jesus and Jesus followers are the true inheritors of the Jewish tradition. This is a great puzzle.
Many modern Christians of course do not find it puzzling because they regard it simply as a truth that God decided that the Messiah should suffer. Thanks to the fact that they have been taught this Christian doctrine, they are already in possession, before they read his gospel, of what Mark thinks is a truth hidden from the disciples and probably from many of his original readers. It is a simple truth, just that God decided that the Messiah should suffer, and that suffering should in some sense be given an important place in human life. Ultimately one does not ask for reasons why God decided things as he did. Western Christians did eventually work out a somewhat legalistic rationale for God’s decision that Jesus should suffer, given classical expression by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109 a.d.): The human race deserved great punishment for their sins against God, and Jesus suffered to pay God back so that human beings wouldn’t have to. But there has been no comparable agreed upon answer as to exactly why and in what sense suffering should have some central place in Christian life. This has led to some rather strange phenomena such as a mysticism of suffering, in which Christian saints bring suffering on themselves in order to unite mystically with the suffering Jesus. It has also led to the famous “martyr complex” in which claims to be a suffering victim become a means of manipulating others to feel guilty and/or sorry for the sufferer, and so to give him what he wants. These are aberrations, but what are the aberrations of? Is there some vision of human life that makes suffering somehow central, and that would make some plausible sense to a sensible person?
This brings us back to Mark. We should not assume an audience that already accepted the idea that suffering is somehow central and intrinsic to the figure of the true Messiah. (Although Mark says that the scriptures predict this, and cites a few isolated sentences from pre-Christian Jewish scriptures to support this, it would have been impossible for anyone to have arrived at this view by an objective study of these scriptures themselves; in fact no other contemporaries did arrive at this understanding of these scriptures. Mark’s idea that the Messiah should suffer is something that he arrived at independently and read into these passages.) Mark is indeed the first writer known to us among Jesus-followers that asserted some intrinsic connection between being a Messiah and suffering. Many scholars think that he is probably indeed the inventor of this idea. If this is the case, we must ask not only what motivated Mark to propose this idea. We must also ask, on what plausible basis could he have expected his audience to buy this idea? Guided by clues in the gospel itself, can we imagine some version of this idea, and some pragmatist defense of it, that would actually make sense?
In the commentary that follows, my general assumption about the Markan secret will be as follows: First, Mark is not being coy. The “Markan secret” is not something that Mark could have revealed to his readers directly, clearly, and explicitly. What he wants to get across is something that can only be gotten across in story form, i.e. by telling a story that dramatizes some fundamental issues, and depending on an audience well attuned to these issues and able to relate the surface details of the story to these fundamental issues. This is not an uncommon proceeding: Indeed it has become a very common strategy among serious fiction writers today, who address fundamental problems in our culture not by writing essays about them but by writing stories dramatizing them. (The American literary critic Frank Kermode has written a book, The Genesis of Secrecy [Harvard, 1979], largely taken up with a comparison between the gospel of Mark and the strategies of some modern fiction writers.) One of our main tasks as interpreters of Mark is to try to see beneath the surface details of his Jesus-story to understand the fundamental issues he was dramatizing, and how these details relate to these issues.
Secondly, in the commentary I will develop the thesis that Mark’s story builds to a climax, and that this climax-centered story structure is closely related to the motif of the hidden meaning of the events. This story climaxes in the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, and Mark intends this part of the story as somehow the final clue to the hidden meaning of the story, the final revelation of the secret, but only for the reader who has been able to rightly understand the build-up to this event given in the entire Jesus-story he tells leading up to it.
Why would Mark’s audience accept the idea of a suffering Messiah?
Finally, I want to proceed on the initial assumption, at least, that Mark is not addressing an audience that is stupid and credulous, willing to accept anything he tells them about Jesus, simply because he tells them. Although he is not writing a philosophical essay, explicitly giving them reasons to accept his message, he tells his Jesus-story in such a way that it implicitly appeals to plausible good reasons for accepting his central message. The character of the message itself, giving a central place to suffering, cannot be understood, let alone accepted, without understanding these reasons. We need to look carefully for whatever clues he gives in any part of the story about these reasons. The persuasiveness of reasons, of course, depends partly on the mentality of an audience, and so part of our attempt must also be to reconstruct from way he tells the story the mind-set he assumes in his audience.
A general hypothesis about the context and purpose of Mark’s gospel.
In the course of the commentary I develop a central thesis about the overall context and purpose of Mark’s gospel that it might be helpful to spell out very briefly before proceeding.
Mark’s gospel engages in a double critique. One critique contrasts the “Pharisee” mentality with what I will call a “charismatic” mentality. Roughly, the Pharisee-mentality tends to emphasize certain legal prescriptions, mostly centering on the distinction between clean/unclean, as the central expression of what it means to remain faithful to the Jewish tradition. This mentality would tend to look up to persons most familiar with Jewish religious law. The charismatic mentality, on the contrary, is a mentality impressed by what is most emotionally striking and powerful, both intensely moving moral preaching, and also exhibitions of supernatural powers such as healing-miracles and demon-exorcisms. These are looked upon as manifestations of a supernatural “spirit” inhabiting the charismatic preacher or miracle worker, sometimes looked upon as being himself a quasi-supernatural being. (There were many such “charismatic” preachers and miracle-workers in the contemporary world, among Jews and non-Jews, and many Jesus followers were also reputed to have miracle working powers and to be possessed by a supernatural spirit.) The charismatic mentality tends to regard manifestations of spirit-power as the decisive sign that a particular person represents “true” Judaism. Members of Mark’s audience are most attracted to the charismatic mentality, and they are in conflict with other “Pharisaic” members of a diaspora-synagogue community. This is a serious conflict. Although many of his stories present “Pharisees” in the worst possible light, their ideas must represent some serious threat to him and his audience, or he would not be writing about them. He is not only a liberal Jew, freeing people from some religious laws. Mark has to present something positive that the charismatic Jesus stands for that can plausibly and successfully compete with the Pharisaic way as a claimant to represent the essence of Judaism. This is the theme of the first part of the gospel.
Mark’s second critique is directed against some Jesus followers (represented by the disciples in the story) who share the charismatic focus on spirit-power, and who also claim to be in possession of special secret revelations about Jesus and his message that set them above other Jesus followers.
(These are probably connected: both miracle working spirit-power and secret revelations are signs of special status. Claims centered on secret wisdom and secret revelations were common among many groups in the Mediterranean world. Sometimes of course they are mere propaganda. But underlying the attraction of this idea is an extreme alienation which produces the sense that any truth that can be made plainly manifest and persuasive in such a corrupt society cannot be the real truth; the real truth must be something radically different from present worldly appearances, and is available only to those who reject this corrupt world.)
These (misguided) Jesus-followers are represented in the gospel by Jesus’ disciples, who are recipients of many special revelations and of miracle working power, but who “never really get it”, never really understand the true “hidden meaning” of what Jesus stands for. Criticism of these Jesus followers is the main theme of the second half of Mark’s gospel. Their failure to understand is clearly related to their rejection of the idea that the Messiah must suffer and be put to death, and to their eventual complete abandonment of Jesus during his trial and crucifixion. It is also probably related to the fact that they tend to “lord it over” other members of the community (a violation of theocratic egalitarianism).
This is the theme of the second half of the gospel. The implied contrast here is not between the disciples and some other figures in the story (no one in the story ever really understands.) The contrast is rather between the disciples in the story and the ideal reader reading the story. The disciples have a mentality opposite the kind of mentality that the ideal reader must try to adopt and let guide her reading.
If most of this is right, then Mark is addressing a small group (Jesus-followers) who are one embattled part of a larger group (a diaspora synagogue), who in turn are an embattled and alienated group within the larger Roman Empire. The issues he is addressing arose in debates in the diaspora synagogues about the kind of mentality an idealistic person ought to adopt in the face of an alien and illegitimate but all-powerful Roman political order.
My best conjecture.
The following is my best conjecture about the Markan worldview to which he wants to convert his audience.
I think Mark follows a major theme in the Jewish “prophetic” tradition focused on rightness, “justice”, tzedakah in Hebrew. Since the land of Israel was conquered by Babylonians, who destroyed Jerusalem with its temple in 587 b.c., the classic prophets proclaimed that this rule by unrighteous foreigners was God’s punishment for lack of rightness among the Jewish people. They promised that if the Jewish people remedied this and became devoted to true rightness, God would act to send a Messiah and give him power to defeat foreign powers militarily and restore something like the Kingdom of David in Israel. This would be a kingdom in which rightness rules, i.e. in which there would be a close relation between power, prestige, and privileges, and true goodness, lacking in the rule of Israel by foreigners.
The “apocalyptic” movement among Jews was a turning point. It was fueled by a feeling that the world they lived in was fundamentally “not right” because there was so little connection between power, influence, prestige, and privilege in this world, and their sense of true goodness. A God of Rightness must be angry about this fundamental lack of rightness in the world, and this would surely motivate Him to act. But they also despaired that this could take the form of military “worldly” power, wielded by a human leader/Messiah, bringing back the Kingdom of David as an actual sovereign country. Rather, the only remedy for the world’s un-rightness would be a terrifying cosmic catastrophe directly brought about by a Righteous God, physically destroying the entire present world, and miraculously putting a perfectly Right Kingdom of God in its place. (See Mark chapter 13.)
The moral of the story: Live your life wholly dedicated to ideals of perfect Rightness, as though you were already a member of this perfectly Right Kingdom of God. Those who do this can expect to lose in this present world, but will be literally “saved” when this cosmic catastrophe happens, and will become members of the perfectly Right Kingdom of God when it replaces the present world.
Why must the Messiah who rules over this coming Kingdom first suffer and be crucified? This idea represents a final separation between true rightness on the one hand, and any kind of worldly power on the other. And this includes miracle-working power. Although Mark tells many stories of Jesus as miracle-worker, their function in his story is ultimately to criticize the disciples in the story whose attraction to Jesus lay in his miracle-working power which he wields to win out over his enemies the Pharisees. The disciples are still wed to the idea that somehow rightness and power must go together in this world. This gives them a mentality unable to make sense of Jesus’s insistence that the Messiah must suffer, and why they finally all abandoned him when he proved to be powerless and was put to death (“he saved others, himself he cannot save.”) This mentality is what made the disciples unable to grasp the “secret” meaning of Mark’s Jesus-story. The message to the audience: make sure you are open to understanding this secret meaning that the disciples did not understand.
What would it mean for Mark’s audience to be “converted” by Mark’s story? You must accept the disjunction between rightness and power in the world you actually live in now. Devote your life to perfect rightness, battling when necessary against the unrightness of the world, and accept the likelihood that you will lose. Rightness will never prevail in this concretely existing world. The ideal in which Rightness and power go together belongs to a supernatural world that is presently completely hidden and absent from the world we live in right now. Do not let this diminish your commitment! “Stay awake!”
Among other things, this extreme pessimism about the present world implicitly dismisses the idea of “divine Providence,” a God who is in control of conditions and events in this present world.
A somewhat similar message is described in Citizens of the Kingdom of God: Excerpts from Jacques Ellul
All this is most likely connected to the central place held by the figure of the “martyr,” killed by Roman decrees, in the Christian imagination from early on, as a culture-hero.
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