(This is a modified version of a piece published in a Festschrift dedicated to my main mentor in graduate school, Dieter Georgi, on his retirement, Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays Honoring Dieter Georgi.)
This paper proposes an hypothesis about the meaning of Mark’s Gospel that depends in turn on an hypothesis about its social setting. I would also like to deal with several problems for theoretical hermeneutics that this Gospel raises, specifically the relation of sociologically-oriented interpretation to theological interpretation.
I take as my starting point one of the most far-ranging and stimulating recent studies of Mark, Burton Mack’s A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins. (Philadelphia: Fortress. 1988).
One great strength of Mack’s book is its critique of what I would call the fideism of Christian scholars, that prevents them from raising questions at a sufficiently fundamental level, and so prevents them from fully explaining the origins of Christianity. I call “fideist” all those scholarly accounts that implicitly appeal to unquestioned assumptions of a modern Christian audience, that of course Jesus speaks with divine authority, of course his death is a saving event, of course Jesus-followers were right to follow Jesus and to condemn those who rejected him, and so on. Taking these beliefs for granted means that scholars do not really imagine themselves back into a time before Jesus-followers began to hold them, and attempt to fully account for the origins of these beliefs.
Mack shows the way that recent scholarship on Mark is at many points governed by a more explicit fideism, the view that the basis for the Christian faith is so discontinuous with the rest of reality—so “unique” and without analogy–that one cannot describe this basis in terms taken from general human experience. This view manifests itself in the way that interpreters at some point lapse into language that, as Mack says, “marks the point beyond which the scholar chooses not to proceed with the investigation, indeed the point beyond which reasoned argument must cease.” This language “hold[s] a space for the unimaginable miracle that must have happened prior to all interpretation…[It is a] rhetorical device for evoking the myth of Christian origins without having to explain it.” Fideism thus sets firm limits both to rational explanation and to empathic understanding.
A second great strength of Mack’s book is that he treats the question of Markan origins, not as a question of Mark’s testimony to a real and historical “Christ-event” that preceded the Gospel, but as a question of how a group in a synagogue community in the Jewish diaspora came to imagine the Jesus-story the way they did, as an imagined story about their origins.
Mack treats Mark’s Gospel as essentially “serious fiction”, a narrative that uses stories set in rural Galilee in the early 30’s to dramatize issues of importance to people attached to a Southern Syrian synagogue in the early 70’s a.d.. Mack’s study is outstanding for its sensitive and detailed treatment of Markan narrative art, and the way that Mark’s plot and narrative themes are plausibly related to problems faced by Jesus-followers in conflict with other groups in a diaspora synagogue. I find myself in agreement with very many of Mack’s individual analyses of these narrative themes, although I want to offer here a fundamentally different account of the origins of Markan belief.
Mack’s treatment of the Controversy Stories (Mark 2:1-3:6).
Though developed in much complex detail, the core of Mack’s thesis about Markan origins can be stated rather simply: The community Mark speaks for was originally a reform movement in a Jewish synagogue community in Southern Syria. It battled another, law-oriented (“Pharisaic”) reform movement for influence in this community, and lost.
On this account, Mark makes Jesus’ crucifixion at Pharisaic hands central to his Gospel in order to rationalize this defeat; their defeat, like Jesus’ crucifixion, was part of “God’s plan”. This community’s current weak status in the world now conflicts with its exalted self-image. Community members compensate for their actual weakness by making highly exaggerated claims for themselves and their Lord, Jesus, and demonizing those who had defeated them. The expression and rationalization of such claims is the main purpose of Mark’s Gospel. To put this in terms more blunt than Mack uses: What is most distinctive about the Markan community is not anything substantive that it stands for, but its chutzpah, its audacity and skill at creating an authority figure of such monumental proportions to support its own vastly overblown self-image.
The approach by which Mack arrives at this conclusion can be illustrated by considering his discussion of the controversy stories in Mark 2:1-3:6. The main importance of these stories for Mark’s narrative consists in the fact that they provoke the plot of the scribes and Pharisees to have Jesus crucified, and present Mark’s claim that this plot results from a refusal to recognize Jesus’ “authority” (exousia). These stories have to bear a lot of weight, because the Jesus/Pharisee conflict they describe turns out to be, as Mack says, “a conflict of apocalyptic proportions”, first causing the Pharisees to pressure Pilate to crucify Jesus, but ultimately causing God to destroy the sacred Temple, to disown the leaders formerly entrusted with the Judaic heritage, and to give this heritage to the Jesus-followers.
Mack rightly asks the very fundamental question, On what basis did Mark’s community accord to Jesus such immensely important authority? He then argues that the stories themselves do not give any rational basis. Jesus in these stories “violate[s] the basic ground rules of human discourse and dialogue”. “There is no point of leverage outside the sayings of Jesus to qualify or sustain the argumentation”. “[He] uses assumptions that his questioners did not share or could not have known”. Nothing that Jesus says or does in these stories could serve a normal-rational reader as a plausible basis for believing that Jesus has special authority.
Mack turns this accurate observation into an argument, central to his overall thesis, that Markan Jesus-followers had no basis for the stands they took on other issues dramatized in the stories Mark tells (their inclusion of sinners in table-fellowship; their rejection of strict Sabbath observance and of fasting-customs common to other Jewish groups). It is because they have no basis for these stands that they create this image of their leader Jesus in these stories and, by simple fiat, endow him with supreme authority, so that he may in turn authorize their views and practices.
Their claims about Jesus’ authority are truly extravagant, and stridently asserted, and Mack offers a psychological explanation for this: The extravagance and stridency are a compensatory mechanism, compensating for their half-conscious awareness that they have no basis for their distinctive views and practices. Jesus’ authority authorizes these, while this authority itself is without any other basis, serving as its own authorization, completely self-referential. Mark becomes the first Christian fideist when this “self-referential oddity [of Jesus’ claimed authority] was now transformed into a revelation of the divine.”
My critique of Mack’s approach.
I have two criticisms of Mack’s approach here. First, it gives us a picture of the Markan community that is curiously empty at its center. Mack makes little attempt to conjecture why it was that individual Markan Jesus-followers began to “follow Jesus” in the first place, and what motivated their fierce commitment to their group. He gives us only a very weak picture of what it meant to them to “follow Jesus”, beyond their adherence to a group which had egalitarian leanings, included “sinners”, did not follow the law-codes of some other Jewish groups, and considered itself followers of Jesus. For Mack, Mark’s narrative is purely a propaganda piece; and the themes of this propaganda are almost completely external to the real reasons why Markan Jesus followers are committed to Jesus. This is very odd from a human perspective. Ultimately, the people involved do not appear very plausible concrete human beings, but sociological abstractions: They will blindly believe to be true whatever they would like to be true, whatever contributes to “the construction and maintenance of social structures” to which they are attached, and rationalizes the claims they want to make over against other groups. This sociologically motivated picture of the Markan community is humanly rather flat, and seems but a reverse image of Christian fideism. In both cases early Jesus-followers have no explainable basis for their views. For fideists this is a function of unique and unexplainable divine origins. For Mack, it is a function of an enormous and fierce desire for self-legitimation, whose fierceness is only weakly explained by reference to a general sociological axiom that this is just what religious groups do. Mack’s picture is not the product of a careful consideration of alternatives. It is the product of a simple omission, omitting to consider whether Mark’s Gospel reflects some of the real bases for the beliefs of Markan Jesus-followers, and to try to reconstruct a thoroughly plausible picture of them as concrete and human beings. This, it seems to me, is what happens often today in biblical studies when the sociology of knowledge serves as a substitute for empathic understanding rather than as an aid to it.
Secondly, Mack’s approach is an easy target for the charges that fideists always level against their critics: He subjects Mark’s message to rational criteria established independently of the Gospel itself. Doing this guarantees a priori that the Gospel will not fundamentally challenge any of our pre-established notions about what a valid basis for belief might consist in.
A different approach.
I would like to propose a different approach, not only for the Gospel of Mark but for any difficult text from a distant culture. Let us not start by seeing whether the reasons expressly presented in a writing, considered rationally, are sufficient to justify the claims it makes. Let us rather begin our work with the provisional assumption that the claims made by a text have a plausible substantive basis in something else the text says. A central interpretive task is to devise some way of construing what the text says in a way that would plausibly support the claims that it makes. Often what this means is imaginatively constructing a picture of the kind of human audience–a picture that accords with our knowledge of possible socio-cultural settings in this era–who would naturally have construed the text in this way. Let us imagine the most respectable, but humanly understandable audience possible, who would have been moved and convinced by a given writing.
Such an effort will result, of course, in an hypothesis, rather than in proven results. But I argue that this “hypothesis formation”–the aim of the present writing–is one of the more difficult aspects of interpretation, one that requires and also deserves great imaginative effort. It generates “charitable” readings, but not uncritical ones, as I will try to show at the end of this essay.
An alternate interpretation of the controversy stories.
As an example of this approach, let me propose the following as a plausible audience for the series of controversy stories in Mark 2:1-3:6–an audience who would have seen in these stories some plausible basis for according Jesus great exousia.
First, some history: Three centuries of Hellenistic and Roman rule had broken down traditional and organic social organization that had previously prevailed in many local communities throughout the Mediterranean world. The (Greek and Roman) “high culture” it tried to replace this with was foreign and alien to many, especially among the poorer classes.
This produced a widespread sense of alienation coupled with anomie. Many people were alienated, in the sense that participation in community life was not enough to give their lives meaning; and the forces that ruled over their world at the top of the political spectrum lacked any felt legitimacy, i.e. they were not experienced as representing anything reflecting the felt values of many people.[1] Many were in a condition of anomie, in the sense that there was no well-established set of social norms in terms of which they could define and maintain a stable personal identity and sense of self-worth. Jewish people in Palestine represented only one case of this widespread condition.
Dieter Georgi has argued, and many others agree, that Judaism of the time was a missionary religion; there were widespread conversions of non-Jews to Judaism in diaspora synagogues outside of Palestine during this period. Judaism was one of the most successful of the “Eastern Religions” that took hold throughout the Roman Empire during this period. What accounts for this? Who were these non-Jews who came to think of Jewish history and tradition as their history and tradition, to read the Jewish scriptures as their sacred books, and to accept the Jewish God as the one true God? One likely group would be those described above, the people whom the Imperium Romanum left suffering from alienation and anomie. People in this situation needed some alternative social framework, some culture or subculture, within which to define and maintain a stable identity. This framework needed to be something they could personally relate to, something that had some innate appeal to them.
Consider first the attractiveness of law-oriented Judaism in this context. It responds especially well to the problem of anomie. In this respect I think the early years of the Black Muslim community in the U.S. provides a helpful analogy. The black community in this country also suffers from alienation and anomie, stemming from social exclusion and often also from a breakdown in stable socio-cultural structures. The Black “Nation of Islam” has also adopted a foreign “Eastern Religion”, and defines itself as the true following of Allah, in specific contrast to the alien and illegitimate, “demonic” American economic and political establishment. But it also emphasizes rigorous discipline in adhering to very specific codes of discipline covering not only moral decency but regulating everyday matters such as dress and eating. Adherence to this code gives outward expression to a distinctive identity, superior to the masses of non-Muslim Black people still living in a state of social disintegration that lies in the past of many Black Muslims, and superior also to the “illegitimate” dominant American culture.
Consider this as a possibility also to account for the attractiveness of law-oriented Judaism to people suffering from alienation and anomie in the first century Mediterranean world. It offers this group a well-defined set of rules and practices that serve as clear external signs of their adherence to an idealistic moral code. Rigorous adherence to these practices gives people a tangible sense of pride in being members of a superior community that sets them apart from others still suffering from social disintegration and anomie, or compromising themselves by attempting to assimilate to an alien and illegitimate political regime.
But there is a price to be paid for this. One of the main prices is that, in the framework which this kind of Judaism offers for defining one’s identity, that identity is defined by contrast with other people who had not joined this community. These “unclean sinners” are an important part of the symbolically constructed world of law-oriented Judaism; a law-abiding “Jew” is righteous before God precisely because she is not like others (“sinners”) who do not adhere to certain codes. Hence one of the important codes she follows is one that externally dramatizes this difference: refusing to eat with those who do not follow the codes. She has to “blame the victims”, so to speak: Rather than identifying and sympathizing with others who (like herself formerly) are victims of social disintegration, she has to regard many of these as symbolic embodiments of the central evil (i.e. the moral anarchy) over against which she defines the goodness of her own disciplined way.
Another weakness of law-oriented Judaism in this context is that people consciously looking for a “tradition” they can identify with have a different attitude to tradition than do people whose tradition is an organic part of long established patterns of community life. Attachment to tradition for the former will always have something of an artificial character, that has to be sustained by conscious will, rather than being sustained as an organic part of their social life. This would be true even of many ethnic Jews living for several generations outside of Palestine.
Suppose we imagine, then, a group of alienated people, among whom are both ethnic Jews and non-Jews, who frequent[2] some diaspora synagogue and think of Judaism as their tradition. This synagogue is a voluntary association, sociologically similar to the many private clubs that arose at this time. There is no official authority that dominates the synagogue community and is able to impose its interpretation of Judaism on all. But law-oriented Judaism has some prestige here, both for reasons given above, and because it has some claim to be “traditional” Judaism. Those who emphasize and excel in matters of traditional law are especially admired (some of these may have connections with Palestinian Pharisees).[3]
But some members of this group, attracted as they were to the Judaic heritage, feel the emphasis on Jewish law and custom to be somewhat artificial. They feel that law-orientation involves simply suppressing their own feelings of deep alienation, and their own deep feelings of identification with the excluded unclean “sinners” whom they have been asked to cut out of their circle of friends. These feelings have become emotionally powerful because they have been suppressed. Some Jesus-preachers who came to the synagogue awakened and appealed to these previously rejected feelings, and presented them with a new version of Judaism in which these feelings have a central place. The feelings are powerful feelings; the stories of Jesus/Pharisee conflicts now preserved in Mark 2:1-3:6 convey vivid images that appeal to these feelings.
Consider for example how the story of the healing of the paralytic on the Sabbath (3:1-6) would appear to this audience. The story goes like this:
Jesus went into a synagogue, and there was a man there who had a withered hand. And they were watching him to see if he would cure him on the sabbath day, hoping for something to use against him. He said to the man with the withered hand, Stand up out in the middle.' Then he said to them,Is it against the law on the sabbath day to do good, or to do evil; to save life, or to kill?’ But they said nothing. Facing them angrily, grieved at their hardness of heart, he said to the man, `Stretch out your hand’. We stretched it out and his hand was better. The Pharisees went out and at once began to plot with the Herodians against him, discussing how to destroy him.(3/1-6)
The “scribes and Pharisees” in the Gospel represent those who emphasize law-oriented Judaism in this diaspora synagogue. From a normal and realistic point of view, the Pharisee position in the story might appear quite rational: Jesus could easily wait one more day to heal the man, thus both meeting the needs of the crippled man and observing the Sabbath. Jesus’ angry charge that he is in favor of healing on the Sabbath while the Pharisees are in favor of “killing” on the Sabbath is surely an outrageously gross exaggeration, considered realistically. But for my hypothetical audience, these elements of the story would be highly charged with special meanings, because they would see the stories as symbolic dramatizations awakening deep and strong feelings that were previously suppressed. This audience already feels that Judaic law-orientation in general denies their feelings of identification with and concern for the unfortunate. This is represented in the story by picturing the law-orientation of the Pharisees as something that “hardens their hearts” against human concern for the plight of the crippled man. The intensity the audience feels around this issue motivates the hyperbole in Jesus’ charge that the Pharisees are in favor of “killing” the man. Jesus implicitly asserts by contrast that “saving the life” of an unfortunate person is the true way to “keep the Sabbath”. This mirrors their feeling that identification with the unfortunate merits a higher place than lawkeeping in the true moral code, hence ought to be considered central to “true Judaism”.
Jesus heals the man by an act that combines law-breaking in a synagogue on the Sabbath, an angry and highly confrontational condemnation of law-oriented Judaism, a show of supernatural power, and a healing from physical distress. Supernatural power is extra-ordinary power, the power that is beyond the ordinary and lifts one out of the ordinary. In the symbolic image presented by the story, the extraordinary healing power joins the powerful feelings of identification with the unfortunate, feelings that though powerful also seem to have no place within the ordinary world, and have especially been excluded from the orderly world of law-oriented Judaism. The story of the healing miracle thus attains a special meaning in this context because of these associations, a meaning the same miracle would not have if performed, say, by a Roman priest on behalf of a Roman Emperor’s son. The physicality of the miracles–relieving the unfortunate of obvious physical distress–would also be important for my hypothetical audience, in that the concerns of those on the bottom rungs of the social ladder are often focused on such immediate physical distress. Thus this story creates a complex image of Jesus in which many elements combine to convey a sense of emotional and ethical power, for this particular audience. For this audience, there would be no need to invoke an independent belief in Jesus’ exousia to validate his words and deeds in theses stories. Rather in this account (in contrast to Mack’s account) the words and actions of Jesus evoke a substantive basis for according Jesus an extraordinary exousia.
This interpretation illustrates the hermeneutic principle I proposed earlier: That we ought to stretch our imaginations to form an hypothesis in which the claims made by a text are plausibly supported by other things that the text says. It does this without lapsing into the fideist language that Mack rightly decries. Although this account ends up very different from that of Mack, it remains true to his guiding principle, that Mark’s stories are to be read as dramatizations of issues important to some group in a diaspora synagogue. It is also in accord with other indirect indications Mark gives of the character of his audience,[4] and with our current picture of the situation in diaspora synagogues.
Let me now proceed to fill out my hypothesis by dealing with two other major aspects of Mark’s Gospel: the Markan secret, and the idea that the crucifixion was part of God’s plan.
The Markan Secret.
The above approach to the controversy stories suggests a solution also of at least one important but puzzling aspect of the famous “Markan secret”. This is the puzzle that arises if one imagines that the secret that the disciples do not understand must consist in some piece of information. If this information consists in something told to the disciples in the Gospel (that Jesus is the Messiah, that the Messiah must suffer, etc.), in what sense is there still something important that they do not understand? If this information is not something told to the disciples, then why is it withheld?
The discussions above suggest that even the controversy stories have a meaning that is in some sense “hidden”. The stories are meant to convey Jesus’ exousia, but only certain readers will feel this exousia–the ones whose special life experiences cause certain aspects of the stories to be highly charged with meaning. Other readers–Pharisee-sympathizers, or the rational readers Mack assumes as normal–will feel no charismatic “power” in the Jesus portrayed here. It is in this sense that the exousia of Jesus would be “hidden” from them, and no amount of explicit explanation could un-hide it. They could understand the surface meaning of the words, “Jesus’ exousia was greater than that of the scribes”, but these words would not “make sense” to them.
In the same way, then, the disciples in the Gospel (representatives of Jesus-followers without understanding) can hear the words “This is my beloved Son” (9:7), and “The Son of Man must suffer many things…and be killed” (8:31), but the words do not have the meaning for them that they do for Mark. In particular, the idea that the Messiah must suffer does not make sense to them, because they are unreceptive to the solution this part of Mark’s story implicitly presents (in the interpretation given below) to the problem of alienation and anomie.
There is nothing particularly unique or mysterious about the phenomenon I am pointing to here. The general point I am making could be made of most jokes, for example. Every joke has a point, which some listeners might get and others fail to get. This point is not something one can extract from the joke and tell someone instead of telling them the joke. The essential thing the joke-teller is trying to present can only be presented by telling the joke, and it will only be grasped by a listener properly attuned to this joke, i.e. who shares the same “sense of humor” as the joke-teller. Something analogous could be said of many poems and of much serious modern fiction. To truly understand some modern fiction, the reader must be able to see the story as a dramatization of certain issues that she herself is able (at least vicariously) to care deeply about.[5]
This explanation accords with Mark’s own “reader-reception” theory given in Chapter 4. The parable of the sower emphasizes the necessity of being “good ground” for the message of Jesus, and clearly conceives of this as a moral qualification. People who are not good ground because of worldly cares, or because of the “shallowness” of their attraction to Jesus, are clearly morally blameworthy. This explains also why Mark casts his “Gospel” (i.e. his preaching) in the form of a story. What he wants to get across can only be gotten across in narrative form. The entire Gospel has the character of a “parable” which some Jesus-followers can understand and some can’t. (Jesus-followers who think they understand but really do not are represented by the disciples. Even though the disciples are given information about the meaning of Jesus’ parables, they ultimately fail to understand the core of what Mark thinks it is essential to understand.)
I will argue later that this kind of sympathetic reading of Mark does not require us to agree also that he was justified in condemning those whose sensitivities prevented them from understanding the hidden meaning of his Jesus-story. That is, this might be a case of conflicting value-orientations, rather than a case of moral concern vs. lack of moral concern.
Why must the Messiah suffer?
Let me now suggest a way that this kind of explanation could be applied to the question about the centrality of suffering in Mark’s Gospel. On what basis does Mark expect his readers to buy the idea that God willed the crucifixion, that Jesus’ death saves, and that they themselves must “deny themselves and take up the cross”. Familiar acceptance of these ideas in subsequent Christianity places a veil over our eyes here, that we must try to wipe away. To reconstruct the original basis for the acceptance of these ideas, we must imagine ourselves back into a time before these ideas became familiar, and try to imagine why anyone would first come to believe they were true.
My account begins with a description of a certain kind of personal transformation and “salvation”. This experience provides the basis for the Markan belief in the centrality of suffering, as well as for several other beliefs such as the belief that Jesus is a divine Messiah.
First, we can develop further the picture described above of an audience suffering from severe alienation and anomie. Alienation and anomie produce a certain split in the way the world is constructed for such people. On the one hand there are what might be called “conventional legitimating structures and categories”. One who wants to be “legitimate” as a person, to validate her sense of self-worth, normally does so by showing how her character, actions, or achievements exemplify certain ideals admired in her cultural context. These ideals a great deal of power as “social facts” (Durkheim), determining what counts as personal success and personal failure. They are inevitably felt by most people as ultimate “authorities” determining what is indeed good and bad, valid and invalid in human beings.
But even in normal times, there are ways in which people’s actual moral sensitivities are in conflict with conventional legitimating categories: They perceive some “successful” people as not really deserving their success, and vice-versa for some “unsuccessful” people. This phenomenon is greatly exacerbated in cases of extreme alienation: The values people feel most strongly about on a personal and instinctive level become polarized over against the legitimating structures and categories that seem authoritative in public life. It is not only that some individuals enjoy unmerited success. The very standards by which success is measured in public life are at odds with the moral sensitivities of alienated people. These sensitivities are themselves “excluded” from the social world.
The social split in Pharisaism between the righteous and the excluded sinners has a counterpart here in the internal struggle between that part of oneself that has internalized the power of conventional legitimating structures on the one hand, and one’s own deepest moral sensitivities on the other. Some alienated people try to repress their own deepest sensitivities and focus on trying to appropriate some socially recognized badges of status and worth.[6] Mark essentially advocates the opposite move, and this in a very radical way. He wants his readers to identify with sensitivities and characteristics in themselves that are excluded from the social world, and to take these as an alternative legitimating norm. He wants his readers to identify with these precisely as excluded. Such identification would amount to a fundamental psychological transformation, that is, a transformation in the way a person feels the issue of legitimacy and tries to establish a sense of personal worth. It would mean taking one’s own powerfully felt instinctive moral passion as a guide, in opposition to external legitimating social structures. This identification would “save” the transformed person. What it saves her from is the acute feeling that alienation and anomie produces, a feeling that “nothing is right”. The world is not right, but one’s own self is also not right (one feels “sinful”; in Pauline terms, one cannot feel “justified” under these conditions.) Mark instinctively sees that the root of this not-right-ness is the flight from one’s powerlessness. “Salvation”, the achievement of a sustainable sense of personal rightness, comes about through complete identification with the powerless and excluded part of oneself, as powerless and excluded in this world and permanently so.
Identifying with what is permanently and by nature excluded from the social world means that one can never “win” in the world: The real social world will never be transformed to such an extent that these excluded sensitivities can themselves become social norms. Such a person “must” suffer in the world, and everything will not come together in a sustainable feeling of rightness unless this destiny is fully and deliberately taken on. (There will not necessarily be physical suffering of course; and physical suffering when it comes will come as a physical sign of this more fundamental exclusion from the world.) Identifying with what is excluded from the social world also makes it difficult to legitimate one’s views “rationally”, since rational legitimation usually consists in appealing to some standards of legitimacy well accepted in one’s society. (I hope the above account does, however, indicate a different way in which rational legitimation of Mark’s views might proceed.)
Mark’s ideal reader will not learn these things from the Gospel as ideas or doctrines. She will probably not be conscious of the ideas as I have just sketched them. In the ideal case she will find herself engaged with the story because she will feel the story, deeply but implicitly, as a dramatization of these issues that affect her life so deeply. When she comes to the episodes surrounding the crucifixion she will simply feel a power in the figure of the suffering and crucified Jesus. This is a power that, on my reflective account, derives from the fact that Jesus represents the good-but-excluded part of herself. But in the ideal case she will not herself be reflectively aware of this fact, and so will give it an external-objective rather than a subjective-psychological interpretation. In reading the story she will implicitly identify with Jesus, feel herself transformed by this identification, and so attribute her salvation to the “power” of the Jesus pictured in the story. (This accounts for the extraordinary emphasis placed on the person of Jesus in Mark. The fact that Jesus is associated with what is permanently “powerless” in the world also accounts for the often-remarked fact that the Markan resurrection accounts emphasize Jesus’ absence rather than his presence as a risen Spirit, as in Paul.) This psychological transformation will also transform the world that the transformed person lives in, including the divine being she assumes to rule over this world. The divine is what legitimates, that upon which one ultimately depends for legitimation. The totally defeated Jesus on the cross is now the earthly manifestation and representative of God on earth; this gives the very word “God” a different meaning that it has for those for whom God is the authority standing behind some particular legitimating social structures.
A person transformed and saved in this way will perceive a strong intrinsic relationship between suffering and Messiahship. The Messiah “must” be a Defeated One because identification with something defeated in the world is what saves. The Jesus in Mark’s story who willingly accepts suffering is partly a model for the transformed Jesus-follower, who also must identify with the “suffering”-excluded part of herself, for the reason given above. But the fact that the last part of Mark’s story is motivated by “God’s plan that the Messiah should suffer”[7] also reflects the fact that the Jesus in the story is not entirely a human figure with whom the reader can identify, but a symbolic image charged with the divine “power” that the reader feels in his identification with suffering. The suffering is partly what “baptizes” the figure (10:38) and renders him for the reader a Messiah with divine powers.
This account makes the saving transformation of the reader and the reader’s world the basis of all other beliefs in the Gospel. Suffering defeat is necessary to make Jesus the Messiah, because identification with What Suffers Defeat is what saves. Jesus is a divine “Son of God” because what suffers defeat in the world is the ultimate locus of authority in the world. Those who identify with what suffers defeat are the true inheritors of the Judaic tradition because they are the followers of the one true divine Authority. Thus, although Mark considers personal conversion necessary, this is not to be interpreted individualistically. My assumption, at least, is that members of the Markan community gathered together on the basis of a roughly similar conversion experience shared by most (due to their similar previous social experience). They also of course interpreted their experience in terms that connected them with the historical community of Israel, and that led to important consequences for interactions in their own small community.
Mark and conversion to the good.
This account has a weakness, in that it seems obvious that not just any “identification with what suffers defeat” is something good. In showing how various further features of Mark’s Gospel support my account, I want to show also some ways in which Mark’s Gospel makes more specific the kind of identification involved, in such a way that it points the reader toward identification with something that is truly good. In my account, this goodness is what makes the personal transformation good and provides a plausible substantive basis why Mark could expect his community to accept what he is trying to convey in his Gospel).
First, this approach can claim simply to be taking seriously Mark’s claim that there is a hidden meaning to the Jesus-story he tells, and that failure to understand this hidden meaning is the sign of a moral failure. Put in other words, Mark is suggesting that a pure concern for a certain kind of good is one of the factors that makes one “competent” to understand the meaning of the story he tells. One only understands the story as Mark wants it to be understood if one lets a pure concern for this good shape one’s reading.
Turning to specifics, consider first the well-known turn, in the middle of the Gospel, from Jesus/Pharisee conflicts, to increasing criticism of the disciples. On this reading, the Jesus in the first part of the Gospel is the hypostatized spirit of Markan Jesus-followers, defined in opposition to law-oriented Jewish groups in their diaspora-synagogue community. Jesus’ successes reflect their claims to stand for something superior to what these opposing groups stand for. This part of the Gospel encourages an “us vs. them” mentality, in which “we” (Markan Jesus-followers) are better than “they” (law-oriented Jews). Some might easily assume (as Mack appears to assume) that who “we” are and who “they” are is easy to recognize, simply by looking at the people one associates with. The critique of the disciples, increasing especially after 8:17, symbolically represents criticism turned in upon the group of Markan Jesus-followers themselves. This criticism is the basis for a division within this group, between what Mark would regard as true Jesus-followers, and those who might associate with this group, but whose attitudes and actions show that they haven’t truly understood and internalized the way of being Mark thinks is the essence of “following Jesus”. This critique is motivated by the fact that, if one is devoted to something good for its own sake, one will sometimes be willing to sacrifice one’s own tangible interests, and the tangible interests of one’s group, for the sake of this good.[8]
This criticism is most obvious in the case of the criticism of the disciples’ competition over “who is the greatest” (an indirect criticism of those among Markan Jesus-followers who struggle for status within this group.) One whose mind is focused on the dogmatic assertion that “our group is better than their group”, will also want to be admired as an exemplary member of “our” group. But if (1) a person thinks that each individual is good insofar as she is dedicated to the good our group stands for, and (2) if what our group stands for is identification with something powerless and excluded, then she would not be anxious to enhance her personal status in the group.
One can also identify something good for its own sake by defining it in relation to other more familiar good and bad traits. Suppose, for example, that a person suffering from anomie identifies “what is excluded” with all the chaotic and disordered feelings engendered by anomie itself. This would obviously include many impulses that are not good. Such disordered impulses are plausibly represented in Mark by pictures of people “possessed by unclean spirits”. This contrasts with the “holy spirit” that Jesus brings, a unifying and order-bringing force in peoples’ lives. Identification with this excluded but holy spirit expresses itself, for example, in staying away from “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly” (7:21-23), in being faithful to one’s marriage-partner (10:2-12), and in loving others as oneself (12:31).
Finally, one could imagine several ways of identifying with What is Defeated in the world that would not be good, and see the ways that Mark’s picture of Jesus stands in contrast to these. For example, one could envision oneself as the concrete personal embodiment of justice in an unjust world, and identify one’s struggle to gain personal power purely and simply with a struggle for justice. Alternatively, one could withdraw into oneself, and disengage from any kind of competitive struggle in the world. One could acquiesce in one’s own humiliation, internalizing a low self-image that mirrors one’s low status in the world. One could masochistically seek out suffering. One could use suffering as an occasion for self-pity. One could use personal suffering as a way of manipulating the sympathies of others.
By contrast, one outstanding characteristic of Jesus throughout Mark’s Gospel is the way he aggressively and confrontationally asserts the authority of the difficult-to-grasp values he stands for and aggressively condemns the world and its commonly recognized standards of success as without authority. He does this in full awareness that he “must” ultimately lose in these confrontations (standing as he does for something that must by nature remain powerless in the world). He conducts himself with dignity throughout his trial, either making simple assertion of his otherworldly authority or remaining silent.
Consider, in the light of these observations, the last moment in the crucifixion scene, the climax of Mark’s Gospel toward which everything else leads. Just before Jesus dies he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Then Mark says, “And the Centurion, seeing how he died, said, ‘This man indeed was a Son of God'”. The centurion’s remark suggests that Jesus’ final moment was also a final revelation of his divinity, a revelation of his status as the representative of God on earth. This cry is on the one hand a sign of human weakness and total defeat. Jesus’ acceptance of his suffering destiny wavered in Gethsemane, but he managed to remain committed to it. Here the physical distress, the humiliation, and the abandonment by his followers, have pushed him to the extreme where he is no longer able to maintain his own faith that God is with him. His defeat and human weakness penetrate him thoroughly. At the same time “Why have you abandoned me?” is an implicit but aggressive protest and assertion of his innocence. Though he feels abandoned by God he maintains his conviction that he does not deserve to be so abandoned. Taken as a climax of the motifs sketched in the preceding four paragraphs, this picture of the dying Jesus is the perfect imagistic representation of what, in each human being, is excluded, untainted by any shred of connection with the legitimating structures of the social world, but conscious and assertive of its own rightness.
This is the ultimately authoritative, the ultimate revelation of the divine.[9]
A critical assessment of the substance of Mark’s message.
I do not offer this hypothesis as a decisive and proven solution to the problem of Mark’s meaning–this would take another book. I offer it principally as an illustration of a general kind of approach to interpretation that I think remedies the weaknesses both in the fideist approaches Mack criticizes, as well as the socio-historical approach he pursues.
One way that this approach differs from fideist approaches is that the interpretation it leads to provides us with a critical norm for deciding under what interpretation a given Markan belief might have a valid basis. Partly what is at stake here is the manner of construing the what might be called the “implicit epistemological structure” of Markan beliefs: What is based on what? Although it is unlikely that Markan belief is based on explicit reasoning, still it has some implicit epistemological structure, in the sense that there are some considerations that serve as basic motivations, and other beliefs that are based on these considerations. We take Mark most seriously if we consider Markan origins, not chronologically or causally (what chain of causes led up to his beliefs?), but epistemologically (what in reality are they cognitively based on?).
For example, is the belief in an apocalyptic vindication of Markan Jesus-followers a basis for their belief that they are the new chosen people? On what basis then do they believe in apocalyptic vindication? Do they believe that they are the chosen people simply because they want to believe this? On the above account, this belief has some valid basis. In the ideal case, the experience of Markan Jesus-followers was structured in such a way that yielding to the power of the excluded good was perceived as committing themselves to the highest good that appeared in their experience, a good that they rightly perceived to be also one of the central foci of the Judaic tradition. This is what they expressed by saying that commitment to this good was the new “will of God”, and being seized by the power of this good was a sign of being “chosen” by the Jewish God. The power of this good is real, but is something that by nature cannot appear powerful in this world. Its power belongs to another dimension of reality, and this is what is pictured in the apocalyptic image of the utopian Kingdom of God to come.
These Markan beliefs are partially justified, under some interpretations, by the basis I have proposed for them. One can also see what is not justified by this basis. For example, from my own historicist and pluralist perspective, I would say that the experience of many Pharisaic Jews may simply have been structured differently, and so Mark’s claim that they are guilty of a great sin against the one true God would be unjustified. (And if this is true, it is also true that we cannot take for granted the validity of the Markan worldview for Europeans and Americans in the 20th century.)
Some Markan Jesus-followers might believe that they have become members of the new chosen people merely by associating with the group who think of themselves as Jesus-followers. This belief is completely unfounded. On the present account, the purpose of Mark’s criticism of the disciples is precisely to make a distinction within this group, of those who are “true” Jesus-followers and those who merely claim the name. Mark and his audience probably did think that the kingdom of God was literally coming soon. But perception of the highest good is not good evidence about what is actually going to happen in the future; and so, as a literal picture of the future, this belief was without any substantive basis.
Something similar could be said about belief in the resurrection. It makes no sense to say that, epistemologically, belief in the resurrection was the basis for the Christian belief that Jesus’ crucifixion was not really a defeat. For this, one would have to provide some plausible basis, independent of the rest of the Jesus-story, for belief that the resurrection happened. On the present account, Mark’s ideal audience would already feel a divine “power” revealed in the crucifixion story itself. The resurrection, as an image, dramatizes the power they already felt in the crucifixion; the power needs some concrete representation, and this is why they would feel that the resurrection “must” be part of the story. (To take this dramatic/aesthetic “must” as factual evidence for the resurrection would of course be a mistake.)
These observations illustrate the way that an account of the basis for Markan belief can also serve as a critical norm for interpretation. That is, the idea of an implicit epistemological structure gives a more philosophical and pluralist basis for a critical evaluation of what a text says in the light of our own grasp of the reality of which it speaks–or as I would say, a grasp of the basis-in-reality of the worldview which it proposes or tries to convert us to. Thus it remedies a fundamental weakness of fideist accounts of Christian origins.
I think it also remedies the weakness in Mack’s approach. Mack tends, like many current biblical scholars, to assume a dichotomy between theological interpretation and socio-historical interpretation. On this view, theological interpretation construes everything in terms of debates about purely intellectual and personal “theological beliefs”, conceived of as timeless truths independent of social and cultural context. Socio-historical interpretation by contrast tends to assume as axiomatic that all religious beliefs are really indirect strategies for pursuing (or “rationalizing”) group interests. The core of “interpretation” consists in telling the story of the group responsible for a given writing, what their situation was and what their interests were, and how their various beliefs furthered those interests. As often as not, the story the social historian tells is a moral tale, taking sides in the struggles between ancient groups, and implicitly assigning praise or blame to an author’s intentions, according to which side the historian takes. (This is essential in making the story into something we can learn from, rather than just something to satisfy antiquarian curiosity.) The side the historian takes is usually governed by his own values and his involvement in modern debates. Mack’s unflattering story of Mark’s community, for example, is clearly informed by the priority given to values (which I share) of rationality and tolerance among 20th century liberal intellectuals. The historian does not try to see the world as the text’s author saw it, but to substitute his (more “objective”) picture of the author’s situation for the author’s picture. The interpreter never directly confronts the author as someone whose ideas and values should be taken seriously as potential competitors with the ideas and values of the interpreter.
The approach illustrated above is “theological” in a broadly Tillichian sense.[10] It does not of course treat Mark as an intellectual theologian trying to teach some doctrines about the objective structure of otherworldly reality for purely speculative purposes. It does treat Mark as someone who has some very different and interesting views on the topic of what ought to be of ultimate concern, views worth our critical engagement, and critical comparison with other views we might have on this subject. These views were shaped by his social experience. And they have directly social consequences, in that commitment to the authority of what is excluded in oneself is intrinsically related to identification with, and compassion for, other individuals excluded from social legitimacy.
On the present view, the study of Christian origins is best conceived of as an exercise in Geistesgeschichte (“Spirit-history”) after the manner of the sketches[11] given in Hegel’s Phenomenology of mind. The most interesting and important aspect of early Christian history does not lie in the moral tales we can tell of concrete struggles between various Christian groups. The reconstruction of social setting is important because human consciousness is a thoroughly social reality. The most important object of research into early Christianity is the origins of the dramatic transformation it represented in human consciousness, in people’s feelings about the relation between external legitimating structures and internal moral passion.
[1]The widespread attraction of apocalypticism, gnosticism, and Cynic philosophy are among the many indications of this alienation. As Hegel said perceptively: “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, which is sunk into a feeling of unhappiness. (G. W. F. Hegel The Philosophy of History [New York: Dover, 1956] 278).
[2] It may be best to envision groups loosely connected with a diaspora synagogue, who have enough contact to quarrel with each other, but who are not necessarily struggling for control of an organized synagogue community.
[3] On this hypothesis, the “scribes and Pharisees” in Mark are dramatic representations of law-oriented Jews in the diaspora synagogue community Mark belonged to. These latter may or may not have called themselves “Pharisees” and have been connected with Pharisess in Palestine.
[4] This audience is one for whom conflicts over Jewish fasting customs (2:18-22), Sabbath-observance (2:23-3:6), table-fellowship (2:15-17), and dietary laws (7:14-23) (i.e. customs familiar in their milieu) are very important, yet who are unfamiliar with some “traditions of the elders” concerning ritual washings observed by “the Pharisees and all the Judeans” (7:3) (actually newer customs introduced by Pharisees and [in Mark’s mind] observed by many Jews in Judea). They are interested in Aramaic phrases used by Jesus, but don’t understand them (see Mack A Myth 296 n. 2; H. C. Kee The Community of the New Age: Studies in Mark’s Gospel [Philadelphia: Mercer University Press. 1983] 101). They are unfamiliar with the exact geography of Galilee (See Nineham, Saint Mark [Baltimore: Penguin Books. 1963] 40). They reject some Jewish customs and influential Jewish leaders, but Jewish scriptures and the fate of the Jerusalem Temple are very important to them, and it is very important to them also to claim that they are the true heirs of the Judaic tradition (Mk. 12:1-12). They are doing something that provokes others in synagogues to beat them and to accuse them (of being trouble-makers) governors and kings (13:9) (i.e. they are making exclusive claims to the Judaic heritage within synagogue communities and condemning others who disagree, while flaunting their rejection of many customs these others hold dear). I take their expectation of the near end of the world (9:1, 13:1-37) as an indication that they were alienated from their social world in general (not only from law-oriented Judaism); this is probably also indicated by their lack of attachment to family-life (1:16-20; 3:21, 31-35; 6:1-6; 10:28).
[5] For example, at the end of Margaret Atwood’s novel, Surfacing (London: Virago, 1979), the heroine undergoes a kind of psychotic episode, in which she feels guided by an internal “power”, identified in some scenes with the ghosts of her dead parents that appear to her. This power causes her to break off human contact, and tells her to destroy mementos of her past “false” life; not to go into any area that is walled or fenced in; to dig vegetables out of the wet ground with her bare hands and eat them raw; to take off her clothes and sleep in a lair like an animal. The novel leads up to this by presenting the heroine as one whose feelings are greatly at odds with many features of the modern world (cast in a very negative light) but who internalizes social conventions and represses her feelings to the point of self-deception. A reader whose experience of the modern world is similar to that of the heroine will understand her “psychotic episode” as a healing “surfacing” of a much better self. A reader with no similar experience is likely only to see the heroine inexplicably “going crazy.”
[6] See Franz Fanon’s description of the way that, under colonial domination, native populations sometimes become envious and want to imitate the colonizers (The Wretched of the Earth [New York: Grove, 1963] 39, 52). Fanon’s description of what it feels like to be a colonized people suggests some helpful possible analogies to the mentality of Mediterranean communities under Roman rule.
[7] Mack notes that this “supernatural” idea is necessary to Mark’s plot, since the Pharisaic persecution-plot cannot motivate Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem (A Myth 244, 282).
[8] This is perhaps the most crucial methodological point on which I would disagree with Mack, and with many other sociologically oriented biblical scholars. The latter tend to assume as a methodological axiom that groups always do and say only what it is in their tangible interest to do and say (by “tangible interest” I mean such things as group survival and prestige, group status vis-a-vis other groups, etc.) The interpreter’s task is only to discover the ways in which what groups do and say furthers their interests. I tend to agree that the pursuit of group self-interest is indeed most often the dominating force in the stream of changes in world history, but that in general we do not stand to learn a great deal from the study of how individual groups have pursued their interests. Sometimes individuals and groups also propose ideals that have an intrinsic worth and goodness–as Mark does in the present hypothesis–and the study of such ideals is a much more worthwhile endeavor. My conception of the good is pluralist and contextual, and so understanding ideals requires understanding the relation of these ideals to socio-cultural circumstances.
[9] One can see here again a continuity with a certain strand of exilic and post-exilic Judaism. Many of the psalms are laments spoken by relatively powerless people unjustly oppressed by those more powerful than they, laments in which one can feel a great deal of emotional power in the voice of the sufferer. As the situation of Israel grows more and more hopeless, there is an increasing emphasis on the Suffering Just Man as the key example of the person close to God, the most “Beloved by God”, the “First-born Son of God” (as in the well-known examples of Wis Ch. 2-5, Isa 52:13-53:12). In the context of this progressively developing tradition, Mark is the one who turns the final corner: Not only is the Suffering Just Man the favorite of God. This figure is the key representative of God on earth, the one worthy to be Lord of the coming Kingdom of God.
[10] I refer here to Tillich’s insistence that “theology” not be defined as the study of a particular set of (Christian) beliefs, but as a general subject matter on which different people have different assumptions (as for example astronomy is a general subject matter about which different astronomers have different theories), and that this subject matter is “what is of ultimate concern” (Tillich Systematic Theology Vol. 1 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1951] 8-15). I would again push Tillich’s principle in a more pluralist direction, in that different cultures and religions have many different valid ways of conceiving of and relating to the question as to what ultimately matters.
[11] I emphasize Hegel’s individual sketches of transforming moments in the development of Western consciousness, because I take as my model the approach that he illustrates in these sketches (not their specific content, and certainly not his attempt to fit all these sketches into one grand metaphysical scheme).
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