A hypothesis about Mark’s audience.
The audience for Mark’s story are probably Greek-speaking members of a Jewish synagogue community (or communities) somewhere in the Mediterranean world outside of Israel proper (Paul preached in synagogues mainly in modern-day Turkey and Greece). At this time there was no central authority overseeing all these communities. Reading and interpretation of Jewish scriptures was the focus of meetings in these synagogues. They were sites of contention between different factions, each claiming to represent the true interpretation of the Jewish tradition, each claiming to be the true inheritors of this tradition. Jesus-followers (not yet “Christians”) were one such faction. Their chief opponents represented a more law-oriented kind of Judaism (represented in the Gospels by “Pharisees”), who were ancestors of what eventually became mainstream Rabbinic Judaism which has persisted to this day, but who had not yet become recognized representatives of “true Judaism” as they are today.
Some Key Elements of Mark’s Story.
Mark’s main story line can be divided into two parts.
The first part of the story (Chapters 1-7) revolves around two main themes: (1) Jesus as miracle worker and exorcist, and (2) his conflict with Pharisees, which motivates them to plot how to get him killed. In this first of the story he gathers 12 close “disciples,” but also attracts large crowds of other people.
The second part of the story is taken up with many criticisms of his inner circle of disciples. One main point of criticism is their refusal to accept the idea that his life is to end by crucifixion. Here Jesus often repeats the idea that there is some secret meaning to his teachings and events of his life, and the disciples are often criticized for not understanding this secret meaning.
This part climaxes in his crucifixion, where he is abandoned by all of his disciples and all the crowds who had previously followed him. His last words are “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
Jesus had predicted that he would be crucified and would rise again after three days. But (unlike the other Gospels) in the Gospel of Mark there are no resurrection appearances. Some women followers come to his tomb and find it empty. A young man tells them: “He is risen, he is not here. Tell his disciples to go to Galilee where he will meet them.” But they were so frightened by everything that they said not a word to anyone.
Apocalyptic Expectations.
All this happens in the context of apocalyptic expectations of a soon-to-come end of the world, “when there will be such distress as has not been equaled since the beginning when God created the world, nor ever will be again. And if the Lord had not shortened that time, no one would have survived; but he did shorten the time for the sake of the elect whom he chose…. After that time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will come falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” then Jesus will “come in the clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels to gather his chosen from the ends of the world to the ends of heaven.”
“Be on your guard: they will hand you over to Sanhedrins; you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them, since the Gospel must first be proclaimed to all the nations. And when they lead you away to hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what to say; no, say whatever is given to you when the time comes, because it is not you who will be speaking: it will be the Holy Spirit. Brother will betray brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by all men on account of my name; but the man who stands firm to the end will be saved.”
Mark’s double critique.
Mark’s first critique
Mark’s first critique, represented by Jesus’ conflict with Pharisees in the first part of the Gospel, contrasts the “Pharisaic” mentality with what I will call a “charismatic” mentality. The charismatic mentality in this case is reflected both by powerful preaching and by miracle working. These two ideas are reflected in the double meaning of a Greek word exousia, which means both “power” (including miracle-working power) and “authority” (associated with powerful preaching). Mark says that “Jesus spoke with power (exousia), not like the Pharisees.”
Roughly, the Pharisee-mentality tends to emphasize certain legal prescriptions, centering for example on the distinction between clean/unclean and Sabbath rules, 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 “charismatic” preachers and reputed miracle-workers in the contemporary world, among Jews and non-Jews, familiar to synagogue-goers. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians chs. 12 and 14 shows that many Jesus followers were also reputed to be charismatic preachers and have miracle working powers resulting from their possession by a supernatural spirit.)
The charismatic mentality among one party of Jesus-followers tended 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 in this they are in conflict with other “Pharisaic” members of a diaspora-synagogue community. This is a serious conflict, possible sources of physical violence–the reason for Jesus’s prediction “you will be beaten in synagogues.”
Mark’s Second Critique
Mark’s second critique, represented by conflicts with his disciples in the second half of Mark’s story, is a criticism of some charistmatically-inclined Jesus-followers in a synagogue community who are attracted to emotionally powerful preaching and to miracle-working power, probably represented by some members of this community. This makes them attracted to the Gospel image of Jesus’s power and worldly success in gathering thousands of followers. Like the disciples in the Gospel, these Jesus-followers are repelled by the idea that suffering, being a “loser” in the world, should be associated with true righteousness, and with Jesus as ruler of a perfectly righteous kingdom. Mark opposes this point of view by making Jesus’s crucifixion a central climax to his story.
So Mark thinks that the crucifixion is all-important to the Jesus-story he wants to tell. Resistance to seeing it as all-important will render a person resistant to the overall moral of the story, the kind of life-changes that Mark wants his story to bring about on the part of his audience. This is the “secret meaning” of events in the Jesus story that Jesus’s disciples did not understand, and which made them abandon him at the end. Mark is basically leveling this same accusation against power-oriented Jesus-followers in his synagogue community. They will never achieve True Rightness, making them members of Jesus’s perfectly Righteous Kingdom soon to come, unless they are willing to accept the crucifixion as central to the story, and somehow also symbolically central to their lives.
Why is this?
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. (Abraham Herschel’s book on the prophets calls them “The conscience of Israel). They promised that if the Jewish people remedied this, turned their lives around, 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, which was lacking in the rule of Israel by foreigners.
The “apocalyptic” movement among Jews was a turning point in this prophetic tradition. It was fueled by a feeling that the world they lived in was very 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, unlike the classical prophets, 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.) This would follow on the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 a.d., which Mark regards as also the end of any hope for a literal restoration of Israel as God’s Kingdom.
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 in this world 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. 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.
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, confrontationally standing up against the unrightness of the world, and accept the likelihood that you will lose in such confrontations. Rightness will never prevail in this concretely existing world you live in. The ideal in which Rightness and power go together belongs to a supernatural world and will always be completely absent from the world you live in right now. Do not let this diminish your energetic commitment to stand up always for perfect Rightness! “Stay awake!”
I suggest that all this most likely explains the central place that the figure of the crucified Jesus had for Christians from a very early period, a very unusual picture as a focus of religious devotion. I think it also suggests an explanation of the central place held by the figure of the “martyr,” as a culture-hero in the Christian imagination at a very early period.
Leave a Reply