The Media Matrix of Early Jewish and Christian Narrative

Nicholas Elder

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567701541
• eBook ISBN: 9780567688132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Generically, theologically, and concerning content, Mark and Joseph and Aseneth are quite different. The former is a product of the nascent Jesus movement and influenced by the Greco-Roman Bioi ("Lives"). It details the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a wandering Galilean. The latter is a Hellenistic Jewish narrative influenced by Greek romances and Jewish novellas. It expands the laconic account of Joseph's marriage to Aseneth in Genesis 41 into a full-fledged love and adventure story. Despite these differences, Elder finds remarkable similarities that the texts share. Elder uses both texts to examine media and modes of composition in antiquity, arguing that they were both composed via dictation from their antecedent oral traditions. Elder's volume offers a fresh approach to the composition of both Joseph and Aseneth and Mark as well as to many of their respective interpretive debates.

Chapter 1

Mark and Aseneth

A paradox has emerged during the past thirty years of Markan scholarship. With the rise of narrative criticism, many deem the gospel a well-crafted and even sophisticated story. Mark creates a narrative world into which its audience is invited to enter. According to David Rhoads and Donald Michie in the opening words of Mark as Story, this is “a world full of conflict and suspense, a world of surprising reversals and strange ironies, a world of riddles and hidden meanings.”¹ As interpreters began to read Mark as a unified whole in the early 1980s, interest shifted from the world behind the text to the world of the text.² The Second Gospel, which was previously judged an artless collection of sources, became a literary achievement written by an artist par excellence.³

But Mark’s style has not changed during this time and neither have assessments of it.⁴ Linguistically, many consider the narrative terse and unpolished.⁵ Those who claim that Mark writes sophisticated Greek are few.⁶ This is the heart of the paradox. On the one hand, the gospel is narratively effective, even artistic. On the other, its style is literarily unadorned. Mark is a compelling story written in unaccomplished Greek.⁷

There is a growing consensus that this incongruity results from Mark existing at the borderland between orality and textuality. The preface to the third edition of Mark as Story exemplifies this new development in Markan studies. There, Rhoads, Michie, and Joanna Dewey claim that the Second Gospel is an “oral/aural composition.”⁸ Yet there is little clarity about what it means for a narrative to be an “oral/aural composition.” It is common for other nebulous terms such as “residual orality” and “oral literature” to be applied to Mark, as if merely evoking these categories settles the matter about the gospel’s distinct style.

One of my objectives in this book is to bring precision to these terms. I agree with those who argue that Mark is an oral composition and that the gospel exhibits a preponderance of residual orality. But these terms will not be employed without situating them within ancient media culture, which I will do in Chapter 2. It is one thing to claim that a narrative exhibits residual orality and to categorize it as oral literature. It is another to offer a reason why it exhibits residual orality. I will contend that Mark displays style and syntax characteristic of oral storytelling because it is an oral tradition that was committed to the written medium via dictation.

By proposing this explanation for the orality that abides in Mark’s written form, I am intentionally distancing myself from the so-called Great Divide approach to orality and textuality. The Great Divide perspective considers orality and textuality to be two modalities of communication that are competing or mutually exclusive. It also tends to exaggerate the importance of orality in antiquity while minimizing the functions of textuality. By painting orality with such broad strokes, scholars adopting this outlook have not paid adequate attention to why a written text might exhibit features characteristic of oral discourse.

Werner H. Kelber is often charged with first generating this Great Divide approach in his seminal monograph The Oral and the Written Gospel. ⁹ Therein Kelber does not contend that the Gospel of Mark is oral literature itself, as many other Markan interpreters have argued since the publication of this book.¹⁰ The opposite is the case. Kelber maintains that Mark did not extend an oral tradition but resisted many of its constituent aspects.¹¹ According to him, the first written gospel was an attempt to silence the pre-Synoptic tradition that was heavily influenced by orality.¹² In Kelber’s treatment, Mark’s exploitation of the written medium is an intentional break with the oral medium. But he affirms that oral forms and conventions “gained admittance into the written document.”¹³ Oral features made their way into the written text because of the prominence of oral tradition.¹⁴ According to Kelber, these features include parataxis, formulaic phrases such as καὶ ἐγένετο and καὶ γίνεται (“and it happened”), the speed at which the narrative progresses, the ubiquity of the third-person plural, the dominance of active verbs, a high number of instances of the historical present, and the frequency of direct speech.¹⁵

In his final analysis, Kelber finds Mark’s evocation of the oral gospel tradition hostile and destructive.¹⁶ Mark retains aspects of an antecedent oral tradition only to supersede it in written form. Mark’s Gospel takes a polemical stance against the prophetic voice that promoted “the oral metaphysics of [Jesus’s] presence.”¹⁷ By writing a gospel that relegates Jesus’s authority to the past rather than the prophetic present, the author of Mark harnesses the modality of writing to support an ideological agenda that silenced its oral predecessors. Mark intentionally creates a Great Divide between oral and textual traditions.¹⁸

By arguing his case in this forceful and dichotomous form, Kelber exposes a deep-seated bias of modern biblical criticism. Exposing the chirographic-typographic hegemony in biblical scholarship remains Kelber’s principal contribution to the field of NT interpretation, as it ushered in the current era of orality studies that considers seriously the oral lifeworld in which NT texts were produced and received.¹⁹

Discussions about this oral lifeworld have until recently tended to exclude the possibility that orally influenced discourses were also textually influenced, even when the object of inquiry itself is a written document. For example, Joanna Dewey writes, “the gospel [Mark] remains fundamentally on the oral side of the oral/written divide.”²⁰

Responding to this overemphasis on orality in the first-century context, Rafael Rodríguez attempts to deconstruct the binarial relationship that orality and textuality is often constructed in, arguing that NT scholarship needs a more complete understanding of both, particularly when it comes to their cultural and social functions.²¹ For Rodríguez, the essentialization of both orality and textuality, and especially oral cultures and literate cultures, has led NT scholars to misunderstand the complex relationship between the two.²² As a remedy, he proposes that NT scholars exploring the effects of orality and textuality need to acknowledge that these modalities vary in different cultures. Understanding the roles of orality and textuality in any given context is the most significant task of the interpreter, according to Rodríguez.²³ This entails investigating texts along with the social, historical, and cultural worlds in which they were produced.

Rodríguez has called his a “contextual” approach to orality and textuality.²⁴ This perspective considers the mutual effect of textuality and orality to be central. Scholars promoting this contextual methodology maintain that neither orality nor textuality is a monolithic reality. The two modalities work differently in various social and cultural contexts. These interpreters want to avoid making summative claims about orality and textuality. Instead, they attempt to understand the communication systems of respective ancient contexts before investigating the implications of orality and textuality within those communicative environments. They also affirm that the two modalities are interrelated. It is from this contextual outlook that I argue that the residual orality present in the written text of Mark results from the gospel being an oral tradition, of which one instantiation was textualized via dictation.

That Mark is an oral tradition composed in this manner is evidenced by its beginning, its ending, and elements in between the two. The first words of the narrative designate it “orally proclaimed news” (εὐαγγέλιον).²⁵ In a novel way, this oral message now abides in written form. “Gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) was originally a media term, but, under Mark’s influence, it came to connote content about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Nazarene in a variety of forms. I will argue in Chapter 5 that “gospel” (εὐαγγέλιον) in Mk 1:1, as a meta-generic category, indicates more about the narrative’s medium than its genre. Furthermore, Mark’s successors, Matthew and Luke, also signal their media affiliations at the beginnings of their narratives.

Just as Mark’s relationship to the oral lifeworld is intimated in its opening words, so also is it revealed in its closing words. The gospel infamously ends on an anticlimactic note. Mark 16:8 disappointed readers as early as the second century, at which point tradents appended what they must have determined to be more satisfying endings. They were able to do so because Mark was considered an open tradition that could be expanded. In Chapters 2 and 4, I shall argue that there are certain media conditions under which a narrative is more likely to be augmented. Mark, as a textualized oral tradition, meets these conditions. We shall also see that the ending “for they were afraid” (ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ) is not so curious in view of media-critical considerations.

Between the gospel’s beginning and end, its style hints at its medium and mode of composition. Anacolutha, for example, are frequent in Mark.²⁶ These occasions of ruptured syntax and their close counterparts, parenthetical insertions, bespeak oral composition. When visualized in writing they appear awkward or jarring, but when heard they serve as oral punctuation.²⁷ As Robert M. Fowler writes, “The spoken word readily forgives and perhaps even favors anacoluthon.”²⁸ This is but one way that oral composition and aural reception shed light on a characteristic of Mark’s grammar.

Many other linguistic features that make Mark stylistically distinct from the later gospels are the very features that are characteristic of spoken stories. This raises old questions about how Mark relates to vernacular Greek and the Koine of the papyri that were addressed by the likes of Adolf Deissmann and Albert Thumb at the turn of the twentieth century. These questions will be revisited in Chapters 2 and 3. In the latter, we shall also see that several Markan idiosyncrasies follow normal patterns of spoken narrative. For example, the word εὐθύς, which is typically, and I will argue often improperly, translated “immediately,” makes better sense as a multifunctional discourse marker, which is a sequencing device common in oral narrative, than as an adverb that connotes immediacy. Other Markan particularities, such as the historical present, intercalations, parataxis, and repetition, likewise suggest that the gospel is an oral tradition composed via dictation.

Mark was not the only narrative composed this way in early Judaism and Christianity. A near contemporary of the gospel, the Hellenistic Jewish narrative Joseph and Aseneth, appears to have been written similarly. This text presents a quandary similar to that of the Second Gospel. It is also an effective story told in a simple style.²⁹ Moreover, many of the linguistic characteristics exhibited in Mark are also present in Joseph and Aseneth.

As it happens, thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 Mark and Aseneth
• Chapter 2 Media Theory, Ancient Media, and Orally Composed Narratives from the Papyri
• Chapter 3 Linguistic Oral Residues
• Chapter 4 Metalinguistic Oral Residues
• Chapter 5 Linguistic Trajectories of Joseph and Aseneth and Mark
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Subject and Author Index
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Literature
• Copyright