The Gospel of Mark

A Commentary

Moloney, Francis J.,SDB

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441238832
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The Gospel of Mark, addressed to an early Christian community perplexed by failure and suffering, presents Jesus as suffering Messiah and Son of God. Recognizing that failure and suffering continue to perplex Christians today, world-renowned New Testament scholar and theologian Francis Moloney marries the rich contributions of traditional historical scholarship with the contemporary approach to the Gospels as narrative. Now in paperback, this commentary combines the highest-level scholarship with pastoral sensitivity. It offers an accessible and thoughtful reading of Mark's narrative to bring the Gospel's story to life for contemporary readers.

INTRODUCTION TO THE GOSPEL OF MARK

The Gospel of Mark was neglected by early Christian tradition, rarely—if ever—used in preaching. The Gospel of Matthew surpassed it in both length and detail. Mark was seen as something of a poor cousin to the great Gospel of Matthew, used so consistently by the fathers of the church. Already at the turn of the first Christian century authors were citing Matthew (the Didache [90s C.E.], 1 Clement [96–98 C.E.], Barnabas [about 110 C.E.], and Ignatius of Antioch [110 C.E.]). Toward the middle of the second century (circa 130 C.E.) Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis in South Phrygia in the province of Asia, associated the Second Gospel with a certain “Mark” and the Apostle Peter, and Clement of Alexandria located that association in the city of Rome. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Jerome, and Tertullian agree: the Gospel of Mark appeared in Rome, and reports a Petrine story of Jesus, interpreted by his associate, Mark. But the great fathers of the church scarcely use this gospel in their writings.

Augustine articulated most clearly an understanding of the Gospel of Mark that has endured till the modern era: “Marcus eum subsecutus tamquam pedisequus et breviator eius videtur.”[1] As the emerging Christian church looked consistently to Matthew for its instruction, no commentary on the Gospel of Mark appeared until the turn of the sixth century. From 650 to 1000 C.E. thirteen major commentaries were written on Matthew, and four on Mark. This neglect continued down to the end of the eighteenth century.[2] The Gospel of Mark maintained its place in the Christian canon because of its traditional relationship with Peter and the city of Rome. But it has been well described as “present but absent.”[3] As the Christian church became an increasingly unified political, social, and ideological phenomenon in the early centuries, “biblical texts were not used as narratives in themselves but as sources for proofs of doctrinal and ecclesiastical positions. In this enterprise, Mark was a weak contender.”[4]

The First Gospel

Things have changed since that time, and it could be claimed that gospel scholarship over the past 150 years has been dominated by a fascination with the Gospel of Mark.[5] The turn to the Gospel of Mark was initiated by the so-called source critics who began to question the long-held tradition that Matthew was the first of the gospels to appear. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the source critics established the priority of Mark over Matthew and Luke. The traditional “Second Gospel” became the first gospel. The modern era, ushered in by the Enlightenment, saw a rapid development of critical thought. The English deists, themselves products of the Enlightenment, demanded that the biblical tradition be subjected to the scrutiny of hard logic. The doublets, contradictions, and non sequiturs had to be explained.[6] A “higher criticism” emerged, especially in Germany, but also in England and France, applying more rational criteria to biblical studies. The source critics were part of the “higher criticism.” Their work, especially that of H. J. Holtzmann,[7] sought to establish a firm historical basis for the life of Jesus. Holtzmann argued that Mark, the most primitive of all the gospels, took us back to a reliable “framework” for the life of Jesus: Jesus’ messianic consciousness developed over a period of preaching in Galilee, and reached its high point at Caesarea Philippi. There he made known to his followers his belief that he was the expected Jewish Messiah. His journey to Jerusalem and his end there were the result of the Jewish leadership’s rejection of his claim.

Contemporary scholarship is skeptical about Holtzmann’s discovery of a framework for the life of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. But close and detailed study of the use of individual passages in each of the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) suggests that Mark’s Gospel is the most ancient. Although the so-called Synoptic Question, i.e., the order of appearance and the related question of the literary dependence of one Synoptic Gospel upon another, is still debated,[8] the priority of Mark is the best explanation for a number of the features of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Matthew and Luke had their own sources for their accounts of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Some material is found only in Matthew (sometimes called M; see, for example, Matt 16:16–18), or only in Luke (sometimes called L; see, for example, Luke 15:1–32). A large amount of material in both Matthew and Luke is not present in Mark (sometimes called “Q,” from the German word Quelle, meaning “source”; see, for example, teachings in Matt 5:1–7:28 found in Luke 6:12–49 and elsewhere in Luke, but nowhere in Mark). It appears that the authors of both Matthew and Luke had the Gospel of Mark before them as they penned their particular stories of Jesus.[9]

On this supposition, it was Mark who invented the literary form which we call gospel: a narrative telling the story of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, proclaiming the good news (Greek: εὐαγγέλιον;[10] Old English: god-spel) that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God (see Mark 1:1). Only about forty of Mark’s 675 verses are not found somewhere in Matthew.[11] The presence of material from the Gospel of Mark in the Gospel of Luke is not so obvious. But this can be accounted for by Luke’s very skillful storytelling techniques. He uses the tradition in a creative way and has some memorable material not found in either Mark or Matthew, especially some parables, e.g., the Good Samaritan (10:25–37) and the Father with the Two Sons (15:11–32). Yet, both Matthew and Luke have accepted the basic story line of the Gospel of Mark: beginnings in Galilee; a journey to Jerusalem; a brief presence in the city, leading to his arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. Only the Gospel of John dares to break from this story line, as the Johannine Jesus journeys from Galilee to Jerusalem, especially for the Jewish feasts of Passover, Tabernacles, and Dedication.[12] When Matthew and Luke agree in sequence, they also agree with Mark.[13] Matthew’s order of events is closer to that of Mark’s, but even Luke, who intersperses his account more systematically with other material, follows the Markan order of events. This fact points to the possibility that the authors of Matthew and Luke both had the same text, the Gospel of Mark, before them as they wrote their versions of the life of Jesus.[14]

These are but some of the reasons for the widespread scholarly consensus on the priority of Mark. Perhaps the most significant factor, however, is not found in the Synoptic Tradition’s use of the same material in terms of words, style, and the location of each single, self-contained passage, called “pericopes” by critics. If Matthew was the first gospel, as Augustine suggested, and Mark derived his account from Matthew, it is difficult to find good reasons why Mark would have performed such a radical operation on Matthew’s carefully assembled work. It is, on the other hand, easier to find satisfactory reasons for a Matthean or a Lukan reworking of the Gospel of Mark. It takes a deal of imagination and mental gymnastics to read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety as a deliberately shortened version of the Gospel of Matthew.[15] However, as Fitzmyer has pointed out “ ‘the truth’ of the matter is largely inaccessible to us, and we are forced to live with a hypothesis or a theory.”[16]

Mark the Historian

But does the primitive nature of the Gospel of Mark give us privileged access to a framework for the life of Jesus of Nazareth, as Holtzmann claimed?[17] At the turn of last century two scholars almost single-handedly brought such speculations to an end and thus established a new era for the study of the Gospel of Mark. In 1901 William Wrede, among other things, addressed the thesis of those who, like Holtzmann, regarded the Gospel of Mark as a faithful record of Jesus’ life. In his book, titled The Messianic Secret in the Gospels, he demolished the suggestion that the Gospel of Mark represented a primitive portrait of Jesus’ story.[18] He argued, on the basis of Jesus’ continual commands to silence in the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus made no messianic claims. They were added to the story by the early church, and the Gospel of Mark was clear evidence of this process. Jesus was not the Messiah, and never made such a claim. Many were surprised to hear early Christian preachers claim that he was. In the Gospel of Mark the nonmessianic Jesus was explained by Jesus’ repeated insistence that no one be told of his messianic words and deeds. He was not widely known as the Messiah because he himself forbade any such proclamation in his own time. This meant that the Gospel of Mark was not a reliable historical report; it was part of the theological creativity of the early church. “The Gospel of Mark belongs to the history of dogma.”[19]

Shortly after Wrede’s epoch-making study, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus reviewed nineteenth-century scholars’ portrayal of the historical Jesus.[20] He showed that each “life of Jesus” was more a projection of German scholarship than an objective historical reconstruction.

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forth publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.[21]

For Schweitzer, Jesus preached the imminent end of time and must be judged to have failed in terms of his own understanding of his God-ordained mission, however much the four gospels and subsequent Christian culture had reinterpreted his person and message.

These debates were not limited to the studies and the lecture rooms of German universities. Critical biblical scholarship had its origins in an attempt to put the study of the Bible on the same scholarly footing as the emerging sciences in a post-Enlightenment world. Its activities and conclusions captured the imagination of many, especially those responsible for the preaching of the word of God, so central to the Christian tradition. But a gulf was opening between the critical biblical scholars and those involved in a ministry of the word because, like many of their contemporaries, in their search for the scholarly excellence of their time, the biblical scholars had lost touch with the primacy of the story itself. This problem was to deepen with the passing of time.[22] The turmoil, suffering, and death which marked the First World War (1914–1918) did not lessen the growing skepticism among German scholars. Between World War I and World War II Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann founded a new approach to the Synoptic Gospels that focused upon the identifiable prehistory of the individual pericopes that had been assembled by an editor to produce the gospels as we now have them.[23]

This approach was called form criticism. It focused its attention on the literary form of each single pericope and attempted to locate its origin in the life of Jesus or the life of the early church. Using an increasing bank of knowledge about other ancient religions, the form critics traced parallel “forms” in the parables, the miracle stories, the conflict stories, the pronouncements, and the stories of suffering found in those religions. They identified (somewhat speculatively, and often with insufficient support) the “situation in the life” of Jesus or the church where such passages were born. From this comes the well-known expression, widely used even by non-German scholars, Sitz im Leben (the situation in life). The title of Schmidt’s study, Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu, stated a truth by now accepted by all form critics: the “framework” (Rahmen) of Jesus’ story cannot be recovered from the Gospel of Mark. This had already been made clear by Wrede’s work on the messianic secret and quickly became a bedrock point of departure for all subsequent stud...