As the theologians say, we “live from the end,” even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive … In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord.1
This monograph tells the (hi)story of the relationship of the Gospel of Mark to the apostle Paul. In the quote above, Frank Kermode, one of the great exemplars of 20th-century literary criticism, speaks of modern fiction. It is unlikely that he would admit that, for the evangelist or apostle, “time has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness,” or that “Ends” are simply “figures for what does not exist except humanly.” Instead, for him, Mark's and Paul's conceptual horizon is that of apocalyptic, and their narrative constructions presume the imminent approach of the final moments of this world.2 Yet, according to Kermode, it is from such presumptions that Western fictions are born and upon such that they pattern themselves, consciously or otherwise. He explains,
We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus, we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.3
At a most basic level, then, modern humankind is no different than ancient. For Kermode, it is the universal experience of the sons and daughters of Adam to find themselves in the “middest,” torn between bygone eras to which they do not have access and those murky futures played out in anticipation and imagination. Through recourse to narrative, human beings make consonance from distension, and they impose concordance upon an unstable and unpredictable world.
In the case of the Gospel according to Mark, Kermode would say that the “rectilinear” narrative structure of the Bible is presumed—a structure which extends from one end of historical time to the other—and Mark reworks and “requites” it in the service of a new apocalyptic vision.4 He is, in a general sense, an author concerned with the longue durée. Yet, practically speaking, his engagement with the Bible's narrative structure is witnessed within the courte durée of a 16-chapter narrative set only a few short decades prior to Mark's composition, one which must speak to a real community living in the shadow of that duration's impending end. This temporal positioning invites exploration of how Mark uses the limited time within the narrative to help make sense of the time between the narrative and his community, a time of “transition” (to use Kermode's terminology) that does not belong to the End but immediately precedes it. One might label this the period of the mission, during which “it is necessary first [πρῶτον] that the gospel be proclaimed [κηρυχθῆναι τὸ εὐαγγέλιον] amongst all the nations [εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη]” (Mk. 13:10).5 If narrative concordance is to exist at the macro level of cosmogony and End, there should be some concordance at the micro-span that runs from the death of the messiah to the Markan community, as well. Were it otherwise, one could not expect either Mark or his readers to admit a meaningful and active space for themselves within that narrative, as the words and deeds of its heroes would be unfamiliar to them, and they would be reckoned mere passive vessels in and for events, if any reckoning was made of them at all. In other words, for the community to put their hopes in the story as a whole (which runs from one end of time to the other), there must be some significant way(s) in which it speaks to them directly and intertwines with their own lived experiences. In what follows, I will suggest that it is precisely in the investigation of the limited period that Mark's relationship to Paul comes into full relief.
Part I: Project overview
In his seminal article, “Mark—Interpreter of Paul,” Joel Marcus makes the programmatic assertion that Mark's work is influenced by the thought of the apostle Paul.6 To demonstrate this, Marcus suggests a list of potential theological, Christological, and ecclesiological overlaps between the two authors, and he then analyzes the apostle's and evangelist's shared emphasis on the cross. Interestingly, despite Marcus’ provocative assertion, in his comprehensive Mark commentary—the first volume of which was published the same year as his article—only three short pages in his introduction discuss Mark's potential familiarity with Paul, and an argument for dependence is never sustained.7 Moreover, Marcus nowhere claims that Mark had access to Paul's letters. My monograph will pursue what Marcus does not: a sustained case for the plausible literary dependence of the Gospel of Mark on select letters of the apostle Paul. I will suggest the historical possibility of Mark's and his community's knowledge of the person, teachings, and epistles of the apostle, and I will argue that Mark has self-consciously anticipated Paul and his mission within his story.
To state my thesis forthrightly: I contend that Mark adopts what I am calling an “etiological hermeneutic” vis-à-vis Paul. Mark's story is a story of origins (see Mk. 1:1: “The beginning [ἀρχή] of the gospel [τοῦ εὐαγγελίου] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”), one which establishes continuity between the earthly life of Jesus, the contemporary situation of the Markan community, and the final ending of the world (see Mk. 13). Between the life of Jesus and Mark's historical moment, I presume that the evangelist knows that Paul is located, and I use “etiological” to suggest that one of Mark's primary literary goals is to create, within his narrative of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, historical precedent for the mission and teachings of Paul that occur subsequently to the conclusion of his narrative but prior to his composition of it. The evangelist's goal is not to repeat that which Paul has said (that is, to lift Paul from his letters and throw him some thirty years back into the past), but rather to anticipate him. Mark seeks to seed the apostle and his teachings into his text.
Mark's project is therefore both proleptic and synecdochical: he always presumes, though he does not narrate in full, the entirety of a salvation-historical narrative that extends from one end of historical time to the other (the “gospel” [εὐαγγέλιον], an episodic narrative he shares with Paul8), and his purpose is to tell a story that anticipates and concordantly connects with episodes subsequent to his 16 chapters. Believing that the mission of Paul is a part of this narrative, Mark seeks to create logical and concordant episodic precursors that will bind the missionary activity of the earthly Christ to the eventual teachings of the itinerant apostle, teachings that are themselves carried on within Mark's community. Depending on the particular Pauline phenomena Mark seeks to seed into his story, his literary strategies may be adapted, but his etiological hermeneutic remains fundamentally the same.
This chapter will be dedicated to setting out the historical presuppositions and methodological underpinnings of my thesis. In lieu of a comprehensive Forschungsbericht that situates the question of Mark's dependence on Paul within its modern historical context, I will offer a brief overview of the works of Gustav Volkmar and Martin Werner, two exegetes whose now-classic arguments have set the terms of the debate surrounding Mark's Paulinism for over a century, and I will summarize their exegetical legacies.9 Following this review, I will chart a new path forward by building upon the contributions to Mark and Paul studies by C. H. Dodd, Richard B. Hays, Joel Marcus, and Margaret M. Mitchell. The hermeneutical road I propose to pave runs straight through Mark's perception of himself as one ‘in the middest,’ both at the macro level of universal (narrative) history, and at the micro level of transition. He is, on one hand, a storyteller living in a moment postdating the earthly career of the messiah and the missionary activity of the apostle but preceding the fulfillment of that mission and the consummation of the End. On the other, he is a storyteller anticipating the End and beginning to see the limits of historical time collapse upon themselves. It is through the composition of his gospel that he seeks to bring these tensive realities into a concordant and meaningful whole, and he does so, I suggest, by creating a retrospective narrative that prospectively engages the Pauline mission, anticipating the teachings of the apostle and seeding them into the earthly life of Jesus Christ.
Part II: Historical presuppositions, scholarly approach, and the genre of Mark
(A) Historical presuppositions
Any argument for Mark's familiarity with and use of Pauline traditions must begin by presenting a case for Mark's plausible access to them. Though Pauline letters and traditions were known throughout the ancient Mediterranean world at a very early date (before the middle of the second century C.E.),10 the extent to which those letters were disseminated prior to 69–71 C.E.—the period during which Mark is generally thought to have been composed11—is unclear, and final judgment upon Mark's familiarity with Paul's epistolary correspondence is dependent, at least in part, upon where one imagines Mark's gospel was originally composed. Scholars have argued for both the Eastern and Western halves of the Roman empire,12 but I am convinced by the contributions of Brian Incigneri and Michael P. Theophilos, both of whom place the composition of Mark at Rome. Incigneri argues comprehensively that Mark's rhetoric reflects a historical situation in which Vespasian rules the Roman empire and Titus has recently returned to the capital city carrying the spoils of the Second Temple (71 C.E.),13 and Theophilos, building upon Incigneri's work but dating the gospel earlier (late ’60s C.E.), emphasizes the number of Latinisms found in the text (10 of 18, “a frequency which is higher than any other Greek literary text of the period”) and notes that several of those Latinisms are unattested in any Greek text prior to the first century.14 Theophilos also underscores the observation made by Martin Hengel: only a Roman provenance would necessitate Mark's designating the Gentile woman of Mk. 7:26 a “Syrophoenician” (Συροφοινίκισσα) rather than simply a Phoenician (Φοῖνιξ), as it implies Mark's making a clear distinction between eastern Phoenicians and the “Carthaginians” (Λιβυφοινίκες), with whom the Romans would have been more familiar.15 In my judgment, the arguments of these scholars, coupled with the Patristic evidence that places Mark in Rome as an interpreter of Peter,16 suggests a Roman provenance for the composition of Mark's gospel and the inauguration of the synoptic literary tradition as a whole.
Should one adopt Rome as the place of composition for Mark's gospel, Mark's familiarity with Paul's letters circa 70 C.E. becomes significantly more probable, and it is possible that the evangelist had copies or knew the contents of as many as three Pauline epistles in the capital city: (1) Romans, (2) 1 Corinthians, and (3) Galatians. Rome is, of course, the destination of the first letter in this list (Rom. 1:7), and it is a text with which Mark shares significant thematic ...
