Moore 1989). Perhaps the most important single contribution of this approach is the fact that interpreters were forced to take the Gospel as a complete text seriously. It also implied that the transmitted text — and not its history or the origin of parts of it — was placed in the centre of interest. This does not imply that the text was interpreted a-historically as is so easily incorrectly assumed by critics who regard narrative analysis of the Gospel as an extension of redaction criticism (see Zwick 1989).
This short survey clearly indicates that the emphasis that was put on the growth of the Gospel also determined the role of the person who was responsible for the final text. One can safely say that there has been little reflection on the role of the person who produced the Gospel, except for the descriptions I have mentioned, namely collector, composer, redactor and author. How one should picture Mark editing tradition in written or oral form by changing a word here and there, adding a sentence or two, rearranging the order of material, putting the traditional material into a narrative frame and joining separate units or episodes — as redaction critics make us believe — is difficult to imagine. There is much more to the production of a text than traditional views would allow. As long as the Gospels are perceived mainly from the perspective of their growth, the process of production is blurred. What is needed is serious reflection on the production of texts from the perspective of what happens when other texts, whether oral or written, are included in or absorbed by a new text. The traditional approach is anti-individualistic because the driving force behind the Gospels is the anonymous community.
In addition to the assumption that the message (meaning) of the Gospels can be studied from the perspective of their origin, and that the authors were redactors and not authors in the proper sense of the word, the idea of influence also plays an important role. The assumption is clearly that Mark was influenced by his sources. One should be very careful with this type of argument. If Mark is simply regarded as an exponent of the community within which he stood, it may be thought that his task was to put into words what the community thought. From the insights of Sociology of Knowledge we are aware that all knowledge is context-bound. But that does not imply that there is no place for creativity. On the contrary, even oral storytellers tell the ‘same’ story differently in different contexts and under different circumstances, although their knowledge is bound to their contexts.
A further problem with the traditional approach to the Gospel of Mark is that the final text is not sufficiently distinguished from its history of growth. This is due to the text concept which underlies the approach. As we have seen it is not the text as such that is studied, namely a new edition of a text, but a text which should be divided into segments of redaction and tradition.
