The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality/Section 1
Modern informed readers know the Gospel of Mark from critical Greek editions with text-critical and other notes in the margins. These notes inform them not only about the history of the transmission of the final text, but also about allusions and quotations in the text. In addition, it is commonly maintained that the Gospel was originally written in Greek, and that the final text represents a rather lengthy history of growth. For more than a century attempts have been made to explain the origin of the gospel material and to interpret the space between the related events and the final inscripturation of the contents of the Gospel. For that reason the emphasis has been on the growth and not on the making of the Gospel. Very few scholars have taken the production of the written Gospel seriously. Certain data beliefs and assumptions concerning the Gospel have become so dominant that very little progress has been made in the history of interpretation of the Gospel (see e g Peabody 1987:3ff).
In this essay I will discuss the importance of the unsolved problem of the production of the Gospel of Mark. To achieve my goal, I will first pay attention to current views on the origin of the material. The idea is to illustrate the implications of the traditional focus on the origins of the Gospel. In the next part of the essay I will turn to the production of the Gospel from the perspective of intertextuality. In this section I will focus on the implications of a totally different perception of the phenomena of text and textual relationships.