The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality/Section 2
It is no longer possible to determine with any certainty who Mark, as we normally call the author of the Gospel of Mark, really was. Neither is it absolutely certain how he went about writing his Gospel and where he got his material from. A period of three or four decades must have passed after the death of Jesus before Mark decided to write his story. What happened during that period lies in the dark.
It is normally argued that the followers of Jesus transmitted his words and deeds by telling and retelling things he did and said. In view of the folkloric nature of many of the stories of and about Jesus, the aphoristic character of many of his sayings, the many parables he apparently told his followers, and the role of oral communication in that period, it is probable that Mark was informed about the story of Jesus by way of tradition. It is also probable that his audience would have known these traditions and others, such as the institution of the Lord’s Supper, and controversy stories. It is therefore possible to argue that Mark based his written story of Jesus on traditional material which he received and decided to put into written form. This is also the way in which the origin of the material was explained in the early church. The earliest witness to the authorship of Mark is the quotation from Papias of Hierapolis (c 140 CE) in the history of Eusebius (Hist Eccl [I] 39:15), according to which the Gospel was based on memory of the things Peter had told Mark (see also Breytenbach 1992).
What other sources did Mark use? One of the interesting things about early Christian literature is that although there was only one Jesus, we have many Gospels. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke — the so-called Synoptic Gospels are closely related and have much material in common. Some form of dependence is therefore presumed (see Sanders & Davies 1989). The dominant assumption is that Matthew and Luke made use of Mark in compiling their Gospels, and that they also had a hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus normally called Q (that is, ‘Quelle’ = ‘source’), at their disposal when they wrote their Gospels. On the grounds of this hypothesis it is much easier to explain the origin of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke than it is to explain that of Mark. The question therefore arises whether Mark also had other, perhaps written, sources in addition to the ‘traditional material’ referred to above when he wrote his Gospel.
First of all there is the so-called Old Testament. It is probable that Mark had copies of the Old Testament in either Greek or Hebrew in written form at his disposal. Whether he had these copies on his desk is difficult to determine. This is also not the place to argue the problem. That his Gospel echoes the Old Testament is clear from both the quotations and the many allusions to Old Testament writings. There are, moreover, large chunks of material in the Gospel, such as a collection of miracle stories, parables, an apocalyptic speech and the passion narrative, for example, which have prompted scholars to investigate the possibility of other written sources behind the Gospel of Mark (see Vielhauer 1975:332-336 and Neirynck et al 1992:646). The passion narrative is presumably related to the Gospel of Peter, which is basically a passion story (see Crossan 1988); Mark 13 is based on an earlier Jewish leaflet (see Brandenburger 1984); Mark 4 on a collection of parables, and the miracle stories in chapters 5 and 7 on catenae of miracle stories (see Kuhn 1971). It has furthermore been proposed that some of the sayings material is also related to the material found in Q (see e g Neirynck 1991:421ff). In addition, it has been argued that Mark’s Gospel is based on an original lost Urmarkus or Grundschrift being either the ‘proto-Mark’ or ‘deutero-Mark’, or that it is a revision of the Secret Gospel referred to by Clement of Alexandria (see Koester 1990:273 ff). However it may be, there seems to be little evidence that Mark invented the material in his Gospel.
From the perspective of the making of the Gospel, different viewpoints have been advanced in accordance with views on the role attributed to the person who was finally responsible for composing the Gospel. Mark has been regarded as a collector, a composer, a redactor (editor) and an author (see Vorster 1980). These perceptions are based on data assumptions. Underlying assumptions concerning authorship, the phenomenon text, text types, the history of early Christianity, the origin of early Christian literature and other aspects of the Gospel are responsible for the current state of affairs. Let us briefly discuss this viewpoint since I have treated the problem elsewhere in more detail (see Vorster 1980).
In the 1920's the idea that Mark was written by an author was replaced by the current view that he was nothing more than a collector of traditions. The Gospels were regarded as Kleinliteratur, the products of the transmission of tradition by illiterate, unknown persons — a collective community (see Schmidt 1923 & Güttgemanns 1970). Mark’s task was to collect these traditions and to put them into a narrative framework. His contribution was limited to the collection of material which he knitted into a loose composition of episodes concerning the deeds and works of Jesus. Mark was regarded as a stringer of pearls (see Schmidt 1923:127f) or a collector of traditions (Dibelius 1971:3). This should be understood against the background of the emphasis on the interest in what lies behind the text and not what is in the text.
The situation changed in the late 1950's with the rise of the so-called redaction-critical approach to the Gospels (see Marxsen 1959 & Peabody 1987). The material in the Gospel was increasingly regarded as edited tradition — an idea which goes far back, but one that had only recently developed. Although the Gospel as a whole came into focus, the interest was in the redaction of tradition. This resulted in detailed investigations concerning tradition and redaction in the Gospels. In the case of Mark it was extremely difficult to determine exactly what could be regarded as tradition and what could not, because of the absence of copies of the presumed sources. On the basis of style, regular occurrence of certain words and phrases, views that were peculiar to the specific Gospel, so-called seams or breaks in the text and other features, scholars reached a certain degree of consensus about redaction and tradition in the Gospel of Mark.
Mark’s (theological) emphasis was determined by interpreting his redaction of tradition. At least a certain amount of creativity — however limited — was ascribed to the redactor. Mark’s own contribution to the story of Jesus came into focus despite the fact that he was soon described as a conservative redactor (see Pesch 1976). The emphasis which Wrede (1969) had put on Mark’s creativity in 1906 was newly appreciated.
In circles where Mark was regarded as a composer, he received more credit for what he had achieved, and attention was given to the Gospel message as a whole. It was, however, only in the late 1970’s that scholars started paying serious attention to Mark’s Gospel as a narrative, and to Mark as an author or author/narrator and to the Gospel as an autonomous text.
The renewed interest in Mark as author and his Gospel as a narrative opened new possibilities in the interpretation of different aspects of the Gospel. It was discovered that the story had been told from a certain narrative point of view, why time and space play an important role in the Gospel, and that characters, including Jesus, were presented in conjunction with the story line — in short, that narrative analysis posed new challenges to interpreters of the Gospel (see Vorster 1980; Hahn 1985 & 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. In the next section an attempt will be made to take the fact seriously that Mark probably did not invent the material, but that he nevertheless made up his own story of Jesus for his own purposes and in his own circumstances. This will be done from the perspective of the production of the text and not from its growth.