"Mark is in other words, not a biography; its outline of Jesus' career is fictional and the sequence has thematic and theological significance only. As Norman Perrin bluntly puts it, "The outline of the Gospel of Mark has no historical value. " Anyone can demonstrate this with a careful reading of Mark, watching the transitional tags between episodes. The following selection of them are translations from the New English Bible: ·"When after some days" (2:1); ·"Once more" (2:13); ·"When" (2:15); ·"Once, when" (2:18); ·"One Sabbath" (2:23); ·"One [On] another occasion" (3:1); ·"On another occasion" (4:1); ·"When he was alone" (4:10); ·"That [unspecified] day" (4:35); ·"He left that place" (6:1); ·"On one of his teaching journeys" (6:6); ·"On another occasion" (7:14); ·"There was another occasion about this time" (8:1); ·"Jesus and his disciples set out" (8:27); ·"On leaving those parts" (10:1); ·"As he was starting out on a journey" (10:17).”
I responded:
The phrases provided are simply the peculiar style that Mark used. How does a particular writing style discount historicity? This is an objection on what amounts to procedural grounds rather than on an examination of the actual contents and details of Mark’s gospel. It’s sort of akin to declaring a mistrial based on a legal technicality rather than coming to a verdict based on the evidence. It is simply a false move going from the particular style of writing (or particular arrangement of material) to a conclusion of fiction.
There are in fact good reasons for accepting the historical reliability of Mark’s gospel (and the rest of the NT).
Even if one takes the view that Mark was written 70 to 80 CE, the gospel was written well within the lifetime of many of the eyewitnesses. And these eyewitnesses don’t disappear behind a long process of anonymous transmission of the Jesus tradition but were people who could be consulted.
The NT documents explicitly claim to be the product of eyewitnesses. American historian Louis Gottschalk says that a document should be assumed trustworthy unless, under burden of proof it can be shown to be unreliable. (see Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method, Alfred Knopf, 1969, p.89).
Without this assumption, we’d be in a constant state of skepticism and end up knowing nothing of history. And the eyewitnesses were willing to tell the truth about Jesus. They had little to gain and everything to lose.
Some clues that we’re dealing with historical information include:
1)the form of Jesus’ sayings. Many are poetic or in easily memorizable form, a common technique of rabbis.
2) the presence of aramaisms (i.e. phrases transliterated rather than translated into Greek from Aramaic which was the language that Jesus mainly spoke). Some e.g.s include talitha koum (5:41), ephphatha (7:34), rabbi (9:5), rabboni (10:5), abba (14:36), eloi,eloi,lama sabachtani (15:34). Some Hebrew and Aramaic words or phrases became so embedded in the gospel material that they passed into the ordinary vocabulary of worship of Gentile xianity (e.g. hallelujah, amen, hosanna, maranatha). But even in cases where the Aramaic word was translated into Greek, when the Greek is translated back into Aramaic, there is often parallelism, assonance, and alliteration; literary features that get obscured or eliminated when in Greek. The widespread presence of Aramaisms point to a first century Palestinian environment and the likelihood that the Jesus traditions originated early. But it’s not the sort of material one would expect if the Jesus tradition were the product of creative, legend-making imaginations of non-Palestinian and non-Aramaic speaking xians living later in the century.
3) The lack of relevant material. There were a number of controversial issues in the early church that could easily have been remedied by any gospel writer if he were just making things up. For e.g. the disputes over circumcision, charismatic gifts, and food laws found in Paul’s letters. The failure to create sayings of Jesus to meet these pressing needs shows the restraint in presenting the gospel materials. There are no sayings of Jesus on these issues because the historical Jesus never addressed them. But if the gospels were fiction, why not make up sayings of Jesus and resolve the problem? This points to the desire to present factual information.
4)The presence of counterproductive or embarrassing features. IF a document contains these features, it has a high likelihood of being historical. For e.g., the disciples are portrayed in unflattering ways (in unbelief, cowardice, difficulty understand Jesus’s teachings, the Zebedee boys requesting pride of place at Jesus side), Jesus’s own family questions his sanity (3:21), he could not perform miracles in his own town (6:5), his healings were not always instantaneous (8:22-25), he associated with people of ill repute (2:14-16), he was executed like a common criminal. It’s hard to imagine why early xians would make this up.
5) Inclusion of personal names. A hallmark of legendariness is the avoidance of identifying particular named persons (think of today’s urban legends – “yeah, my friend knows a guy who said that his cousin saw an alien”). The naming of actual people, (ones who could be questioned regarding the veracity of a given report) tends to signal eyewitness accounts.
Now, the reason that Mark is difficult to outline in a linear fashion is because the gospel is rooted in an oral/aural performance environment. NT scholar Christopher Bryan points out that Mark shows all the earmarks of being written for oral recitation and transmission. When examining Mark’s structural arrangements one finds broad thematic effects that would emerge naturally in the course of a performance of the whole, but that can hardly emerge otherwise. Given the length of Mark, this could easily be done at a church service (in fact, even today, actors perform enactments of Mark by memory –
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcuP_jiapVk&feature=player_embedded#at=11) –
remembering of course that first century xians didn’t have to worry about missing the opening kickoff to an NFL game!
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