The intertextual production of the Gospel of Mark is the viewpoint that there are identifiable textual relationships such that any allusion or quotation from another text forms an integral part of the Markan text, even when it seems to be out of context.
It is commonly maintained that the Gospel of Mark was originally written in Koine 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.
C. H. Dodd asserted the earliest Christians shared oral accounts about Jesus but in order to make sense of what looked like failure on the part of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion they were driven to interpret those memories in the light of Scripture. [1] Dodd justified this model of how the stories evolved before becoming part of a written Gospel by pointing to passages in the Acts of the Apostles. [1]
The Dodd camp's viewpoint has resulted in scholarship where the emphasis has been on the growth and not on the making of the Gospel to the extent that 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). [2] However some scholars, following the work of Alfred Suhl, [3] have taken the intertextual production of the written Gospel seriously. [4] [1] The intertextuality of the Gospel of Mark has been recognized by scholars such as Thomas L. Brodie, [5] Willem S. Vorster, [6] Dennis R. MacDonald, [7] and Bartosz Adamczewski. [8]
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. [9]
Therefore, 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. Thus it is argued that Mark based his written story of Jesus on traditional material which he received and decided to put into written form. [9]
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 III 39:15), according to which the Gospel was based on "memory" of the things Peter had told Mark (see Breytenbach 1992). [9]
Karl Ludwig Schmidt asserted that the accounts of the New Testament were to be regarded as fixed written versions of oral Gospel tradition. [10] Using form criticism, Schmidt showed that an editor had assembled the narrative out of individual scenes that did not originally have a chronological order. [11]
In Mark we have a text, written in Greek with different allusions to and quotations from precursor texts. These include parables, miracle stories, controversy stories, bibliographies, stories of cult heroes, speeches about the future, stories of suffering and resurrection stories. In addition Mark apparently knew themes, words, phrases and stories from the Old Testament. He must have had acquaintance with the Elisha cycle and with other performers of miracles. He must also have known the economic, political and other cultural codes of his time. [12] We still do not know exactly how Mark went about creating his story of Jesus — that is, how he made his Gospel, but some scholars such as Willem S. Vorster argue for an intertextual production of the Gospel. Vorster writes:
The relationship between the final text of the Gospel of Mark and precursor and other texts is an intertextual relationship. There is no causal relationship between this new text and the texts out of which Mark made his text. Mark quoted other texts, and his story alludes to other texts and absorbed other texts. This is how his story becomes meaningful and different from other stories with the same theme when the reader interprets Mark's texts in the light of other texts known to him/her. [13]
There is no reason to doubt that the written Gospel of Mark echoes many different precursor texts and intertextual relationships. [14] Other scholars that also argue for the making of the Gospel are:
Whereas Matthew and Luke use the Old Testament within a promise-fulfilment scheme, Vorster, following Alfred Suhl, [16] argues that Mark's use of the Old Testament is totally different. [17]
Allusions to and quotations from the Old Testament are usually absorbed into Mark's story in such a manner that, except for a few cases where he specifically mentions the origin of the quotation, the allusions and quotations form part of the story stuff. They are so embedded into the story that, if it were not for the references in the margins and a knowledge of the Old Testament, the reader would not have noticed that Mark uses an allusion or a quotation (see Mk 15:24 ). This is best seen in Mark's story of the passion of Jesus. [14]
It has often been noticed that psalms of lamentation such as Psalms 22, 38 and 69 concerning the suffering of "the just", are knitted into the passion narrative in such a manner that one can say that the passion narrative of Mark is narrated in the language of the Old Testament. The point is, however, that the allusions and 'quotations' form such an integral part of the passion narrative that it is impossible for the naïve reader to realize that the text is enriched by its intertextual relationships concerning the suffering of the Just. [14]
One possible inference from the use of the Old Testament in the Gospel of Mark is that the author created a new story with the aid of intertextual codes that helped him to communicate his own point of view. The Old Testament quotations and references formed part of the new story that Mark created in order to convince his readers of his point of view concerning Jesus and the implications of Jesus' life, works and words for the prevailing situation. [18]
In addition to the many studies on the texts behind and in the Gospel of Mark, some scholars that argue for the Gospel as the rewriting of Old Testament stories are: [19]
Robert M. Price, and Daniel Boyarin have noted the Jewish mode of scriptural interpretation termed midrash, embedded in the Gospel of Mark. [21] [22]
John Shelby Spong also sees a midrashic production of the Gospel, but clarifies his use of the term "midrashic"—as "interpretation" or "literary borrowing"—which is divergent from the traditional usage of the term "midrash", Spong writes:
I have used the word midrash only as the modifying adjective, midrashic, both to indicate the broadness of the way I am employing this concept and also to leave the word midrash to its special Jewish understanding. [23]
Philip S Alexander holds that in modern usage the term "midrash becomes simply a fancy word for 'Bible interpretation'" and therefore its usage should be discontinued. [24] Nathanael Vette also addresses the problem of definition and sides with those who believe that what is often being labelled as “midrash” is more like the Greco-Roman literary practice of “mimesis”, that is, literary imitation, or simply “a creative use of Scriptural material”. [1]
A justification for the comparison of the Gospel of Mark with Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha is given by Nathanael Vette, [25] following Devorah Dimant 's work "Use and Interpretation of Mikra": [26] that these writings have in common the imitation of the styles and forms of the Old Testament (OT) biblical literature and can be read as if they are attempting to imitate that biblical world. Scripture is not primarily addressed directly in order to be explicitly interpreted in these writings but acts as an underlay that helps shape narrative episodes. Vette also borrows from Dimant the terms to describe these two types of Scripture reference: expositional and compositional. Most scholarship has attended to the expositional use of Scriptures in the Gospel of Mark, seeking to explain how the Gospel can be interpreted through its Scriptural references; but Vette seeks to redress that balance by examining the compositional function of biblical texts in the Gospel. [1]
A possible conclusion about the use of the Old Testament in the Gospel is that Mark had no respect for the original context of the quotations and allusions to Old Testament writings in his text. This can be seen in the story of John the Baptist at the beginning of the Gospel. [27]
The first quotation (Mk 1:2-3) does not come entirely from Isaiah the prophet, as Mark asserts. [lower-alpha 1] [28] It is a composite reference to Exodus 23:20 , Malachi 3:1 and Isaiah 40:3 which he connects to Isaiah the prophet. The quotation is taken out of context and worked into his story of John and Jesus in order to show the relationship between the two. The beginning of the Gospel does not prove the fulfillment of the Old Testament, it characterizes John as the predecessor of Jesus. Only at a later stage does the reader realize the resemblance between the apocalyptic John and the apocalyptic Jesus. [27]
John Dominic Crossan and Howard Clark Kee argue that Mark's citation of scripture is not representative of ignorance or editorial sloppiness, but rather represents combinations and alterations of scripture texts that cohere with Mark's intent to create a new story to communicate his own point of view. [30] [31] [32]
Mark did not hesitate to use the Old Testament out of context, therefore it is probable that he did the same with the "Jesus tradition" he received. This underscores the argument that he retold tradition for his own purposes. By doing this Mark created a new text from other texts, traces of which can be seen in his text. [13]
Mark was not a conservative redactor; he not only reshaped his story of Jesus by retelling the story for the sake of a particular situation, he also told it from his own perspective. However, whether Mark transmitted tradition conservatively or creatively is of little significance, even eyewitnesses shape their messages for their own purposes. [18] Jan Vansina (1985:5) observes:
[M]ediation of perception by memory and emotional state shapes an account. Memory typically selects certain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them according to expectation, previous knowledge or the logic of 'what must have happened', and fills the gaps in perception.
This is all the more true of the Jesus tradition which has been shaped by putative eyewitnesses as well as those who retold the tradition for their own purposes and in their own circumstances. That is already clear from the different versions of the same stories of and about Jesus in the canonical gospels. First of all we do not have any eyewitness reports; [33] furthermore, the retelling of the Jesus tradition was done in different circumstances for different purposes. This is, for instance, confirmed by the 'same' version of the 'same' parable in different contexts in the different gospels. Retelling of the 'same' event or word of a specific person involves creativity. [18] Bart Ehrman argues that an understanding of how memory—especially memory in oral cultures— works is crucial to understanding the production of the Gospel of Mark. [34]
The Gospel of Matthew is the first book of the New Testament of the Bible and one of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells how Israel's Messiah, Jesus, comes to his people but is rejected by them and how, after his resurrection, he sends the disciples to the gentiles instead. Matthew wishes to emphasize that the Jewish tradition should not be lost in a church that was increasingly becoming gentile. The gospel reflects the struggles and conflicts between the evangelist's community and the other Jews, particularly with its sharp criticism of the scribes and Pharisees with the position that through their rejection of Christ, the Kingdom of God has been taken away from them and given instead to the church.
The Gospel of John is the fourth of the four canonical gospels in the New Testament. It contains a highly schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus and seven "I am" discourses culminating in Thomas' proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God". The gospel's concluding verses set out its purpose, "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."
Gospel originally meant the Christian message, but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was reported. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, culminating in his trial and death and concluding with various reports of his post-resurrection appearances. Modern biblical scholars are cautious of relying on the gospels uncritically, but nevertheless, they provide a good idea of the public career of Jesus, and critical study can attempt to distinguish the original ideas of Jesus from those of the later Christian authors.
Midrash is expansive Jewish Biblical exegesis using a rabbinic mode of interpretation prominent in the Talmud. The word itself means "textual interpretation", "study", or "exegesis", derived from the root verb darash (דָּרַשׁ), which means "resort to, seek, seek with care, enquire, require", forms of which appear frequently in the Hebrew Bible.
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events relating to first-century Christianity. The New Testament's background, the first division of the Christian Bible, is called the Old Testament, which is based primarily upon the Hebrew Bible; together they are regarded as sacred scripture by Christians.
The resurrection of Jesus is the Christian belief that God raised Jesus from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion, starting – or restoring – his exalted life as Christ and Lord. According to the New Testament writing, Jesus was firstborn from the dead, ushering in the Kingdom of God. He appeared to his disciples, calling the apostles to the Great Commission of forgiving sin and baptizing repenters, and ascended to Heaven.
The historicity of the Bible is the question of the Bible's relationship to history—covering not just the Bible's acceptability as history but also the ability to understand the literary forms of biblical narrative. One can extend biblical historicity to the evaluation of whether or not the Christian New Testament is an accurate record of the historical Jesus and of the Apostolic Age. This tends to vary depending upon the opinion of the scholar.
The empty tomb is the Christian tradition that the tomb of Jesus was found empty after his crucifixion. The canonical gospels each describe the visit of women to Jesus' tomb. Although Jesus' body had been laid out in the tomb after crucifixion and death, the tomb is found to be empty, the body gone, and the women are told by angels that he has risen.
The Epistle of Barnabas is a Greek epistle written between AD 70 and 132. The complete text is preserved in the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, where it appears immediately after the New Testament and before the Shepherd of Hermas. For several centuries it was one of the "antilegomena" ("disputed") writings that some Christians looked on as sacred scripture, while others excluded them. Eusebius of Caesarea classified it with excluded texts. It is mentioned in a perhaps third-century list in the sixth-century Codex Claromontanus and in the later Stichometry of Nicephorus appended to the ninth-century Chronography of Nikephoros I of Constantinople. Some early Fathers of the Church ascribed it to the Barnabas who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, but it is now generally attributed to an otherwise unknown early Christian teacher, although some scholars do defend the traditional attribution. It is distinct from the Gospel of Barnabas.
Biblical criticism is the use of critical analysis to understand and explain the Bible without appealing to the supernatural. During the eighteenth century, when it began as historical-biblical criticism, it was based on two distinguishing characteristics: (1) the scientific concern to avoid dogma and bias by applying a neutral, non-sectarian, reason-based judgment to the study of the Bible, and (2) the belief that the reconstruction of the historical events behind the texts, as well as the history of how the texts themselves developed, would lead to a correct understanding of the Bible. This sets it apart from earlier, pre-critical methods; from the anti-critical methods of those who oppose criticism-based study; from the post-critical orientation of later scholarship; and from the multiple distinct schools of criticism into which it evolved in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Form criticism as a method of biblical criticism classifies units of scripture by literary pattern and then attempts to trace each type to its period of oral transmission. "Form criticism is the endeavor to get behind the written sources of the Bible to the period of oral tradition, and to isolate the oral forms that went into the written sources. Insofar as this attempts to trace the history of the tradition, it is known as tradition criticism." Form criticism seeks to determine a unit's original form and the historical context of the literary tradition.
The four senses of Scripture is a four-level method of interpreting the Bible.
Disputes regarding the internal consistency and textual integrity of the Bible have a long history.
In contrast to the variety of absolute or personal names of God in the Old Testament, the New Testament uses only two, according to the International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia. From the 20th century onwards, "a number of scholars find various evidence for the name [YHWH or related form] in the New Testament.
Isaiah 53 is the fifty-third chapter of the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. This book contains the prophecies attributed to the prophet Isaiah and is one of the Nevi'im. Chapters 40 to 55 are known as "Deutero-Isaiah" and date from the time of the Israelites' exile in Babylon.
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The historical reliability of the Gospels is evaluated by experts who have not found a complete consensus. While all four canonical gospels contain some sayings and events which may meet one or more of the five criteria for historical reliability used in biblical studies, the assessment and evaluation of these elements is a matter of ongoing debate.
The Q source (also called The Sayings Gospel, Q Gospel, Q document(s), or Q; from German: Quelle, meaning "source") is a written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (λόγια, logia). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's oral gospel traditions.
Oral gospel traditions is the hypothetical first stage in the formation of the written gospels as information was passed by word of mouth. These oral traditions included different types of stories about Jesus. For example, people told anecdotes about Jesus healing the sick and debating with his opponents. The traditions also included sayings attributed to Jesus, such as parables and teachings on various subjects which, along with other sayings, formed the oral gospel tradition. The supposition of such traditions have been the focus of scholars such as Bart Ehrman, James Dunn, and Richard Bauckham, although each scholar varies widely in his conclusions, with Ehrman and Bauckham publicly debating on the subject.
Richard A. Horsley was the Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts Boston until his retirement in 2007.
Alfred Suhl has denied altogether to Mark any promise-fulfillment schema. [Alfred Suhl, Die Funktion der alttestamentlichen Zitate und Anspielungen im Markusevangelium (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1965).]
Since around 1970 an alternative explanation of the New Testament and related texts has been emerging. Researchers are recognizing precise ways in which New Testament texts are explained as depending not on oral tradition but on older literature, especially older scripture.
[Per Seneca] Skilled authors were bees that took the best nectar from many blossoms to produce textual honey. [...] Like the proverbial bee of ancient rhetoric, Mark harvested nectar from several blossoms — some Jewish and some Greek — and transformed them into gospel honey.
[In the Gospel of Mark] we see its background in the Jewish mode of biblical interpretation, midrash. Once again, to remind readers, midrash is a way of multiply contextualizing verses with other verses and passages in the [Hebrew] Bible, in order to determine their meaning.
J.D. Crossan and H.C. Kee have shown that instances of Scripture citation heretofore understood as examples of Mark's ignorance or editorial sloppiness, are in truth combinations and alterations of Scripture texts that cohere with Mark's redactional schema (Crossan, 'Redaction and Citation', pp. 33-50; Kee, 'The Function of Scripture Quotations', pp. 165-88).
This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)( license statement/permission ). Text taken from The production of the Gospel of Mark: An essay on intertextuality , Willem S. Vorster, HTS Teologiese Studies.
This article incorporates text from a free content work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)( license statement/permission ). Text taken from How and Why the Gospel of Mark Used Scripture — a review of Writing with Scripture, part 1 , Neil Godfrey, .
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