From Q to "Secret" Mark: A Composition History of the Earliest Narrative Theology

177 Pages·2006·20.47 MB·English

by  Hugh M. Humphrey

from Q to
“Secret" Mark
A Composition
History of the Earliest
Narrative Theology
HUGH M. HUMPHREY
A
from Q to
“Secret'’ M ark
A Composition History of the
Earliest Narrative Theology
HUGH M. HUMPHREY
\
λ
t&t dark
NEW rORK · LONDON
Copyright Ό 2006 by Hugh M. Humphrey
Λ1Ι rights reserved. No pari of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, T & T (Hark
International.
T &. T Clark International, SO Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
Ί & T Clark International, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SHI 7NX
T öd T Clark International is a Continuum imprint.
Cover design: I cc Singer
Library of Congress Catalogmg-in-l’ublicaiion Data
Humphrey, Hugh.
From Q ro sccrct Mark: a composition history of the earliest narrative theology / Hugh
I lumphrcy.
p. cm.
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 567-02502-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-567-02512 S (pbk. : alk paper)
1. Bible. N.T. Mark-Criticism, Rédaction. 2. Bible. N.T. Mark-Criticism, Narrative.
3. Q hypothesis (Svnoptics criticism) 4. Narrative theology. I. Title.
BS2585.S2.HS4 2006
226..V066-dc22
2006001133
Printed w ibe United St,ites of America
06 07 03 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
°4i Jî?
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Focus of This Study
Chapter One
Revisiting flic Fathers
Chapter Two
A Narrative Version of “Q”
Chapter Three
The Passion Narrative in Mark
Chapter Pour
Assimilation and a Focus on Discipleship
Chapter hive
The Composition History of the Gospel of Mark
Appendix I
The “‘Mark without Q'’ Hypothesis
Appendix 2
Assessing the Quest for a Proto-Mark
Index
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Acknowledgments
It was easier to write this book than it is to acknowledge and thank all
who have in diverse ways helped bring it about. Throughout it all, my
wife, Ellen, has been an enabler through her steadfast love and loyalty,
support and patience. Fairfield University too must be remembered for
a sabbatical leave that lead to the initial draft and analysis of the text
of the Gospel of Mark. The Catholic Biblical Association’ Task Force
on the Gospel of Mark offered many helpful suggestions for which I
am very grateful. And the editors at Tiki Clark have most certainly
made me appear to be a better writer. Probably, however, the person I
most remember here is the late Monsignor Myles Bourke, whose careful
attention to the text of the New Testament in its context set an example
for all his students. To these and all others I should have named: I hope
this book is a worthy “thank you."
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Introduction
The Focus of This Study
%
m
It took almost two millennia for the Gospel of Mark to find an audience
attentive to and appreciative of its distinctivcncss.1 In the last century
and a half, however, biblical scholarship has tried to make up for that
neglect with an intense focus on .Mark, using a variety of approaches
or lenses through which to view' this Gospel. Today we are the heirs to
that history, and it is only now possible for us to appreciate the unique
contribution of the evangelist we call “Mark.”
Looking Back
The relatively modern interest2 in Mark began with the suggestion that
it might have been, at least in part, the source for the other Synoptic
Gospels of Matthew and Luke; in an era enamored of the new discipline
of history, this idea seemed to promise that Mark would Itc a source
closer to the historical Jesus. The hope that one could find in Mark the
unadulterated report of Jesus’ life was soon tempered, however, by the
realization that this Gospel had some materials in it that, to a rational
mind, were more mythological than a historical account would be, arid
by the realization that Mark, too, seemed to have used source materi­
als. Indeed, as the excitement over the actual text of Mark being the
lens through which to view the historical Jesus ebbed, it was replaced
by the excitement over the analysis of those units of traditional material
that had been compiled by the evangelist; this quest to break apart the
text of Mark in order to examine and classify those traditional materials
1. For an account of the ^rnrrn! lack of interest in Mark for most of those two thousand
years, see B. D. SchiUlgcn, Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit:
Wayne State University I’reas, 1999«, 201.
2. For a thorough review of “how we reached the point where wc now are in Maican
studies,” see S. 1’. Kealy, Mark's Gospel, A History of Its Interpretation: h'rotn the Beginning
until 1979 (New York: 1’aulist Press, 1982).
1
2 From £ to “Secret " Mark
according to their “forms” was still driven by the same hunger to objec­
tively reconstruct the actual history of Jesus. What was characteristic of
this development of “form criticism” 3 in Markan studies was fragmen­
tation: small units of the text of the Gospel were studied and compared
with other small units of the text of the Gospel; the Gospel as a whole
was considered to be the artificial result of a scissors-and-paste editor
and therefore to be of no real importance in the quest for the historical
Jesus. For some three decades in the first half of the twentieth century,
this approach was the approach to take in studying Mark, and it did
shape the appraisal of Mark in fundamental ways: never again would
biblical scholarship be ready to take the Second Gospel as an eyewitness
account or a highly reliable historical account: it contained traditional
materials.
Perhaps it was the inconsistencies of approach4 or the questionable
assumptions made about the early Christian church that prompted the
desire to find a new, objectively verifiable approach to the Gospels that
one could defend before all comers. In any event, scholars coupled the
intuition that Mark had compiled traditions with the earlier recogni­
tion of Matthew and Luke as having compiled Mark and a collection
of Jesus’ sayingss into their Gospels; all rhis led to development of yet a
third approach. Called “redaction criticism* because it studied the pre­
cise ways in which Matthew and Luke edited or “redacted” Mark into
their Gospels, it. was not immediately seen as applicable to the Gospel
of Mark. But compilation and redaction are both literary processes; and
just as one could now argue for Matthew having an editorial purpose
on the basis of how he handled the material in his copy of the Gospel
of Mark,6 so too one could argue for Mark having an editorial purpose
on the basis of how he created the “framework” for the units of tradi­
tional material and on the basis of the recurring motifs in the Gospel.
Again there was fragmentation of the whole text as scholars assembled
3. For a concise summary, see Christopher Tuckett, Reading the Netv Testament: Methods
of Interpretation (Philadelphia: l'ortrcss, I9S7!, 9.5-112.
Ί. Some )udttrnent.s were made on the basis of content rather than on the basis of form.
For a balanced evaluation see li. Earle I·.Ilis. The Making of the Neu1 Testament Documents
(Biblical interpretation Series; Leiden: Brill, 1999;, 19-23.
5. This collection ol sayings ot [esus is commonly referred to as ‘‘Q," abbreviating the
German word Quelle (source}. The renewed discussion of the very existence of such a collection
will be reviewed later in this introduction and evaluated at the beginning of chapter 2.
6. Whether Matthew had a written or oral copy of the Gospel of Mark is a matter left open
here.
introduction: The hocus of Ibis Study 3
individual phrasing* and passages to indicate a "motif” or “theme” or
"theological interest” of the redactor, in this case, Mark.
This last development of redaction criticism opened the floodgates of
biblical scholarship, first and primarily for the study of the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke, and then later for Mark; the outpouring of studies
continued into the waning years of the last millennium. What is more
significant, however, are the other approaches spawned by redaction
criticism, each in its own way intrigued by redaction criticism’s acknowl­
edgement of the evangelist as a true author speaking theological truths
to his community. Let thumbnail sketches suffice.
On the one hand, if we were to position the evangelist as a real au­
thor in a concrete, historical situation, an effort to reconstruct the social
world of the evangelist was thought to offer new understanding of the
nuances of his text; others had undertaken this work in the past, but
now it was renewed. For it to he fully effective, one had to make cer­
tain assumptions or conclusions about the probable geographical origin
of the Gospel’s text. Still, general recognition of the distinctive cultural
fabric of the Mediterranean basin sharpened our sense of distance from
the realities of the first-century cultural world of the evangelists.
Then, too, if we were to think of the evangelist as a person embedded
in a social context, then it would he conceivable that models taken from
today’s social sciences {anthropology, sociology, and so on) could be
applied to the information furnished by a Gospel’s text and new insights
provided thereby. Yet the results depended upon the availability of data,
the accuracy of the data, and the trustworthiness of the social science
model used.
On the other hand, if we were to emphasize the role of the evangelist
as an author, then we could apply the canons of contemporary literary
criticism. We could make distinctions between the author implied by
the text of the Gospel and the real author; similarly, we could make
distinctions between the reader envisioned by the text and the real reader
of the first-century Mediterranean world, who in turn would not be the
real reader today, with our historical and cultural baggage. Indeed, if we
focused upon readcr-response criticism, we could detach ourselves from
the inadequacy of historical, contextual information — and even from an
interest in what the original evangelist’s “intention” might have been!
7. I would leave open as unestnblished the ai:rtial gender of any of tl>C evangelists. Use of
the male pronoun here is for convenience* 5<ikc.