Gospel against Parable

239 Pages·12.496 MB·English

by  James G. Williams

GOSPEL
AGAINST
PARABLE
Mark's Language
of Mystery
JAMES G. WILLIAMS
ALMOND • 1985
BIBLE AND LITERATURE SERIES, 12
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
Williams, James G., 1936-
Gospel against Parable.
(Bible and literature series, ISSN 0260-4493; 12)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Bible. N.T. Mark--Criticism, interpretation,
etc. 1. Title. II. Series
BS2685.2. W66 1986 226' .3066 85-18684
ISBN 0-907459-44-7
ISBN 0-907459-45-5 (pbk.)
Copyright © 1985 JSOT Press
ALMOND is an imprint of
JSOT PRESS
Department of Biblical Studies
The University of Sheffield
Sheffield, S10 2TN, England
Origination & Editorial:
THE ALMOND PRESS
Columbia Theological Seminary
P.O. Box 520
Decatur, GA 30031, U.S.A.
Printed in Great Britain by
Dotesios (Printers) Ltd.
Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire
CONTENTS
AKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7
INTRODUCTION 9
Chapter I
LITERARY CHARACTER
OF THE GOSPEL OF MARK 23
A. Mark and Oral Tradition 26
B. Mark's Plot 28
C. III What Sense is Mark 'Historical'? 29
Chapter II
SECRET OF THE SON 41
A. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God 41
B. The Mystery and the Disciples 55
Chapter III
MARK'S LANGUAGE OF MYSTERY 65
A. Style 66
1. Abruptness, Discontinuity, Enigma 66
2. Parataxis and Rapidity 74
3. Repetition 83
B. The Coming 91
1. The Onrush of the Kingdom 91
2. The Way of the Kingdom 97
3. Participation in God's Future 104
C. The Presence 112
1. Sea and Boat 114
2. Bread in the Wilderness 120
3. The Ultimate Parable of Presence 126
D. Summary and Conclusion 130
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Excursus A: The Question of a Theology
of Presence in Mark 139
Excursus B: Reflections on The Oral and the
Written Gospel. by Werner Kelber 143
Chapter IV
GOSPEL AGAINST PARABLE 155
A. The Parables 156
B. Tension between Gospel and Parable 162
C. Parables as Seminar of the Gospel 179
D. Parable as Mirror of Mystery 188
Addendum
ON GOSPEL AS A NEW GENRE 201
NOTES
to Introduction 217
to Chapter I 218
to Chapter II 220
to Chapter III 223
to Chapter IV 230
to Addendum 233
ABBREVIATIONS 234
WORKS CONSULTED 235
INDEXES
Index of Modern Authors 242
Selective Scripture Index 243
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am particularly grateful to Syracuse University
for the academic freedom and support that permits its
faculty to branch out into new areas of specialization
and interdisciplinary study. David Gunn, helpful as
always, encouraged me to develop an earlier, shorter
essay on Mark into a full monograph. Francis Landy
amazed and inspired me by reading an earlier draft of
this manuscript and thinking my thoughts both after
me and before me. Wendy Love gave of her time and
energy beyond the call of duty in preparing the last
two drafts and helping us solve a technical computer
problem.
This book is dedicated to all my teachers. Although
there are too many to name them all, I think with spe
cial gratitude of the contribution to my life and voca
tion made by W. J. A. Power, Schubert Ogden, the late
Floyd Curl, and the late William Irwin of Perkins
School of Theology; and by Sheldon Blank, Matitiahu
Tsevat, and the late Samuel Sandmel of Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Finally, I wish
to thank those Syracuse University colleagues who are,
truly, my 'teachers,' and whose friendship is unfail
ing: A. Leland Jamison (emeritus), Alan Berger, and
Amanda Porterfield.
James G. Williams
Advent 1984
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INTRODUCTION
The gospel of Mark is one of the great 'odyssey' texts
of Scripture. The Torah is the drama of Israel's emer
gence from the peoples and her journey to the borders
of the promised land as the bearer of God's intention
for mankind. This motif is especially prominent in
the prophecies of Jeremiah and the Babylonian Isaiah,
though not absent in some of the other prophets. Mark
draws upon this scriptural heritage of the way, the
journey, the passing over into the promised land. He
reshapes this motif in combining it with the figure of
the suffering servant in the Babylonian Isaiah, as well
as elements of some of the Psalms and the apocalyptic
tradition. The resulting composition is a unique nar
rative text. It is a narrative that recounts an excit-
ing, astonishing, and sometimes troubling journey -
troubling for the disciples who try to comprehend their
master, troubling for those who seek an explanation of
the narra ti ve's seeming disjunctions, inconsistencies,
and lacunae.
My own approach is literary and theological. A lit
erary methodology, in my view, will best prepare the
way to the theological fields that I wish to work. I
am not concerned with the question whether Mark is
'good' literature according to certain canons. That
it is canonical literature means for me that it is
already worth reading, thinking about and discussing.
On the other hand, there are facets of Mark so strik-
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JAMES G. WILLIAMS: GOSPEL AGAINST PARABLE
ingly unorthodox that one may wonder how it got into
the canon (see shortly on the apostles). In any case,
my study of Mark has persuaded me that it is subtly
composed, profound, and full of power. Its apparent
incoherence and inconsistency at points and its ver
nacular Greek are in service of the depth and urgency
of its message concerning the kingdom of God.
One of the troublesome features of Mark, especial
ly to those who are inclined to ground the narrative's
referents in the historical Jesus, is his view of the
function of parables. At issue in this regard is prim
arily chapter 4 of the gospel. There Jesus relates the
parable of the sower, which is subsequently identified
as the master parable (4:13). Jesus speaks of 'the
secret of the kingdom of God' (4:11), which is in all
the parables and which by implication is most typically
expressed in the sower parable. 'Those outside' - those
not within the circle of those 'about him with the
twelve' - are given parables in order that they may not
understand the mystery of the Kingdom (4: 10 , 12). This
esotericism concerning the use and meaning of the par
ables is further supported by the enigmatic saying con
cerning having and not-having and the parable of the
seed growing secretly (4:25, 26-29). It is capped off
by the narrator's note that 'privately to his own
disciples he explicated everything' (4:34).
In a sense, chapter 4 of Mark is a kind of canon
ical 'hedge' around the parables which implies two
conclusions for the reader: (1) Jesus himself is the
best guide; we should look to the master parable and
Jesus' own interpretation thereof. But in this setting
it is Mark, of course, who is the guide to Jesus and
his parabolic teaching. (2) Although the disciples,
especially the twelve, received private explanations,
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INTRODUCTION
they clearly had difficulty comprehending the secret
of the Kingdom.(so 4:13 and the import of 4:35-41).
Apostolic authority is thus decisively checked, if not
undercut. This diminishing, if not abolishing, of apos
tolic authority makes Mark, in principle, a kind of
boundary source between certain orthodoxies and cer
tain heterodoxies in the history of Christianity.
From another point of view, however, the parable as
a genre of language, and certainly as Mark understands
it, is particularly apposite to the 'other side,' the
transcendent, the mystery, thc unstoried world which
the suffering Son of man reveals and of which the nar
rative seeks continually to be a witness from its
abrupt beginning to its dangling conclusion. In this
sense the parables are a hedge around the larger nar
rative, protecting it from being too facilely assimilat
ed into 'world' and conventional meaning. This relat
ionship of parable and gospel narrative is therefore of
such significance that I have devoted a chapter to it.
It could be read as a distinct study in its own right,
although I conceive it as integral to the book as a
whole. The title 'Gospel Against Parable' is intended
to suggest the richly ambiguous relationships of the
two in Mark's narrative. I have in mind three of the
possible meanings of the preposition 'against': in con
flict with, in contact with, and having as background.
* * * * * *
In the course of the study I shall deal with a crucial
issue that often sparks a heated debate and unfortu
nately hard feelings among biblical critics: the heuris
tic and hermeneutical value of historical approaches
as against literary approaches. Until recently most of
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JAMES G. WILLIAMS: GOSPEL AGAINST PARABLE
the noteworthy methodologies in critical biblical study
have been historical in method and goals. The purpose
of 'higher criticism: often called 'literary critic-
ism,' was to reconstruct the original events narrated
in the biblical texts, recount them in their proper
sequence, and develop a history of biblical religion.
Form criticism, though contributing much to our under
standing of discrete literary forms, was by and large
occupied with original life-settings of the forms and
their oral history. Redaction criticism has focused on
the point of view and theology of biblical works in
their final, received stage, but this is now character
istically in order to locate the believing community
and religious milieu reflected in the final redaction.
These forms of criticism share the impulse to seek the
referents of the text outside of the text itself, wheth-
er in the attempt to reconstruct its world, to theorize
about the persons or persons who have composed and
transmitted it, or to determine its audience. On the
other hand, literary approaches share a dominant con
cern to elucidate the relations and patterns within the
work itself (Tolbert, 1982, drawing upon Abrams: 2).
Now I think it is one of the sad and deleterious
facts about contemporary scholarship that so many coll
eagues see these two fundamental orientations in crit
icism as mutually exclusive. It is sad because these
colleagues sometimes forget the collegiality that is at
the heart of the ethos, the way, of a properly humane
and humanistic scholarship. It is deleterious because
both interpretive approaches have something important
to contribute. Although I argue in chapter two of this
study that the preferable approach to any text is first
to mark out what makes up the form and constitutive
elements of the work, I go on to say that once this nec-
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