Do You Not Understand This Parable ?
Mark’s Recursive Paradoxes as Key to
His Gospel
©
Jiri Severa, 2012
Only drowning men could see him.
Leonard Cohen
It may be
surprising news to many but it appears that the literary classing of the canonical
gospels revolves around the interpretation of a single verse in the gospel of
Mark. In the key two questions in 4:13 Jesus
asks : “ Do you not understand this parable ? How will you then understand all
the parables ?”[1] The conventional scholarly reading of the
verse is that ‘this parable’ (αυτη η παραβολη)
refers to the story of the sower sandwiched around the mysterious quibble in 4:10-12
whereby Jesus restricts access to the mystery of the kingdom. However, this unanimity may be an example of Bertrand
Russell’s maxim that when all the experts agree on something, we should be
suspicious. In the upstaging of Mark, both Matthew (13:10) and Luke (8:9) deposited Jesus’ explanation for speaking in
parables explicitly in the disciples. This
makes Mark 4:13 redundant in their versions of the gospel, as the sharp
dividing line called faith that
separates the disciples from the mystical, invisible body of Christ in the
earliest gospel had lost meaning in their communities.
In Mark, however,
it is a primary datum that informs the plan of the narrative . The lament in 4:13 I will argue in this paper,
actually refers back to the quibble, and not to the sower parable which Jesus
explains fully in the verses that follow and Mark uses as a bait to befuddle
the unsuspecting outsider.
The first thing
that needs to be grasped firmly is that 4:13 addresses a different audience
than the three preceding verses. Jesus
evidently is not talking to those who are privy to the secret of the kingdom,
when he agonizes ‘how will you
know all the parables’ ? ( πως
πασας τας παραβολας γνωσεσθε) Unlike
those who have access to Jesus when he is alone, the addressees of this verse
do not possess the gnosis to grasp
the meaning of Mark’s mystery tale. The
narrator does not tell us who it is that Jesus is talking to in 4:13 but the exasperated
tone of the address is analogous to other speeches to his disciples[2].
The problem is the disciples were not
present when Jesus reveals the rule of access to the mystery in 4:10-12.
How can Jesus ask them if they understood the parable they did not hear
? What is going on ?
Mark’s Quibble
The three
verses inside the sower parable have exercised exegets since William Wrede who
pointed out the strange intent of Mark’s Jesus to speak to outsiders in riddles
so as to deny them grace. It is from the founder of modern Markan scholarship
that came the bitter complaint about this feature of Mark: “Blessed are the ones of plain speech, for
they shall be understood”. Wrede put the finger on the facet of the
earliest gospel that became its chief attraction but quickly also its
undoing. Brilliant as the writer known
to us as Mark was, he was not accessible
by design to most readers outside a group of mystics whom he most likely led
personally and within which group he animated the spiritual mystery of
Jesus. Matthew seized on the
intellectual conceit of Mark and deflated his exceedingly clever but condescending
and convoluted tale to a simpler one, taking out most of the persistent opacity[3],
and offensive jesting which included affectation of ignorance and unschooled style
of presentation. He added a wealth of
new material and a sprinkle of condescension and opacity of his own. The immediate effect of Matthew’s re-write of
Mark was likely a rapid coalescence of the two traditions and defections to the
newer version of the gospel in the groups where Mark was not personally
dominant (if he indeed was alive when Matthew’s text began to spread). And the effect was to be lasting; the gospel
of Mark was thoroughly overshadowed by the gospel of Matthew. In the later church, and for most of the
Christian history, the earliest gospel by and large was not seen more than an
abridged version of the work of its rival. Mark was not to be rediscovered as a
unique and original work until modern times.
In terms of social psychology,
Mark was writing a classical cultic material, dense, close to impenetrable,
full of mysterious allusions purposely to mislead outsiders. The gospel addresses two groups of outsiders
separately: one is a group of a
different Jesus tradition[4]
to whom he offers the salvation through Pauline Christ on condition of their converting to the cross. He savages and ridicules the pharisaic Jews
of his time by having Jesus defy the law and giving either himself or through
Jesus, misleading references
to the Torah (1:1-3, 2:26, 9:12-13,
10:19, 14:21, 14:49). Mark’s quibble
addresses all three groups:
(4:10) And when he was alone, those who were about
him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables.
I have called the three verses a ‘quibble’ because they declare a mystical
plot which cannot be deciphered grammatically. The first verse sets up a quiz about
who it is that is asking Jesus the question. Jesus is said to be κατα μονας, and yet there are οι περι αυτον
who are making inquiries. This blatant contradiction is being excused in
most translations as a slip, or a clumsy construction and interpreted as
something akin to ‘when he was alone with
the twelve and some other disciples’[5]. It looks however it is not that and going
to the later synoptics for clues does not help.
As I have hinted already, Matthew and Luke do not recognize access to
Jesus, or knowledge of him, by other agents than the physical entities of
Jesus’ own historical timeline[6].
I believe that one cannot read Mark reduced in that manner and grasp the essence
of his tale. Take for example the syntactic
difference between Mk 4:10 and Luke’s
9:18, in which the praying Jesus is said to be alone with his disciples (…κατα μονας συνησαν αυτω οι μαθηται). In Luke, the identity of those with Jesus
alone is revealed, thereby modifying grammatically the extent of Jesus
aloneness. But Mark 4:10 intentionally conceals
the object. Oι περι αυτον cannot qualify κατα μονας because the presence of an unknown collective flagrantly contradicts
the adjective μονoς. I assume that if Mark wanted to write και οτε εγενετο κατα μονας συν τοις μαθηταις αυτου..[7],
he would
have. But evidently he did not. He must have had something else in
mind. ‘There are three kinds of
people’, said someone in a flash of discovery,
‘those who can count and those who can’t’.
The second important item of 4:10 is the position of the
Twelve vis-à-vis the petitioners.
Clearly, the two groups are separated, and the Twelve are not the ones
asking the question. Why are they mentioned in the verse then ? What was the intent behind that ?
The origin of the Twelve and their
function in Mark’s gospel is a large issue and an extremely important one. As their presence looms large in the exegesis
of the relevant recursions in Mark, I will outline my approach to the problem.
It is my considered opinion that the
Twelve came into being as Mark’s original design and the collective was not
meant to designate an inner group of disciples.
The disciples led by Peter, and the Zebedees appear to have been converted into the twelve apostles by Matthew and later
re-imported into Mark in the manipulations
of the text[8]. That the Twelve were Mark’s own interpretive
device, is argued for by the finding that the group is introduced in the
narrative in anarthrous form (3:14), the only such description of the apostolic
body in the New Testament[9]. This group seems to have been conceived as haggadic
midrash to the twelve founders of the tribes of Israel, as is strongly suggested
by the LXX speaking of Jacob’s sons as “in
all twelve”[10]. That the single acting member of this body in
Mark, Judas Iscariot, coincides in name
with Judah, the brother who would
sell Joseph to the Ishmailites (Gen 37:27), so
his brothers’ hand would not be upon him,
suggests too much an integral plot of the paschal drama to have been
history. Even after the Matthean
recension of Mark, Judas remained the only
named member of the Twelve who was assigned a role in the script. Unlike the disciples, the Twelve, as they
were originally conceived, knew the spiritual dimension of Jesus since their
ordination, and they, like the unnamed body of petitioners in 4:10, had
privileged access to him. They were a
mystical collective, symbolizing the twelve tribes of the house of Israel that
Jesus called to proclaim, and testify about, the kingdom. In the plot, Judas
Iscariot’s delivering Jesus up[11],
divides the Twelve and thus the kingdom,
fulfilling earlier Jesus’ saying[12]
which points to the devastation of the war of CE 66-73 and the loss of
Jerusalem. An important internal proof that
the Twelve were not meant to refer to the disciples, is that the
Transfiguration was made known only to a selected group of them. If Peter, John
and James were of the Twelve, and the demonstration (which failed: see ahead) was
specifically made to them as the members of that group – the apostles - then Mark’s
tale is inaccessible. Where did the
other nine get to know the transfigured glory of the risen Christ ? The original version of the gospel did not feature
posthumous appearances.
Finally, there is the form of the question itself: ‘they asked him about the parables’ (ηρωτων αυτον….. τας
παραβολας). The query comes in the middle of Jesus’ metaphoric
discourse on the fate of faith in different human characters. Given that a single
narrative thread was woven for nine verses, and dealing with a single parable,
the question Jesus is asked looks contrived. The parable of the sower is lucid,
making a consistent point about the loss
of the sown seed in unfriendly soil, and to competing vegetation, until it
finds ground where it prospers and multiplies. There is nothing mysterious
about what Jesus says, whether or not the crowd which he addresses would make
the connection between the seed and the word of faith. Later
in 4:33, the narrator explains, seemingly contra
what is presented in the quibble, that the word was understood by some hearers,
even though it was delivered as parables[13]. So the intent of the question in 4:10 could
not be said to have been provoked by some confusion Jesus caused by speaking in
parables. Note also that the
petitioners do not ask Jesus directly, as Matthew’s more focused disciples do :
‘why do you speak to them in parables ?’[14]. In comparison, the question of Mark’s
mysterious beings with Jesus when he is alone looks distinctly hallucid. But it need not be; it may be a clever way for
Mark to explain the referencing
rule concerning the parables.
(4:11) And he said to them,
"To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those
outside everything is in parables;
The exegesis of this verse firmly
hinges on the ability to identify those who are questioning Jesus and to answer
the apparent lack of agreement between the singular “secret” and the plural
“parables”. Mark ties the two with an enigmatic τα παντα, “everything”. What is everything
? Is
it everything about the secret of the kingdom of God ? Apparently, yes. But then how does that everything relate to parables
?
Naturally, this kind of exegetical problem
does not exist for Matthew and Luke, who it appears solved the mystery by
cutting through the Gordian knot. The unio
mystica asserted in Mark’s quibble is removed, and replaced by Jesus
telling his disciples, ie. those on whose apostolic authority the emerging church
would rely, that there was not one big
secret of the kingdom, but multiple
smaller ones individually revealed through parables spoken by Jesus.
However, the disciples counting among οι εξω seems
an important design element in Mark, as I have already noted. Verse 4:13 turns
to them via the proxy of followers in Mark’s time and tells them in not so many
words they cannot understand this
parable. Whether Jesus refers to the
parable of the sower (which would be easy to grasp even to Peter, I am sure) or
to something else, there is a contradiction : whoever it was with Jesus in 4:11,
to them the secret of the kingdom was granted[15].
They are the knowers of the secret. By
the rules of Mark’s mind games, it cannot be the disciples. Mark’s story seems at times impossibly self-contradictory
but it does have rules. They may not be simple
but they are internally consistent. Whatever one may say about Mark’s off-the-wall
antics and his perhaps excessive disparaging of the proselytizing rival Jesus traditions,
his committed viewpoint can hardly be questioned.
Paula Fredriksen
wrote that the earliest gospel operates with a kind of stereoscopic vision, in
which events taking place “ostensibly” in the historical timeline of Jesus have
eyes fixed on Mark’s own community as the
Jesus’ elect. In other words, there is a
dual trace of CE 30 and Mark’s own time cca 70 CE., the time of the gospel
writing[16]. This perspective is in tune with modern
Markan studies. It comes very close to
my own, except that I see the 70CE track
in the gospel more as a generalized sensation of cosmic eternity[17]
whereby the community or sons endowed
with the Spirit, actually present themselves inside the story and liberally interact
with Jesus, and the disciples. The
writer, I believe, thought of the
spiritual faculty as something outside of the spatio-temporal frame. Mark is certainly not a conventional
story-teller, and to class the work simply as fiction is to miss the uniqueness of the genre by a country
mile. The hypnotic tale of Mark covered
thirty modern pages with ink. On these thirty pages, he conjured a persona that would dominate Western
civilization for seventeen hundred years and the world for three
centuries. There is nothing in the
history of literature that even remotely compares to the effect of the
explosion caused by this short text, probably known at the outset simply as the parables of Jesus.
The plot of Mark’s parabolic
divination of Jesus revolves around the competing visions of Jesus’
messiahship. When Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi, he of
course sees him as the classical
Davidic king, who will conquer Jerusalem and restore God’s rule in Israel. This is still the hope of the disciples when
they enter the city, despite Jesus’ teaching them something else and agonizing
over their lack of grasp of his mission. (This however does not prevent the same Jesus to
egg them on by staging the triumphal entry prophesied by Zech 9:9 as a way for
Mark to thicken the plot.) But they are not the only ones misled about
the messianic identity of Jesus. When
the high priest asks at the trial: “Are you the Christ, son of the Blessed”,
Jesus replies in the affirmative, which settles the issue for the Sanhedrin: he
must be admitting to being a false pretender to David’s throne[18]. But Mark’s Jesus and the community to which he
ministers know as one body he is not that
Messiah; those in communion with Jesus Christ know that the perishable will not
inherit the imperishable. Mark tells his readers with a poorly disguised
glee that that type of Messiah did
not exist in Jesus’ time, in something like, “psst, don’t tell anyone about me, I have not yet been evangelized by the
apostle !”[19]
The gospel evidently
classes Paul’s letters as belonging with scripture (hence αι γραφαι
in 12:24, 14:49[20]),
and inserts them as prophecies to be fulfilled by the narrative to enhance its
paradoxical effect. Mark asserts gospel events that historically precede Paul’s
blueprint which shapes them theologically. The disciples don’t get it; on terms of the
narrative they are foolish (even if apparently devoted) idolators unable to
grasp God’s plan for Jesus in tearing the heavens and sending the Spirit into
him[21]. This is the underlying motif of the messianic secret, at the practical end of
which, the knowing reader is supposed to realize that Mark fully intended to
hoodwink the outsiders[22],
and the gospel text itself is the proclamation of the message that the
disciples failed to deliver – Christ crucified who has risen ! The glad tidings of Jesus’ rising get out
through Mark’s parabolic allegory of Paul, not the preaching of the
disciples.
Mark’s community plays part in the
gospel drama as the crowds who follow Jesus, who are fed by him collectively
and cured by him individually. They are the demoniacs whom Jesus restores to
human dignity. They are the mystics who have been touched by the Spirit and
know the gospel story as personal
experience. They know Jesus intimately
as they are the body of Christ. In 4:10 they are not asking Jesus a question; they
are staging a revelation. They know the
messianic secret, and they know there
really is no way Christ can impart the gnosis[23]
of himself except by faith. To those on
the outside everything is in parables.
(4:12) so that they may indeed
see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should
turn again, and be forgiven."
There are no tricks, no sleights of
hand by Mark in this verse. The shocking
effect of Jesus denying the grasp of his teachings to outsiders is a function
of three things which in the final analysis have little to do with the text of
the earliest gospel. One, most of New
Testament scholars accept the account of Acts of the Apostles as the guarantee
that a single Christian faith existed at the time of Mark’s composition. The appearances or visions of Jesus to his
disciples immediately after his death are taken as an unquestionable premise even
to the most rational, dispassionate investigators, who assign them to psychological
effects of shock and bereavement. The founding of the church, it is believed,
reflects the historical faith in the reality of Jesus resurrection formed at
the very beginning, with the doctrine of crucified Messiah that was preached
first in, and from Jerusalem, as salvation to all.
Two, apostle Paul was converted to this teaching, and
became a missionary agent of the Jerusalem assembly. Again, this appears an unchallengeable datum
to most scholars. When Paul says “but we
preach Christ crucified”, few question the identity of the first person plural.
And that with even such difficult verses as Rom 2:16, where Paul proclaims the
pending judgment of men through Jesus Christ κατα το ευαγγελιον μου (by my
gospel). This, it would be argued, signifies
only that Paul was converted to the theology of crucified Messiah and adopted
it as his own. But that is highly improbable. And the improbability is twofold:
even if we allow for the sake of argument that a suffering, dying messiah could
have been present in cultic Judaism as a model before the time of Jesus[24],
there is nothing (that I have found) that indicates the concept of
resurrection, a messianic promise fulfilled
by God as preached by Paul, had any sort of traction before his epistles
started to circulate. The idea of
spiritual metamorphosis, and resurrection in bodily life beyond God’s creation
on earth[25],
seems to have been unknown in Judaism before Paul and would have likely been
rejected by most Jews out of hand as self-described lunacy[26]. The other large dissenter to the thesis of a
single church and an early harmony is Galatians. Specifically in Gal 5:10, Paul
expresses faith in the Lord that his converts will not accept any other view
than his[27],
and those who trouble them would face his eternal damnation, whoever they are.
Finally, the third constant conspiring against major
exegetical discoveries in the reading of the earliest gospel is the implicit
view that the first Jewish war did not substantially change anything on the
development of the Christian faith. In other words, there is no symbolic
connection between the tearing of heavens at Jesus’ baptism and the tearing of
the curtain in the Temple after his expiry on the cross. There is no reason, some would say, why this symbolic imagery could not have been
present in a text written, say, in 66 CE. True, theoretically there is not, but such
dating will surely miss on Mark’s passion play riot around the semantics of
‘king’, ‘messiah’, ‘temple’ and ‘body’.
4:12 argues with all these
exegetical starting points. Markan community, by all appearances, does not yet know
the recognizable Christianity of the
following gospels. It is a society led by Christ mystics, who are guarding
Paul’s teachings (which they adapted somewhat: see ahead) against incursions of
the judaizing Jesuine exiles from the war likely proselytizing in its immediate
neighbourhood. They consider themselves
called upon to protect the treasure of Paul’s letters which they value as scripture
written expressly for them.
Whatever the actual circumstance of Mark’s
writing, the author appears to copy Paul’s concerns over the possible misuse of
the writing he sends out. The letters were
confidential, written to select groups of
those who are mature (1 Cor 2:6), called to be saints (1 Cor 1:2, Rom 1:7), the
elect (η εκλογη -Rom
11:5,7 οι εκλεκτοι – Rom 8:33), to those who
possess the Spirit and are thus equipped to understand spiritual truths (1 Cor
2:13-14). The last formula is especially
of interest as it articulates a restriction in a direct parallel to Mark’s
quibble: The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God,
for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they
are spiritually discerned.[28]
Much as the verse shocks those who
believe that Jesus, in the spirit of God, could not admit to misleading his
listeners, there it is, and one cannot do more than interpret it. Isaiah 6:9-10 (Rom 11:8) may be unattributed,
but Mark evidently deployed the saying(s) as a fully intended proselytizing
formula that leaves open the alternative
of the reader refusing, or misapprehending, the offer of salvation. The gnosis necessary to grasp the meaning of
the gospel is supplied by familiarity with ecstatic psychic phenomena, faith in
their being of divine origin and training in the interpretation of sacred texts. By all appearances, this is what Mark’s
community believed.
The riddle that explains the quibble
The verse 4:13 puts everything in
perspective. I have already begun to
argue that this parable does not refer
to the simile of the sower. It is apposite to the sower, by the subject of faith.
But that parable is to be fully explained to the disciples in the following
verses. This would make the first
question in 4:13 redundant and argue for the congenial idiocy of Jesus’
followers. Neither, I venture, was
intended. Cognitively, the second
question depends on the first: the
adverb πως (how, by what means) suggests
to the point of excluding alternatives that without the correct grasp of this parable one cannot understand all
the parables, meaning the gospel as a whole. The perception of which parable
then determines the grasp of all the
others ? Outrageous as it will seem to
some, there is not much else in the text neighbourhood beside the sower than
the three-verse quibble just preceding.
But that cannot be; those three verses have Jesus talking, so how can
they be said to be a parable ?
Very well,
the process of referring to an object or event in a manner that re-references
it and produces an indeterminate result is
called recursion[29]. In Mark, 4:13 confirms that the parables told by
Jesus are wrapped in the parables about
Jesus. Oι παραβολες
in 4:10 probably is a veiled allusion to oι παραβολες
του Ιεσου, a pun on
the double meaning of the genitive. It
refers to all events of the gospel,
not just parabolic material spoken by Jesus.
I have shown
one recursive brain-teaser : ‘there are
three kinds of people, those who can count and those who can’t.’ See how this statement refers to the ‘three
kinds’ in naming just ‘two kinds’ in favour of the assertion that some people
can’t count? Formally, of course, the statement is self-contradictory, but most
people will (sooner or later) re-create the complementing subtext that gives
the statement the intended meaning. The
riddle is explained when we realize the speaker wishes to make us believe in
jest she can’t count to three.
In analogy, Mark drew a paradoxical scene
where Jesus was alone and yet there were those around him who asked him about the parables. He tells them “you already know the secret”
but to those on the outside (of the
current fully initiated audience) everything is in parables. The intent here is
to create a recursive pointer
identifying the question-and-answer
exchange as ‘this parable’ to the outsiders. Mark’s Jesus then turns
(parabolically, again) to his not-so-smart disciples who do not have access to the
pneuma and asks: do you understand this self-referencing
style of discourse ? And if not, how will you then get the meaning of the whole
gospel ? An important point to grasp in
this is that 4:13 does not intend to address the disciples inside the story
but those who follow their traditions in
Mark’s time, i.e. the Petrine group of Jesus witnesses.
The
paradoxical recursion tricks were known in antiquity since Homer. Odysseus introduces
himself as “Nobody” to the Cyclops Polyphemus
and then blinds him as a way to escape his imprisonment. When the Cyclopes
friends whom he calls for help, ask the blinded giant who injured him, he
replies “Nobody”. And they leave the
cave cursing him. Odysseus then manages
to save his men, and on parting shouts to Polyphemus from the boat: ”You have Nobody to blame, nobody but yourself, that
is”.
Paul’s Connection to
Mark
Evidently, not all readers of Mark are fazed by the
forbidding density of his hypnotic tale:
Frank Kermode asks pointedly: if so many causes act in concert to
ensure that texts are from the beginning and sometimes indeterminately studded
with interpretations; and if these texts in their very nature demand further
interpretation and yet resist it, what should we expect when the document in
question denies its own opacity by claiming to be a transparent account of the
recognizable world ?[30]
Kermode then goes on to illustrate
his point by the scene of the crucifixion in John which bears unmistakable sign
of story-telling combined with the text’s “urgent demand” that it is taken as
factual reporting. But John is a later
version of Jesus divination in a later version of a Christian church. In Mark the suggestion of Jesus’ authority and
compassion is far more subtle as he artfully, movingly, manages the vulnerable human
side of Jesus, in passing from an unchained force dominating everyone and
everything to a pitifully disarmed, ridiculed and tortured prophet, forsaken by
everyone, and in all appearance, by the one who sent him, a prophet destined to
fail and to be crucified alone, in weakness.
When the shrewd Wrede scoffed at the liberal historicizing of Jesus, he
said that all interpretations of Jesus begin with the discovery of something
Jesus-like (etwas Jesu-ähnliches) in ourselves. But this process of course did not start in
1860’s. Mark’s original narrated
suggestion of a man who had the holy dropped in him was designed to do
precisely that: to excite that jesuslike
thing within the listeners and readers, and to have them identify
themselves with Jesus by introjecting the suggestion of Jesus as the supreme
authority. Those who know this and learn
to resist the temptation of the libido dominandi are the ones who grasp
the gospel. They are the ones whose messianic mania is eventually cured by
Jesus, or rather by the communal property of the gospel where he personifies
the Lord’s Spirit.
The
difference between the mystics in Mark’s church and the liberal theologians from
the time of Victoria to Elizabeth II. is that the former had insight into their
personal tête-à-tête with Jesus. They were at the source and the gospel
was animated to them by the life and values of the community. By contrast, modern historical quests for
Jesus are predicated by naïve
interpretation of the gospel at the text level (usuallly by individual isolated
effort in an academic setting), and the deluded assurance that flows from it, that
it provides a historical portrait of one’s own superior morality in Jesus. By design, such reading misses the mystical
in Mark, the disguised carving of the figure of a beauty of a man and its
placement in the Lord’s house as a model to emulate. The subtext of Mark’s story reads: ‘If you do not get the gospel it is because you
are being fooled by your imagining something that is not there’. The
incredulity of some exegets that Mark intended to exit, or as I believe recurse,
at 16:8 best illustrates Mark’s deep
insight into human psyche. No greater
homage could have been paid to the man who wrote the story of Jesus for the
delight of his community than that its forged version became canon.
Mark
achieved the desired effect by having the narrative soaked in scriptures
(ie. the tanakh and Paul) interact with
its reader, Jesus with the story, and the narrator (on behalf of his community)
with Jesus. When Frank Kermode says in
the quote above from the beginning, he is not wasting words. Already the first word of Mark’s writ is a
mystery: αρχη, pointing strangely to itself, and
suggesting an Augustan incipit. But if one has read the gospel already and
knows its polymorphic feel, a question will obtrude at once: Does αρχη allude to the
beginning of the gospel, its origin, its master design, or perhaps, can it be pointing
to its master designer ? I propose Mark used the same sleight of hand in
1:2 as in 4:13: feigning a forward reference, when in fact he intended to
assert something about the statement immediately preceding. The answer he says is
written in Isaiah the prophet, and it is evidently not (only) Isa 40:3 shown in
1:3. The hiding of the Malachi 3:1
attribution (which I will show was intentional) suggests that the master verse
in Isaiah that identifies the αρχη of the gospel is also cryptic material.
Professor Aichele noted that the phrase αρχη του ευαγγελιου is present in Philippians 4:15,
and specifically alludes to the beginning of Paul’s missionary activity[31].
He however does not think that the finding has significance for Mark
1:1.
Such verdict would have been
surprising if he or his sources had assessed the likelihood of the strong
association of Paul and the word ‘gospel’ and found little or no connection.
But the problem is that the novel mytho-poetic reach of the word ευαγγελιον very likely did originate in the
apostle’s head[32]. The shock of the loss of Paul would have no
doubt accelerated the copying and distributing of his letters and supplying
them to the communities as Paul’s moral guidance in the impending collapse of
heavens. It is reasonable to hold then
that the word ‘gospel’ in the years immediately after his death would have
become associated with Paul even to a greater degree than during his life, and
the faith in the reputed power of the cross in Paul’s guide to,
and insight into, the unio mystica with the Lord, would have been
strengthened. It is hard to imagine
that the author of Mark, writing perhaps within a dozen years of Paul’s death – even if he was a leader of his community -
could have appropriated the sacralized word without at least indirectly
acknowledging Paul. But he appears to have done much more than pay Paul ex
obligatio
in the enshrining of his gospel in the first verse of the new text. Mark’s allegorical narrative is a vibrant
exposition and resounding justification of Paul, even if admittedly conceived in
ways that the apostle might have had great difficulty with. Be it as it may, αρχη transparently acknowledges Paul
as the builder of the faith and specifically his understanding of himself as
the founder of a new movement : According to
the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder (αρχιτεκτων) I laid
a foundation, and another man is building upon it.[33] The Isai’an prophecy of Paul as
the architect of the Lord’s mystical temple is 44:13:
The builder (τεκτων) stretches a line, he marks it out
with a pencil; he fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he
shapes it into the figure of a man, with the beauty of a man, to dwell in a
house. [34]
The extent of Paul’s influence on Mark has been widely debated for well
over a century. Most of the academia has taken a negative view, and the
majority case is still referred to a 1923 monograph by Martin Werner[35], which vigorously denied any
debt of Mark’s gospel to Paul. However, from the times of Gustav Volkmar and
Alfred Loisy, this position has had strong dissenters. In a 2000 paper titled
“Mark – interpreter of Paul”[36], Joel Marcus, a NT professor at
Duke University, severely dented the existing consensus around Werner. Marcus
sees direct correlation between Paul’s theology and Mark in the use of the word
ευαγγελιον, in the messianic and atoning significance of the cross, in Jesus’ death
as victory over demonic powers, in Jesus as divine blessing and fulfilment of
prophecy, the incorporation of Gentiles in the plan of salvation, and in the
negative views of Peter and the apostles.
In another closely related
development, since the mid-20th century Markan scholars following
Willi Marxsen, have challenged the historicist underpinnings of the Markan
hermeneutics, focusing instead on structural literary elements of composition which
promise much better grasp of Markan goals and his modus operandi[37]. There is a limited yield in the historicist
speculations which depend on the dubious reality of textual sources earlier than
the gospels. In the end, many feel, the
quests will prove futile, as they will produce nothing of a lasting value. James G. Williams wrote wisely:
Attempts
to find a foundation for faith in discrete historical events, whether the
approach is liberal or conservative, is
a positivism which finally founders on two scores:
1)
The
impossible task of apologizing for the gospel text or any hypothetical strata
thereof as a source of detailed historical information in the face of modern
canons of historical criticism (see Van A. Harvey The Historian and the
Believer,N.Y. Macmillan, 1966, ch 2).
2)
The untenable conviction that God’s acts in
history are demonstrable from derived sense perception in the web of historical
and natural events.
The
question for the theologian is not whether God acts in human history but how
God acts in it.[38]
There is an important secular complement to this for those students of
the texts who are not particularly animated by a need to find plausible new
forms of theodicy. When Williams asks
for a form of faith that does not offend reason, or requests it deny a claim on
any part of human history including the history of religious ideas and
movements, he is also making a case for a civil society that is tolerant of a variety of
expressions of human spirituality.
For the new hermeneutics, the writer of Mark
is emerging more and more as the implied author[39] of the earliest gospel. Naturally then, the question of his resourcing
comes to a sharper relief in assessing the logic and techniques of the narrative
structure. If, as I perceive, Mark is essentially an authored allegory and not
a redacted collection of traditions about a minor Jewish prophet (though some
may have been co-opted), then the extent of Paul’s influence needs to be understood
in much more focused terms. The
connection to Paul’s text is hugely important in assessing and testing Mark’s
recursive narration. I will therefore outline my findings briefly.
In one of the more striking example of the insistent
coiling of the narrative thread, the parable of the Yeast of
the Pharisees and of Herod,[40] one sees the pericope introduced by a narrative
element: the companions had forgotten to
bring any bread; and they had but one loaf (ει μη ενα αρτον ουκ ειχον) with
them in the boat. The implication here is that the one
bread was not supplied by
the forgetful disciples. Jesus admonishes them en
passant of
the yeast of his adversaries, and they reply with a seeming non-sequitur,
responding not to Jesus but to the object of the narration, i.e. the supply of
bread. The story-teller then explains
cryptically that Jesus is aware of this and scolds them for questioning the provision.
Then comes the refrain of the quibble (4:12), and a test of the number of broken pieces in
baskets after the mass feedings. The disciples answer correctly, giving the numbers
of which symbolize the Twelve (tribes of Israel) for those five thousand fed on
the Jewish side, and the number of days of unleavened bread at Passover for the
four thousand fed on the Gentile side[41] of the sea of Galilee. Apparently, Jesus remains unconvinced the
disciples get him.
The cognitive effects of
this parabolic unit are extremely interesting. The fascinating issue here is
not as much Jesus reading the mind of the disciples, but his reading the mind
of the disciples as it exists in the mind of the narrator. What Mark is saying in effect is that Jesus
in launching the recursive referencing of ‘unleavened bread’ to himself, is
aware of the eucharistic interpretation of such a figure to the hearer or reader of the story. Mark however is also
saying that such view of Jesus was unavailable to his disciples (and the
uninitiated), and despite Jesus perceiving it, he deplores it as unfaith. This finding has an enormous implications
for interpreters. How would Mark justify
such overwrought melodrama ? By what authority (of his time) would his Jesus chastise and ridicule those
who follow him ?
It seems a foregone conclusion that it would
not be on the strength of pre-existing historical traditions about the Nazarene
Jesus. There may be some historical background to actual happenings in the
parabolic chain of events but that would
be mostly to enhance the appeal of the gospel to the Jesuine Nazarenes as
prospective converts.
So what is the extent of
the one known authoritative Christology available at the time of the earliest
gospel playing part in it ? I dare say
it is much greater than is generally admitted.
Overall, Mark appears to have written a thesis about the Risen One,
disguised as an allegorical, fast-paced thriller taking place on earth in a
historical time-frame. In this
particular story Mark transparently animates two Paul sayings from 1
Corinthians: first the argument about the missing bread alludes to 10:17 : Because there is one bread (οτι εις αρτος), we who are many are one body, for
we all partake of the one bread, and Jesus’
saying about the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod paraphrases Paul’s leaven of malice and evil in 5:8.
The letters of Paul make themselves
felt on several distinct levels. As professor Marcus argued, all the major
theological points of Paul and his posture to the rival Jesuine tradition are
present in Mark: the cross as the atoning death of Christ, the overriding
importance of faith, victory of Christ over forces of darkness and death, Jesus
as the fulfilment of prophecy, the inclusion of Gentiles, Paul’s distrust of
and hostility toward the Jesuine traditions of the Jerusalem Nazarenes.
There is much more than Joel
Marcus perceives as Paul’s imprint in the earliest gospel: Mark’s legal and ethical
base coincides almost entirely with Paul. This is partly obscured by the long
held, nearly universal, belief that the historical Jesus preached agape, giving to the poor, rendering
unto Caesar, restricting the right to divorce, calling God ‘Father’, relaxing
food laws, and seeing himself as first in being last and the servant of
all. All of these facets of the Christ
persona that have been with us for two millennia are firmly associated with
Jesus of Nazareth as the model of a perfect human.
Nonetheless, they were first formulated in the letters of Paul as
attributes of his spirituality as he received them in his intimate dealings with
the oracles of the Risen One.
Paul’s mystical union
with Christ may be unspoken in Mark but underlies the narrative framework, from
the appearance of the Spirit at the Jordan[42] and descending into Jesus to its
mysteriously disappearing on the cross, and morphing into Mark’s community in
the mystical Galilee as the body of Christ.
The two baptisms, at the beginning by John and at the end by the neaniskos in the tomb, serve as the
allegorical vault to interpret Romans 6:3-6:
Do you not know that all of us who
have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were
buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be
united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no
longer be enslaved to sin.
The verses touch on
the next overarching facet of Paul’s teaching in Mark, the imitatio
motif, which comes to the
sharpest relief in 8:34’s “let him take up his cross and follow me”. That those who assign this saying to Q do not see Paul’s “be
imitators of me as I am of Christ”[43] as the community background for
the verse seems strange. On
the other hand, their subscribing to the ‘cynic-stoic’, or the ‘deuteronomic’ origin of the saying[44] may signify
not more than that they overlooked the telling signature (οπισω μου) present in all the canonical variants of
the maxim. I venture that the exhortation does not
originate in any putative Q script any more than Hamlet’s assessment of Yorick tracks
to Danish royal court’s personnel records.
In Mark’s plan of the gospel, the saying is to be played out in the
ascent to Golgotha, where not Peter but another Simon will follow carrying his cross. Note also the strong parallel
between Paul’s confession of Christ in 1 Cor 1:18-31 (especially in 25-28) and
Mark’s frank portrait of Jesus as resembling a demoniac to those without faith
in the Spirit.
I have touched
already in the interpretation of 4:12 on the next element of the Paul-Mark
agreements, the sense of a special status or election that Paul promoted among
his followers. The Acts, and to a degree the later Pastorals, portray the
apostle as a more or less indiscriminate proselyte reaching out wide and up
into the ruling class of his day. The
corpus, on the other hand, seems by and large innocent of such ambitions.
Indeed, in one of the key passages, 1 Cor 1:18-31, Paul says plainly that not
many of his flock were wise or powerful by the worldly standards, and that God chose what is (or, generally held to
be,) low and despised in the world. It
is those who appear foolish to the outsiders that God calls and into whom he deposits the
great wisdom of the crucified Christ. Mark’s
Quibble fully reflects this sense of
being especially chosen and living apart from the mundane society. The election is affirmed by the suffering
that the mystics experience which Mark interprets after Paul as a sign of
superior character that will become manifest in the judgment (1 Cor 3:12-13, Mk
9:41-49).
Finally, Paul’s suggestion
of the Eucharist forms a sustained theme by Mark in the stories of the feedings
and the Paschal meal. As we saw above,
the theme of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herod and the reference to one
bread are supplied directly by
1 Cor 5:8 and 1 Cor 10:17.[45]
I have asserted that
Paul’s conceptual framework animates Mark’s passion plot. Paul’s ideas of one’s body that one does not
own, a temple in one’s body[46], his concept of an universal, cosmic
Redeemer, contrasted with a parochial yearning for a shepherd king to restore
the old kingdom, and finally Paul’s church as the spiritual successor of Israel
supply the interpretive material for the narrative. There
is a strong allusion to 1 Thessalonians in the Little Apocalypse (Mk 13:27, 1
Th 4:16-17), and more pointed ones in Gethsemane. Jesus reproachfully waking Peter
(14:37) references Paul’s maxim to watch (1 Th 5:6) for the coming of the Lord.
The arresting party coming for Jesus, reverses
ironically the saying in 1 Th 5:2. The
two-part trial Jesus follows Paul’s two part-script in 1 Cor 1:23, Jesus as
offense to the Sanhedrin and folly to Pilate.
Jesus expiring with an anguished cry of abandonment fulfills Paul’s maxim
of Jesus crucified in weakness (2 Cor 13:4).
Outside
of theological concepts, maxims and larger parabolic themes, Mark alludes to
Paul subtly: Jesus’ being observed as out of his mind (εξεστη) follows Paul’s frank admission
of same (2 Cor 5:13). Like Paul, Mark’s
Jesus is not ashamed of the word (Rom 1:16, Mk 8:38). Paul says Cephas stood condemned (Gal 2:11); Jesus
leashes out at Peter as “Satan” (Mk 8:33).
Paul alludes to the missions from James wanting to glory in the
Galatians’ flesh only so they are not persecuted for the cross of Christ (Gal
6:12). The disciples in Mark run away
from Jesus when he is arrested and Peter denies him three times. There is even a good chance that Petros, the Hellenized renaming of the
historical Cephas, is also Mark’s invention that dramatizes Paul. Petros looks like a pun on petra in Romans 9:33: “Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and
rock of offense (και πετραν
σκανδαλου),
and
whoever believes on Him will
not be put to shame. (NKJV)”. I do not believe these parallels
can be dismissed as fortuitous, or explained as the flow of dominical
traditions with which Paul was putatively familiar but failed to acknowledge as
coming from teachings of Jesus while on earth.
Wernerian objections like Vincent
Taylor’s that ‘Pauline ideas are wanting in Mark, or are
differently presented’ and
that where their ideas agree ‘the traditions consist of
primitive Christian ideas’[47] strike me as missing an
important point. If Mark was adapting Paul allegorically, the affinities would
often appear as thematic and symbolic, i.e. as cognitive figures that we would
not expect to produce significant verbal agreements. Even less so if Mark was
writing a mystery which assumed familiarity with Paul’s letters to be decoded. In
some instances, the asserted Pauline motifs may seem difficult, as e.g. the
two-tiered ‘trial’ of Jesus which just magically happens to agree proleptically
with Paul’s dictum that Christ crucified was a scandalous idea to the Jews, and
folly to the Gentiles. The bemusement of
Pilate at the nastiness of the Sanhedrin is hard to credit as having historical
roots. Within the narrated framework
there is no rational explanation for the rulings and actions of the Roman
prefect[48], yet they fit neatly the
prophecy fulfilled in the messianic mystery which confirms Mark’s community election.
Last but not least, there
is the mystery of Mark’s style. Many commentators have expressed incredulity
that Mark’s writing should often be so poor and seemingly illogical and at the
same time executing complex plan with patterned structures which bespeak of
great skill and discipline, and generally of the presence of formidable
intellect. This discrepancy becomes even more acute when one examines the
seeming “errors” of Mark and Jesus when the
gospel has him quoting the scriptures.
The text quotes Malachi and attributes the saying to Isaiah (1:2-3). Jesus
also seems aware of the discrepancy in the relationship between Ahimelech who
is father to Abiathar in 1 Samuel, but said to be his son in 2 Sam 8:17. Mark
2:26 appears to switch the identity of the two in Jesus recounting the story of
the bread of the presence in 1 Sam 21. And surely Jesus was informed there was nothing written of the Son of Man suffering and
rejection (9:12, 14:49) except in the scripture written by Mark. And if the
mangled tenth commandment in 10:19 does not convince the reader that the gospel
plays tricks on the learned scribes of Mark’s time, then nothing probably will.
“Do not defraud” (μη αποστερησῃς) does not come from Moses[49],
but Paul 1 Cor 7:5 (!), where the apostle admonishes married couples in his
flock not to deprive without cause each other of sex, and thus give cause to
Satan to tempt them with covetousness against the last proscription of the
Decalogue. Oh come, surely, Jesus
knew that! It is for this and other reasons
stated here that I hold Mark was dissembling lack of scriptural knowledge
likely to get the Pharisee readers worked up at such barbaric renderings of the
Torah. Perhaps, in choosing his style of
tale-told-by-a-fool, Mark intended to illustrate Paul’s 1 Cor 1:20: Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe?
Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the
world?
I do not deny there is
a debit side of the ledger in arguing Paul as the prime source material to
Mark. Of course, there is. It has been
more or less conceded that Paul knew, or rather, recognized, only the risen Lord. The idea that Jesus of Nazareth possessed the
qualities of the Lord in his earthly career does not look very Pauline; indeed
it goes against one of the basic tenets of his theology. Paul proscribed the Jesuine traditions of his
time and would not hear of other Jesus Christ than the one crucified (1 Cor
2:2). He evidently knew the controversies around the Nazarene, and the ‘other
Jesus’ (αλλος Ιεσους) in 2 Cor 11:4 may relate to stories about Jesus before
his crucifixion. Paul’s revelations
about Christ would not change the factual base of what he knew: it was simply that
he believed he received directly and independently a spiritual understanding of
the meaning of the Nazarene’s purpose and death (2 Cor 5:16). Through his own
experience of depressive psychosis he was made to understand that Jesus looked
like sin but he knew no sin (2 Cor 5:21)[50].
Indeed, it is hard to
tell how Paul would have reacted to Mark’s creative allegorization of his
teachings. Perhaps he would have embraced the narrative as true to his
theology, and accepted the hyperbole of the Nazarene martyr as fully matching
the holy spirit of the risen Lord as he received it. It is however just as possible that Paul would
have been upset at Mark’s community breaking his taboo on telling stories about
the Lord’s paradoxical abasement in human existence. It is a tough call to make.
One thing seems clear;
Mark might have followed Paul’s theology faithfully but temperamentally the two
men were of a different stock. Paul sought
to dominate through self-discipline and impossibly high moral standard, and he
no doubt found it hard to assert himself in that manner with mostly urban
audiences. Mark, on the other hand, presents
himself in his writing as a natural leader, a man of prodigious, commanding intellect
and a more subtle insight into human characters than Paul. He appears to have
possessed a gift of spontaneous, generous conviviality and a wicked sense of
humour. The idea of Jesus relaxing
(κατακειμαι) with tax collectors and sinners
would have probably caused Paul great distress as his rules of conduct and
association were quite rigid. The pleasure-seeking Corinthians gave him fits (1
Cr 5:9-10, 6:9, 15:33). Mark’s clowning,
distractions and pranks on the outsiders that were no doubt cherished by his pneumatic
friends, would probably also have not impressed Paul. The apostle, though no stranger to irony and
putdowns himself, was dead serious in his purpose. Mark’s fooling around the request of Joseph
of Arimathea for the ecstatic body (σωμα) of Christ misapprehended by
Pilate to mean Jesus’ corpse (πτωμα)[51] might have made his mentor turn
colours at the impiety.
It has also been
pointed out that Mark’s use of ‘Son of man’ is unknown to Paul. The designation would have come from the Jerusalem side of
traditions, and was shunned in Paul’s lexicon as coming from a different spirit
than he knew. Mark, on the other hand, likely adopted the title in his mission
to wow and woo the Nazarenes to the cross. An apocalyptic term they were
familiar with deployed as a Christological title would bridge the gap in naming
of the objects in the eschatological panoply of the two groups. Jesus referring
to himself in this manner would also help to enhance the illusion of actual
events, if the figure of the Nazarenes by tradition had invoked it.
The
war of 66-73 CE war likely changed a lot of things for the Christ professing
communities in near Diaspora. In the defeat of the Jewish rebels, the mayhem
and the suffering, the Gentile Christian communities would have seen a strong vindication
Paul’s cross as the symbol of Messiah’s fate and power on earth. The arriving
colonies of the other Jesuine believers naturally created an opportunity to
strengthen the numbers for the existing Pauline churches. One gets the sense
from Mark that his community wanted to patronize the new Jewish exiles, and shield
them from the wrath of the Phariseic mainstream which blamed their messianic fervour
for the war and its terrible harvest. In
this they would have followed Paul also as he considered his growing church to
be an expression of the Lord’s approval and guarantee of his apostolic status[52]. The problem was that the helping
hand had a proselytizing agenda which was deeply resented by the new arrivals[53].
Mark found a formula for a merger based firmly and exclusively on Paul’s
theology but the text triggered a wave of counter proselytizing with roots in
the undisputed physical proximity of the original Jewish disciples to the
historical founder. The process of
consolidating the new faith was far from over. Jesus appearing after his
crucifixion in (the much deplored) flesh to his earthly disciples was just
about to be written up by Matthew. Christianity would be built on that kind of
fantastic foma. The hard core of Paul’s following
would bolt to Gnostic cults.
The Parables of Jesus as a Healer
Mark’s text is extremely slippery because its frames of reference are
movable. In 15:21 he introduces Simon of
Cyrene, as a passer-by compelled by the soldiers to carry Jesus’ cross. Except Mark
does not say that nor – I contend - does he intend to say that. He changes the
‘they’
meaning the ‘soldiers’ to ‘they’ meaning Mark’s community. They compel (αγγαρευουσιν - present tense, started in the
previous verse) Simon (likely Mark himself), a passer-by to bear his cross. The passιng by (παραγοντα) may indicate that Simon joined
them from a Thomasian group[54], something argued also by the complements
of low Christology in Mark’s narrative
and by what appears to be his therapeutic aims.
The abrupt switching of references is a characteristic technique in
building up the gospel figures and makes them often hard to read. In this
instance, the switching of tenses bespeaks of the gospel’s intent to crucify
Simon alongside Jesus as one of the robbers.
His cross I interpret as Simon’s cross, as
per the exhortation in 8:34, not Jesus’!
I have already shown this technique in the
verse that forms the object query of this essay, 4:13. I have also shown the recursive turning in
8:34 in Mark setting up a plot to proclaim Jesus as the unleavened bread of the
Eucharist. There is a recursive
reference in 3:20-21, in the relatives of Jesus pointing to the lack of
appetite in his followers as a sign of Jesus being out of his mind. This is again a disguised invocation of the unio
mystica: Jesus
and his true followers are one, or conversely, Jesus is the composite portrait of
the believer community as a model to emulate.
A bizarre incident at the
raising of the Jairus daughter is another example of Mark’s recursive liberty
with the text and “rapid switching” of references; a group that weeps over the
loss of the little girl (5:38) breaks
out into inexplicable laughter when Jesus reveals she is only sleeping
(5:40). This may be, as e.g. Joel Marcus
believes, a laughter of derision of those who know ‘full well that the girl is
dead, and that dead people don’t come back to life !’[55]. It may. But the elementary
problem with interpreting the verse after Matthew in this manner is that humans
in situations like this would not switch from wailing to laughing on a verbal
cue, nota bene one
uttered in earnest by someone brought to the scene as a miracle worker. This is not consistent with emotions that fit a
scene of an apparent loss of life and a hope for it rekindled by the presence
of the salvific spirit. Whether the
mourners were ‘professional’ or not, they are not portrayed as Jesus’
adversaries (though they are not οι μετ’ αυτου). I prefer to look at the incident as another
example of Mark’s gamesmanship in having
Jesus take everyone out of the parable
and going back to
the sick girl only with those who would play along. The recursion clue here is in Jesus throwing everyone out, not just those mocking Mark or an assigned actor in one of the
staged enactments of a Jesus parable.
A number of Jesus’ cures afford us a glimpse into the
life of Mark’s spiritual community (likely a colony akin to the Therapeutae) in the mythical Galilee[56] where Jesus Christ lived. In the first medical intervention, Jesus cleansing
a man of leprosy (1:40-45), he charges the patient to tell nothing of his
cleansing, only to show himself to the priest.
But the man goes away and rants about this everywhere, so much so that
Jesus cannot go back to town but has to retire in the country. This story fascinates because it simply
cannot be decoded at the text level. It yields very little that is meaningful
when isolated from other parables of healing by Jesus. Yes, the command for the
man to go and show himself to the priest follows the traditional protocol for
lifting the communal banishment on the leper.[57] Within the parable, the cleansing is asserted
as real. But beyond that the story is
cryptic. Despite assurances that the lectio difficilor οργισθεις at 1:41 is explainable as a traditional
thaumaturgical posture, Jesus on a short fuse[58] is not all that easily disposed
of. The disobedience of the cured man is
embarrassing, and the effect of the cure baffling, causing Jesus to withdraw to
the countryside. This ironic twist of
the story is in that the man speaking of Jesus in torrents of public praise
achieves the opposite effect that the healer intended, i.e. the re-integration
of the man in the community. Worse still, Jesus himself now has to avoid
appearing in town. How does that follow the news of a talented healer (with the
Jewish theological implications of holiness) coming to practice in the neighbourhood? This story would have been received in roars
of laughter by the initiated pneumatics who would have understood at once what
Mark was getting at, if indeed one of them did not think of it herself. A
similar, and even more provocative, incident of truculence by those following
Jesus comes after his cure of the deaf man with speech impediment in 7:32-35.
There, it is not the subject of the cure but the ones who observe its effect
who wilfully disobey Jesus: ‘And
he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more
zealously they proclaimed it (7:36).
The two stories transparently comment on
the effects of the spirit, known as pressure of speech and glossolalia. Jesus as the personified spirit
can do nothing to stop the praise and visions of himself, as they themselves are
απο κυριου πνευματος (2 Cor
3:2). There is even some chance that
Mark was poking fun at Paul’s lack of largesse, in trying to regulate the
tongue-speaking pandemonia breaking out in his solemn gatherings[59].
Stories of the rising of
the paralytic[60], Jairus’ daughter, the woman
with the issue of blood, cleansing of the leper, and the cure of the deaf and
dumb, all describe via recursive parable the healing nature of the Spirit, as
experienced by the members of Mark’s colony. The landscapes of Galilee are borrowed
for asserting the cures by the Holy Spirit, parabolically personified by
Jesus. The frame of reference for these
gospel events relates too closely cognitively to known positive effects of
manic excitation[61] than to be a purely coincidental
by-product in the recall of actual happenings.
Even more so, as the cures form only a small part of Mark’s mimesis of
the spirit which includes pressured speech (as noted), subjective acceleration
of time (asserted by hyper frequent use of ευθυς and the ‘shortened days’ for the elect -13:20) , insomnia (
proclaimed by Jesus sleeping only twice in the gospel - both times rising early,
by ordering a night-time journey to Bethsaida in 6:45, by the night setting of
Jesus’ trial[62]), short term memory loss (10:46,
11:11-12), psychomotor agitation (2:4, 3:9,
Bartimaeus tossing his cloak), alimentary dysregulation (alluded to in 3:20,
5:43, 6:36, 8:1, and both mass feedings[63]), sexual dysfunction (12:20-24),
manic fugue and spatial disorientation (asserted in the aimlessness of the
Galilean ministry (7:31) and especially in the thrilling voyage to Bethsaida
which ends up with Jesus on board in Gennesaret (6:45-53). The Jesus saying to the rich man in 10:21, also
relates to a standard item on the diagnostic sheet for the people of the
spirit: impulsive generosity and spending.
Mark was not a modern psychiatrist, but he had an amazingly keen eye and
a healer’s deep insight into the perplex of God and man as one, observed
whenever the spirit was ablaze among brothers and sisters, or in retrospect, in
himself. His Jesus showing temper evidently
comes from seeing a lot of that among the former bad copies of Christ who were being reformed to become
a part of a dignified community witness of him instead.
In Mark’s idiom then, the cures the spirit
of Jesus performs are allegorical ciphers of the known beneficial health
effects of a sudden mood conversion (from depression to manic excitement), ones
we may safely assume were observed in antiquity by those who had the challenge
and those around the visionaries who either were fearful of them, or amused by
them or – much less frequently - believed in the divine status, or in the
reality of their connections to the highest places the suffering mystics
claimed for themselves.
That Paul refused to be ashamed of the
gospel i.e. by the humiliating external
view of his own bipolar challenge[64],
was a great inspiration to Mark in his role of therapōn, a communal therapist. His purpose was to focus the
friends who were ill on the positive blessings of their condition. Robert M. Price observes the parabolic nature
of the gospel healings. He asks smartly: ‘what are we to make of the fact that Jesus healing
miracles fall well within the range of known somatization disorders, presumably
susceptible to psychosomatic healings ? Does it mean that , having modern
medical analogies, they do not rest simply upon myth and fiction ? If there had
not been some kind of a reality check, wouldn’t the scope of Jesus’ miracle
stories be much wider than it is ?[65]’
I would reply that the cures in
Mark are by and by a limited license
because they are the things that the spirit actually does;
real cures that the breakout of madness, so despised by most people, actually
brings to the sufferer. Anyone who observes florid manics will be at once
struck by the enormous amount of physical energy they are capable of
generating. Anyone who wrestles with them knows they are veritable God's dynamos.
And their bodies really are being healed by the strange excitement the spirit
brings. Not just figuratively! Eczemas and other skin conditions (which were
conflated with Hansen’s disease as λεπρα in antiquity) disappear on short order, as many of them are
simply physical manifestations of depression. The revved up cardio-vascular system
takes care of many ailments, even serious medical conditions which may have
been present for years. There is also a tendency in manics to wander around (fugues),
which takes them out of environments which may have caused, or contributed to,
their poor health. Another well-known effect of manic excitement is that the
subjects experience a greatly elevated threshold of pain. This is the ‘authority
to
tread on serpents and scorpions’ that Jesus confers on his
disciples (in Luke 10:19). The later annex to Mark records the picking up
snakes and immunity from drinking ‘any deadly thing’ (Mk 16:18) based on the gift of disappearing pain and
greatly improved immune system. Naturally, there is a bit of a poetic license
about the 'any deadly thing', that
one may drink, but it is not altogether a tall tale either, as the difficulty
with putting down the shamanic Rasputin with just a horse dose of potassium cyanide well illustrated.
In ordinary bipolars, being distracted by the spirit, means above all that they
are no longer consumed by minor aches and ailments, which are imaginary, or
real but out of proportion to the severity of the underlying physical problems.
The uncanny resistance of ecstatics
to pain was a well-observed fact in antiquity, which among other things, tempted
authorities to go to extremes in their curiosity to find out the level of discomfort
that would make a furiosus come to his senses. Josephus recounts the
bloody scourging of Jesus ben Ananus by Albinus, in which the prisoner’s ‘bones
were laid bare’. And, ‘yet he did not make any supplication for himself or shed
any tears but,…at every stroke of the whip his answer was, ‘Woe, woe to
Jerusalem’’[66].
The healing of the paralytic in Capernaum (2:3-5) and the narcoleptic Jairus’ daughter (5:38-43) are examples of rapid remission of depressive stupor. The girl prior to being raised by Jesus, would be in a state of spiritual death analogous to the one described by the Thanksgiving Hymn (1QH) at Qumran:
My spirit is imprisoned with the dead
for (my life) has reached the Pit;
my soul languishes (within me)
day and night without rest[67]
But this state of almost total helplessness also bespeaks of the things just just about getting out of control on the other end. Emil Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist who in the early 20th century described diagnostically major mental illnesses observed what he called manic stupor as the phase of the episode which immediately precedes a sudden switch into madcap cheer[68]. The modern compendium on Manic-Depressive Illness discusses the severe psychomotor inhibition which the patient exhibits during this period of deep mourning:
The patient, usually, is confined to bed, is mute, inactive and uncooperative. His bodily needs require attention in every way; he has to be fed, washed and bathed. Precautions have to be made to prevent the retention of faeces, urine and saliva. In some cases all attempts at movement are strongly resisted. In other cases the muscles are more flaccid, and the body and limbs can be molded into any position. On the surface it may seem as if there was a total absence of feeling and emotions, but that is often more apparent than real, for after recovery many patients give a vivid account of the distress they have experienced. The idea of death is believed by some to be almost universal in stupor reactions, and may be regarded as a form of expiation for the wickedness for which they hold themselves responsible…..[69]
The healing of the paralytic in Capernaum (2:3-5) and the narcoleptic Jairus’ daughter (5:38-43) are examples of rapid remission of depressive stupor. The girl prior to being raised by Jesus, would be in a state of spiritual death analogous to the one described by the Thanksgiving Hymn (1QH) at Qumran:
My spirit is imprisoned with the dead
for (my life) has reached the Pit;
my soul languishes (within me)
day and night without rest[67]
But this state of almost total helplessness also bespeaks of the things just just about getting out of control on the other end. Emil Kraepelin, the German psychiatrist who in the early 20th century described diagnostically major mental illnesses observed what he called manic stupor as the phase of the episode which immediately precedes a sudden switch into madcap cheer[68]. The modern compendium on Manic-Depressive Illness discusses the severe psychomotor inhibition which the patient exhibits during this period of deep mourning:
The patient, usually, is confined to bed, is mute, inactive and uncooperative. His bodily needs require attention in every way; he has to be fed, washed and bathed. Precautions have to be made to prevent the retention of faeces, urine and saliva. In some cases all attempts at movement are strongly resisted. In other cases the muscles are more flaccid, and the body and limbs can be molded into any position. On the surface it may seem as if there was a total absence of feeling and emotions, but that is often more apparent than real, for after recovery many patients give a vivid account of the distress they have experienced. The idea of death is believed by some to be almost universal in stupor reactions, and may be regarded as a form of expiation for the wickedness for which they hold themselves responsible…..[69]
Not all cures
were constructed by Mark with the sole focus on the beneficial nature of the
Spirit. Some contain, or simply are, theological arguments his community had
with the Pharisees and the Petrine Nazarenes.
In the restoration
of a withered hand (3:1-6), Mark asserts the right for Jesus contra Pharisees to perform cures on Sabbath[70].
Naturally, if in the gospel idiom the physical restoration was a direct act of
the spirit’s grace[71], then
it could not be constrained by the law. It effectuates at a time of its own
choosing. Similarly, in the healing of
the epileptic boy (9:14-29), Jesus confidently asserts against the gathered
scribes, that faith may cure even ailments known empirically to be intractable.
The two sight restorations were not
cures at all. The gift of sight to the
blind man in Bethsaida, is another example of a mean Markan trashing of the
group’s proselytic rivals. In the
narration, the incident comes after the second feeding of the multitude which
the disciples do not get – yet again[72]. Mark devises a
two-stage cure of a blind man, who after the first phase, which is an allegorical
restoration of physical sight and was devised only to make a point about the
second. After the Nazarene idol[73] does his part in
the two-step cure, the afflicted man can
only see ‘men’, who ‘look like trees, walking’. This ridicules the
Nazarenes’ lack of spiritual insight, which of course has to be corrected by
the proper medicine of Jesus as the Spirit of the Lord, in augmenting the
initial procedure. Many exegets express incredulity at the imperfection of the
first step in the cure. The gradualism does not seem to agree with their jesuslike thing. But as I have outlined above in the comment on
4:12 they have fallen into the trap of
reading the fifth-century Vincent of Lerins’ maxim into Mark[74]. The one-church-one-faith dictum will forever
struggle with the text propagating freely and shamelessly the idea that the
disciples, and by extension, the heirs to Peter after 70 CE, were scattered
sheep without guidance and in need of gospel.
An exegesis proceeding from the premise of pre-existent common
traditions will surely miss the tree
metaphor as belonging to the Isaiah’s hidden prophecy of Paul as the builder of the gospel in which the carpenter is said to cut down
cedars (Isa 44:14) for his carving work.
Let it be said plainly: Paul and
Mark were not singers in the church choir; they were the choir’s first
composers.
In my reading of
the battle of the first two gospels[75],
this story infuriated Matthew, who saw in it a mean-spirited assault on his own
traditions, an exhibit of Pauline insufferable arrogance. He would prove to Mark that he and his mocking
troopers owned no monopoly on the spirit. His Jesus bores into Mark for the Bethsaida
blindness cure: (KJV) ‘How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the
mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam [is] in thine own eye?’ Thou
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou
see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye[76].' Matthew
won hands down. If he did not in fact, the
Jesus of the Q sapiential stratum
could not have said it any better.
Bartimaeus, in my estimate, is another
significant anti-Petrine sketch. Dressed up as a blind beggar cure, the parable delivers a
hard beating on the Nazarenes in the generous offer to accept them as converts
to Paul’s Christ after repenting their sin of being the other-Jesus idolators.
The place is Jericho, the oldest
town in Judea. The conquering Joshua
is now a stand-in for the Apostate.
The destitute man is blind the same
way as the one at Bethsaida. In his spiritual blindness, he begs Jesus, Son of David, and is rebuked not
by the disciples but some obscure gentile hoi
polloi who are offended by the wrong
messianic title[77].
He repeats it. Jesus calls him, asks him what he wants, and Bartimaeus asks for
the gospel. Jesus recognizes his faith, and gives him not
the Apostate’s corpus but parables
that mean nothing to the uninitiated and tells him to go away. The converted Bartimaeus stays. The beggar allegory sets off Jesus on the
Mount, in dealing further with Mark’s blindness cures:
Or what man of you, if his son
asks him for bread, will give him a stone?
Or if he asks for a fish, will
give him a serpent?
If you then, who are evil, know how to give
good gifts (δοματα αγαθα)
to your children,
how much more will your Father who is in
heaven
Beholding the Glory of the Lord
We learn through the re-writes
by Matthew and Luke of the Transfiguration story that they saw recursion in it. After their expert manipulation, Mark’s
intent to abduct the οφθη αυτοις in 9:4[79]
has become for all intents and purposes
invisible to exegesis. Again, a difficult pair of verses has caused
all sorts of misses in understanding Matthew’s and Luke’s comprehension of Mark.
Both go to some lengths to assure the readers of their gospels that Peter, John
and James received the vision. Why would that be necessary with 9:4 and 9:8[80]
of Mark in place which seems to say that plainly ? Why would the artless impostor in 2 Pe 1:16, writing
perhaps a century later, need to forswear, “we have not followed (εξακολουθησαντες)
cunningly devised fables (KJV)” when all
the synoptics apparently agreed Peter
received the vision of Christ’s majesty ? (There is of course another question, which
does not exercise us here: why would he
need to argue that he, as Peter, heard God talk through the clouds to Jesus,
when in fact the gospels agreed the voice was addressed to the disciples ?)
To Mark and the
later Gnostics, the disciples were οι
πσυχικοι unable to discern things spiritual. Both overt manifestations of Jesus
as the Spirit of the risen Lord, i.e. the metaphors of Jesus walking on the sea
of Galilee and Jesus transfigured, are received by them as disturbing anomaly
in the sensorium, of which they frighten and from which they instinctively want
to flee.
The common
reading of Mk 9:4 (and 9:8) among the
pneumatics would presumably have been that the Moses and Elijah’s being
seen by the three disciples was meant as ironic description of their incapacity to see them.[81]
Peter interprets Jesus’ addressing Elijah and Moses as being directed to him (9:5-6)
and in his fear and confusion he offers to build the booths. What is going on ?
In the
Transfiguration parable, Mark transparently alludes to the peaking pneumatics’ sensing
of light in their bodies[82],
and the not uncommon tendency to hallucinate the presence of great sages as
witness to their grandeur. For example,
Muhammad, in his mystical al-Isra
wal-Mi’raj overnight journey to
Jerusalem, was engaged by Isa and Yahya (Jesus and John the Baptist) prior to
mounting his buraq. The common belief among the spiritualist subjects
(whether celebrated Godheads of history or regulars on psychiatric wards in
this day and age) is that the sensation of inner light and other paraphernalia
of their distinction and election are observable externally[83].
But witnesses who have no idea what is going on inside the excited head of a
visionary would see nothing. They would
hear gibberish in which they would barely recognize the invoked names of
prophets and then perhaps s see their leader disengage completely and fall momentarily
into a cataleptic stupor. The fear of
Peter and the Zebedees relates to their imagined observing their leader out of
control, not his glorious transfiguration[84]. And with this innocence of the inner
sensation of eternity by his disciples, Mark’s Jesus – when he recovers his
senses - commands them not to speak of what they had seen (the writer being
fully aware they saw nothing), until the Son of Man rises from the dead. Faithful to the script, the three do not ask
Jesus but argue about what the rising should mean, as they are unfamiliar with
Paul’s resurrectional schema[85]. Jesus answers their timid question about
Elijah’s coming with a typical Markan panache
referring recursively to his own text
as the scriptural source for both, the saying about the Son of Man (9:12) and
Elijah (9:13), transparently alluding to the story of John the Baptist as the
fulfilment of the prophecy of Elijah’s coming.
Matthew would
have none of this. If Jesus took his
most senior disciples to reveal himself in his spiritual majesty of
resurrection, he would darn do it and they would doggone get it. Strictly speaking, the Transfiguration looks
pointless in Matthew since the disciples receive the resurrectional manifest in
the Easter post-crucifixion appearance of Jesus. But there was probably a number of good reasons
why Matthew felt it prudent to address the happening on the mountain. Most importantly, it was an opportunity to further assert the disciples’ pneumatic
capacity. Matthew’s Peter obtains Jesus’ blessing for his confession at Caesarea
Philippi[86],
the wording of which is to confirm that he is an apostle who has received
independently the gift of the Spirit which enables him to recognize Jesus as
not only the Davidic Messiah but also the spiritual one of the Paulines (if
they want to insist there is a difference).
In the ensuing event on the mountain, Peter, John and James receive the
vision of Jesus and hear the voice from heaven:
they react to the shekinah by
hyper-staged mechanics (Mt 17:6-7) which
are to assure the reader the disciples did hear the voice and therefore the sorry
part they played in the passion was assigned to them by God, and without effect
on their capacity to receive the resurrection.
Luke was
evidently unhappy with Matthew’s Transfiguration solution[87]. That Peter should have been invested with
Paul-like mystical insight was not acceptable to Luke’s Pauline constituency. His gospel needed to devise a compromise
formula. There was of course no question
in Jesus blessing Peter and entrusting the church to him, nor would the Lukan elders
agree to a Jesus proclaiming observances.
A large concession was made only for the historical claim of primacy of
the earthly witness of Jesus, in agreeing to the merger of the disciples with the Twelve effected by Matthew
(assuming Luke had access to the original Mark’s text without the apostolic
inventory in 3:17-19). This would have
been consented to in observing that much of the disciples’ witness remained
within the Markan gospel parameters. The
formula allowed the disciples receive the appearances the risen Christ, but
only after he was made himself available to the two proto-Pauline figures on
the road to Emmaus[88].
For this reason, when the transfigured Jesus
on the mountain discusses his “departure in Jerusalem” with Moses and Elijah, Luke has the disciples asleep.
As for Jesus’
nocturnal hydropatesis on the lake, Mark does not lay claim to a miracle. Quite the contrary, the story was told to
lampoon miracle-mongering (1 Cor 1:22, Mk 8:12), and the mistrust of
pneumaticism among the disciples. The spirit of Jesus intends to walk by their
boat on a stormy sea to pilot them and encourage them by his presence, but the
sight of him causes panic among the crew.
This would be again a story that would send Mark’s connoisseurs into
paroxysms of laughter. Mark’s comrades would have had hard time to contain
themselves when reading or hearing of the men crying out in terror at the sight
of Jesus as a phantasma, as it changes the direction of its progress, and as it assures the panic-stricken followers,
that despite lacking flesh it is he, and
whatever they experience as him is real, and there is nothing to
fear. It is clear that Jesus’ εγο ειμι
was not meant to deny that Jesus for the purposes of this parable was a phantasma; the gospel agrees he was, in order to ridicule the disciples’ fear and
misapprehension of psychic events which lie beyond the realm of ordinary sense
perception. Despite the assurance and
Jesus’ presence in the boat, the men do not recover their composure and land
way off the planned target. By contrast, the town folk at the new destination
have no problem recognizing Jesus and
finding their uses for him.
A small anecdote
will perhaps illustrate the deep chasm between pneumaticism and naïve idolatry which
has existed in Christianity (and doubtless in other religions) since its
(their) inception[89].
In an incident recorded by Teresa of
Avila, the 16th century Carmelite mystic, her confessor seemed to
have been at a loss to grasp her saying she sees nothing during her visions of
the Lord. “Since you see nothing”, she
was asked by the incredulous father, “how do you know that it is Our Lord ?” Teresa, writing of herself in third person
singular answered
that she did not know, that she saw no face
and could add nothing to what she had said; that she knew it was Our Lord who
spoke to her, she did not hear them when she willed but at other times when she
was not think about them and when it was necessary….One sees nothing, either
within or without, but while seeing nothing the soul understands what it is and
where it is more clearly than if it saw him….the soul hears no word, either
within or without, but understands quite clearly who it is and where he is and
sometimes even what he means to tell. How, and by what means, it understands it
does not know, but so it is; and while this is happening it cannot fail to know
it.[90]
Mark’s Circular Gospel Plan
Heikki Räisänen is among those who
struggle with the notion of ‘top-down’ exegesis of Mark. On the one hand, he
sees a structural approach in reading Mark that attempts to see the gospel as a
whole to be an imposition on the text. There will inevitably be structural
correlations, says Räisänen , that are
imported into the text by the reader. On
the other hand, he seems to agree that without a bird’s eye view of the gospel
whole, the analytical tools one deploys
will forever struggle with ‘the final product’. [91]
It is a fix, I agree. In the academic culture of the NT studies,
the default theoretical framework is still supplied by the vague consensus that
the gospel happenings are historical events, even if coloured and at times
overwhelmed by religious imagination. This
holds especially true of the Easter events. The belief, which in many cases has
confessional background, that the Jesus trial and execution in the gospels are
essentially historical accounts, holds strong. To construct a competing general viewpoint is
to run the risk, if not of condemning oneself to eternal hellfire, or the sight
of the Inquisition’s torture implements, then at least to being looked down by
the peers’ collective nose as an eccentric oddball. At the same time, scholars
approaching the subject with a critical eye see a myriad of contradictions that
simply cannot be reconciled within the traditional historical schema. One can beat around the bush all one wants,
but if Mark’s text exits with the women running away from the tomb without
telling anyone anything - as is plainly intended - then the disciples did not get the news of Jesus rising until
it was proclaimed by the gospel of Paul parabolized by Mark . The risen Christ was not seen by them until Matthew (or the spurious
passage in 1 Cor 15:3-11, which it seems paralleled or preceded his gospel) argued
against Mark some fifty years after Jesus’ death that not Paul but the
disciples (as apostles) proclaimed Christ
crucified first. What it boils down to is that there was no assembly in
Palestine before the Jewish war that worshipped Jesus as the crucified Messiah.
It is a legend[92]
born of a later quest of the Christian church to become the legitimate
successor of Judaism which laid claim to Jerusalem as its historical ground
zero.
If
Mark’s gospel is an allegory then the all-important question is: allegory of
what ? It does not suffice to say that
Mark allegorized Paul or created a connected narrative of haggadic midrash
figures. This appears to beg the all-important question: a connected
narrative of what ?
In my
understanding of the gospel semantics, Mark’s messianic secrecy motif[93] specifically references the transitory and cyclical
nature of the spirit manifestations and experience. I have proposed that many of the miraculous
happenings in the gospel are mimesis of the pneuma which today would be
recognized as familiar effects of psychotic states, especially in a common
disorder which returns the subject to a semblance of normalcy, usually in a matter of weeks or months. Mark seems to try his utmost to make the
common symptoms of an ecstatic state of mind accessible to a reader familiar
with the associated phenomena, if he or she has re-acquired the ability to
reflect on one’s goings and doings while
non compos mentis. The gospel was to provide guide and higher understanding of
states in which one’s control over actions and expression has been mysteriously
diminished and one has become a stranger to oneself. Mark’s insight into the manic-depressive cycle
is deep. Even though the illness has
often a specific course, and acquires over time a great variety of rapidly
changing symptoms, manic episodes tend to a statistically significant model of
progress.
According to
Godwin-Jamison[94],
there are three distinct stages of a manic episode. Initially, in Stage I., the
mood is euphoric (sometimes markedly irritable if demands not satisfied !). In
cognition, expansiveness, grandiosity, overconfidence prevail, and racing
thoughts appear. Even though the subject is coherent, he/she is often
tangential[95], and
religious (or sexual) themes dominate the discourse. Psychomotor activity greatly increases. Stage
II. is characterized by increased dysphoria, anger and delusions. Pressured speech intensifies, occasional
assaultive behaviour is typical[96].
In Stage III. the subject as a rule becomes panic- stricken, completely
disorganized and hopeless.
Mark’s
narrative appears to follow closely this observed pattern. As noted, Jesus
dominates everyone and everything in the first half of the gospel. As Paula
Fredriksen put it, Mark’s Jesus is a man
in a hurry dashing through the Galilee in rapid, almost random motion, from
synagogue to invalid, from shore to grain field to sea, casting out demons and
amazing those who witness him. The spare prose and stacatto cures create a mood
of nervous anticipation. The times must be fulfilled[97]
During the Galilean fugue, Jesus becomes known
to everyone and is followed by a multitude which – unbeknownst to the uninitiated
reader – is hallucinated. Whatever the
circumstance of the historical Jesus, there were no large crowds following him
in his time; it is a deliberately conjured fantasy to excite that which I have
called here the jesuslike thing. It serves as an interpretive tool
the purpose of which was designed to control delusions of grandeur in excited
pneumatics. In the therapeutic process devised by Mark, the visiting spirit
which initially seduces the subject into believing he or she is the promised
Godhead (and everyone knows it), was to be defused by transferring the grandeur
to Jesus. The tripping brother or sister
were then led from being the Christ him- or herself to a competent member in
the communal witness of the mysterious drama of the passing of the Lord’s
spirit. The community knowledge of the spirit’s phases, i.e. the initial surge
of energy, vistas of limitless mastery and vast knowledge of all, being
replaced by terrific, visceral suffering and an unfathomable sense of persecution,
had a great therapeutic value. The cycle
was predictive[98]. The
great mission to save the world would end with the spirit languishing and with its
expulsion in the terrors of the cross.
That the crowds
in Mark were not real but allegorical props
to counter the associated paranoid aspects of the manio-depressive psychosis, is
best attested by their sudden turning hostile to Jesus[99]. In a detached view of a therapist, one would be hard pressed
to read Mark’s story another way without impugning both the author and his
historical protagonist as seriously mentally incompetent persons, and the
gospel as outrageous nonsense. And this
is why: if Jesus had great success as a healer and exorcist in his
lifetime, it is just plain insulting to human intelligence, whether ancient or
modern, to proclaim he managed to escape
the enduring love and respect for his care and successes in bringing continued
relief and happiness to thousands. His generation would have not been just faithless, not just morally revolting, but simply not
human. Individually, perhaps, there could have been ingrates. But not many
if his skills were said to touch whole villages and towns and his fame spread quickly over
the districts. People would not have
been just all amazed at Jesus’
prowess as a healer; they would have not just
glorified God for it, they would have – first and last - deeply bonded with it.
They would have appropriated Jesus as treasure and would have protected him
ferociously. Reciprocity is the basis of human interaction. And if this bond is expressed by the throng
in the cries of Hosanna on his entry
into Jerusalem, then the crowd turning on him during and after his trial is not
explicable. Now, if the theologian wants
to argue that this was ‘end times’ it
only makes matters worse. The end times did not come. And why would Jesus preach the end times in
the first place if his cures worked
? Would his cures have not been prima facie proof that God loves his
creation in a sensible way, and that he sent his son to assure those who needed
such assurances that his creation was still good ? Oh, they had no faith, you say ! But where on the planet would humans not have faith in Jesus if he was for real and headed their way preceded by
a reputation of being a great healer ? Doesn’t
the spread of Christianity itself argue violently with such notion ?
No, the abrupt
change in the crowd’s disposition appears given by the community’s knowledge of
the Spirit in which the elect experience themselves as the incarnation of a God-like
power but which their brain eventually unmasks as a delusional mirage, frequently
through horrific bouts with acute panic followed
by a lingering sense of shame. The therapeutic suggestion that they are not
multiple Christs but chosen witnesses
of God’s gift to humanity would have (typically) a significant compensating
effect in re-building self-esteem and in helping to reduce their anxiety and
suffering.
Jesus fulfilling
the scriptures in dying an
ignominious death confirms the effects of the manic cycle. At the end of the episode, the pneumatic would be returned to his or her
right mind, most of the time. The
excitement would disappear but may be immediately followed by a depressive mood
swing. A narrative that could explain the strange
loss of one’s self through a complex metonymy
of a witness to the rising of Nazarene Jesus at John’s baptism, would have had
a dramatically positive impact on many intelligent sufferers, and strengthen their
ability to deal with their bipolar challenge.
Some people may
feel that the metaphoric crucifixion with
Christ proclaimed by Paul and written
into his parabolized gospel by Mark (the two robbers being a cipher for the two lawless proclaimers of
Christ crucified, i.e. Paul and Mark a.k.a Simon[100]),
is too melodramatic to have caught on a large scale. I agree to a point. A free,
unstructured communion with the Saviour
could not have been sustained in building a large church, which impulse won the
day over the desire to restrict the access to the mysteries to those deemed
spiritually competent to receive them.
Nonetheless, for some period in the beginning, there evidently existed
proto-Christian communities where this ethos prevailed. As for the reality of the suffering that gave
rise to the crucifixion parallel, it is perhaps best attested by Emil
Kraepelin, the psychiatrist who first described the bipolar process medically:
‘ Very commonly it is asserted’, he
wrote of the illness, ’that the disease is a greater torture than
any other and that the patient would far, far rather endure any bodily pain
than disorder of the mind’.[101]
You have seen my
assertion that the opening and closing scenes of the gospel are allegorized,
two-pronged baptism into Jesus Christ, following Paul’s dictum in Romans 6.
Those baptized into Christ are baptized into his death. This is why the gospel
exits abruptly with the women, unable to cope with the spiritual supra-reality proclaimed
by the gospel fleeing the place where they expected to find the dead body of
Jesus of Nazareth. To an initiated
reader, one who knows Paul’s scripture and who experienced the spirit cycle within
him- or herself this figure would have a clear and un-ambivalent meaning. The
last verse at 16:8, simply confirms the parabolic nature of the gospel and the
interpretive rule of the quibble in 14:10-12,
confirmed in 4:13 as the key with which one unlocks the secret. The messenger, in whom the community
delights, announces that Jesus of Nazareth has risen, is to be found in Galilee
and that this should be made known to his disciples. However, the women do not understand resurrection,
just as the disciples did not understand the allusions to it made by Jesus.
They frighten and run away without saying anything to anyone. There is nothing more to add. If the reader does not understand, he will be
compelled to return to the beginning of the text in search for the meaning of
the gospel. If the gospel fast gained in some quarters the reputation as a
life-saving revelation about the Son of God, the search would likely be
frantic. More so, as the reader would
have been made captive by Mark’s jesuslike
thing. The provocative, unexpected
ending was designed to make the desire to grasp the meaning of the tale more acute.
Robert Fowler suggests
the conjunction γαρ in 16:8 is analogous
to musical notation of a ‘coda, which signals to the musician a return
to marked passage, and to keep on playing’[102]. I am very much on side with this
hypothesis, and in fact the idea of the text returning to the beginning has occurred to me independently. It is
given by the tight coupling of the two baptismal scenes, at the start, by John
the Baptist and at the end by the neaniskos,
which I am persuaded were composed as a single unit ahead of time. Note
that in the recursing narrative, the hidden paraphrase of Mal 3:1 in 1:2 of
Mark becomes ambivalent on the second pass through the text. Behold
I send my messenger now refers to both baptizers, not just John, something
I believe can be demonstrated quite easily, if one reflects on the whole of
Malachi 3:1:
(NRSV) Behold, I send my messenger
to prepare the way before me, and the
Lord whom you seek (κυριος ον υμεις ζητειτε) will
suddenly come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight,
behold, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
Mark deliberately concealed the reference to
this verse as it forms part of the gospel mystery. His gospel starts and ends
with a baptismal scene and a messenger sent before the Lord. The ‘Lord
whom you seek’ is transparently returned by the messenger in the tomb at
16:6 when he tells the women ‘you are seeking Jesus the Nazarene’ (Iησουν ζητειτε τον
Ναζαρηνον). You will also note that the
baptizing neaniskos is first
introduced at the scene of the arrest of Jesus, fleeing in the terrors of the
Lord’s day ( Mk 14:51 cf. Mal 3:2). The body of Christ[103], created as a spiritualist pun in 4:10,
is now in Galilee manifested in the community
of Mark.
And that is how I understand this parable.
[3] For
example, Matthew cleverly resolves the
koan of Mk 4:10-13, “whenever two or three are gathered in my name I am in the
midst of them” (Mt 18:20). The saying is
no longer “baked into” the narrative itself as in Mark.
[5] After William Wrede
writing that the disciples received the explanation alone (The Messianic Secret, tr. By JCG Greig, London 1971, p.61) a number of exegets, among them R.H.
Gundry, J.C. Meagher, H. Räisänen argued along these lines.
[6] For
Matthew this holds absolutely; Luke appears to admit access to the Easter
events from a timeless plane.
[8] To
begin with, both Sinaiticus and Vaticanus repeat the appointment made in 3:14
with the aliasing of Peter in 3:16. The dative Σιμονι in Mk 3:16 makes his renaming unrelated to the repeated ordination, and thus
the appended alias of Zebedees with the inventoried apostles (all accusative)
immediately suspect. The ‘assurance’
of the two oldest known manuscripts at 3:14
και αποστολους ωνομασεν suggests that in the evolving redactions of Mark the idea of naming of
the apostles came first as a license for
its effectuation. (the phrase is missing in Alexandrinus). Οι δεκα, in 10:41 is
most likely a harmonizing gloss (Mt 20:24), to fix the numerical discrepancy
which would have arisen with the inclusion of the Zebedees in the twelve. Mark
identifies Judas in 14:10 as ο εις των δωδεκα making the introduction
of the character in 3:19 improbable.
[9] The strange creedal manifest of Paul in 1 Cor 15:3-11,
looks like an early interpolation, an attempt to indict Mark as unfaithful to
his own teacher in claiming his gospel was the first witness to Christ’s
resurrection. For analysis of the passage as post-Pauline insert, see Robert M. Price, Apocryphal Apparitions, in The Empty Tomb, ed R.M.Price, J.J.
Lowder, N.Y. 2005, Hermann Detering Tradition
oder Interpolation http://www.hermann-detering.de/1kor15.pdf
[10] Gen 49:28:
Παντες ουτοι υιοι Ιακωβ δωδεκα… If
the OT Joshua was from the Josephan tribe of Ephraim, the number twelve then
agrees with the number of tribes if Twelve
in Mark registers Manasseh.
[12] Matthew 12:25 makes
Mark’s reference in 3:24 more strongly suggestive of the mayhem of the war.
[13] 4:34 is generally thought of as Mark’s
redaction but it looks interpolated, as it forces an interpretation on the
preceding verse. Like the longer endings
of Mark, it appears to have been written up to contradict the intent of the
previous passage, in this case Jesus’ saying in 4:11 that to those present, the
secret has been given, i.e. if it were the disciples nothing needs to be
explained to them. Not only χωρὶς δὲ παραβολῆς strangely echoes what was written in the
preceding verse, but it attempts to resolve
the issue of the disciplies’ incomprehension of Jesus, which becomes glaringly
self-contradictory after they have been absorbed into the Twelve. But in the
original plot of Mark, the disciples not
getting Jesus, was exceedingly
important, and asserted consistently.
The verb επιλυω is a hapax in Mark.
[15] The perfect indicative δεδοται speaks of the grant of
understanding the mystery to the hearers as having occurred already.
[17] via known
neurophysiological effects of temporal lobe dysfunction. See Michael Persinger,
Religious and
mystical experiences as artifacts of temporal lobe function: a general
hypothesis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6664802
[18] Mark is probably
correct in guessing that the Jesus would have been condemned for
blasphemy, if he placed himself as the (apocalyptic)
Messiah/Son of man at the right hand of power (Exd 15:6). The gospel
explicitly rejects Jesus’ Davidian descent, in the reaction of the πολλοι to
blind’s Bartimaeus address (10:48) and
in arguing via David’s psalm in 12:36-37 for a non-Davidic messianic
identity.
[19] H.Maccoby
asks: …”which is more likely, that Jesus’ closest disciples failed to
understand his most important message, or that Pauline Christians, writing
gospels about fifty years after Jesus’ death, and faced with the unpalatable
fact that the ‘Jerusalem Church’ was unaware of Paul’s doctrines, had to insert
…denigratory material about the Apostles in order to counteract the influence
of the ‘Jerusalem Church’ ?”
Hyam Maccoby,
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of
Christianity, N.Y. 1986, p. 129
[20] The shortened
descriptor γραφη (singular) likely derived from γραφη
θεου (Ex 32:16) referring to Moses’ tablets. Whether the plural of
the word was commonly used before Mark is questionable. It does not come from
LXX. Paul’s referring to scriptures comes invariably in passages
suspected of being later interpolations.
[21] The disciples of
course could not get it but Matthew appears to have clued on. He outs the
recursive tricks of Mark in 26:68, “Prophesy to us,
you Christ! Who is it that struck you?" i.e. expanding
Mk 14:65 to comment sarcastically on Mark’s asserting
Paul’s cross theology ex
vaticinium eventu.
[22] Dissimulation
and deception are known tools to protect
sacred beliefs. Perhaps the most best known is the common practice of takiyya or kitman in Islam.
[24] The
import of Daniel 9, the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, or the Melchizedek
Scroll (11Q13) on the formation of the
cross theology is an unknown at this time.
[26] This is not the
same belief as one in the immortality of the soul which was probably common
among the Jewish Greek speakers. Nor does
it duplicate a belief in eschatological re-incarnation as revealed in
Josephus, Wars 3.8.5
[27] ουδεν αλλο φρονησετε… strengthens
the reference to the preceding nine verses which it can be little doubt express
Paul’s unique view. That he was at
loggerheads with Jerusalem missions of James regarding his cross theology is
given by Gal 4:23-4:31 which purposely
contrast Paul’s vision of a ‘spiritual’ Jerusalem.
[28] One possible origin
of the text is that the gospel was composed as an allegorical letter and sent
to the Nazarenes who requested Paul’s corpus from Mark’s community.
[31] George Aichele,
The Poetic Function and the Gospel in/of Mark: a Post-Canonical Reading, 2003
(Published on Marc Goodacre’s NT Gateway: http://www.ntgateway.com/gospel-and-acts/gospel-of-mark/books-and-articles/
[32] Paul’s neologism apparently proceeds from the
verb ευαγγελιζω derived
grammatically from Isaiah’s 52:7 participle reproduced in Rom 10:15 (οι ποδες των ευαγγελιζομενων).
[34] It was the mystical
οικος/οικια that led this analyst to Isa 44:13. The verse supplies the meaning to the
otherwise obscure terms in 2:1, 2:15,
3:20, 7:17, 7:24, 9:28, 9:33, 10:10, 13:34-35.
Οικια in 6:4 relates
to the re-referencing of Jesus as τεκτων in
the preceding verse.
[35]
Martin
Werner, Der Einfluss
paulinischer Theologie im Markusevangelium,
Zeitschrift für neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, Beih. I, 1923
[37] Count here Norman
Perrin, Werner H. Kelber, Norman R. Petersen, John R. Donahue, Theodore M.
Weeden, Mary Ann Tolbert, Robert R. Fowler, George Aichele, Donald H. Juel.
[42] The baptism by John
appears to be a midrash on the investiture of Joshua, in Jos 3:2-11. In relation to Paul, it is important to note is Mark’s description of
the invasive nature of the spirit descending into Jesus (εις αυτον, Mk 1:10) mirroring Paul’s articulation of receiving the Son in
him (εν εμοι, Gal 1:15).
[45] I do not believe that 1 Cor 11:23-25 is from
Paul’s hand. Mark was the originator of the Last Supper allegory, inspired
by Paul’s 1 Cor 10:16-17. Matthew and
Luke adapted it from Mark. The
improbability of 1 Cor 11:23-25 being genuine
Paul is that the verses effectuate the 1 Cor 10:16 rhetorical questions, which
indicate that the Eucharist tradition was not known in Paul’s time. Second, the
verses mimic too closely Luke 22:19-20. Third, Paul does not recognize but Christ crucified, and does not
present ever the intimations of the Lord as a source of information on
historical events.
[46] Even if some of the
metaphoric figures do not originate with Paul, they were likely known to the
believer communities through Paul’s writing.
[47] Vincent Taylor’s assessment of Pauline influence on
Mark in The Gospel according to St.Mark,
London, 1959, pp.125-129
[48] The Barabbas story protests too much the folly of crucifying Jesus. Pontius
Pilate would immediately expose himself to the charge of maiestas minuti populi Romani in freeing an enemy of Rome on the
whim of the mob.
[50] There are strong indications in the writing of Paul
that he thought of the Nazarene Jesus exclusively in terms of human
typology (Rom 5:14). His refusal to credit anything Jesus was reported as saying and doing
follows his own experience of the Spirit. One loses one’s identity and cannot be held
responsible for one’s actions. One does and says what the Spirit commands. Paul evidently believed that Jesus was executed justly
under the law, (Gal 3:13, Rom 8:4) hence his idea of the superiority of faith
to written code.
[51] Paul Nadim Tarazi, The New Testament Introduction: Paul and
Mark, St.Vladimir Seminary Press, 1999, p. 230. Tarazi interprets Αριμαθαια as
standing for Har-rimmat(h)aim , Hebrew for 'mount of decay'.
[53] The close of the Sermon in Matthew, (ch 7)
I read as a passionate rebuke to Markan
Paulinism. ‘Judge not’ is likely
reference to Paul’s 1 Cor 2:15, and the conceit of the ‘Christ-imitating’
pneumatics who dominated the churches. ‘Their scribes’ in 7:29 would be Paul
and Mark, appearing also as the two demoniacs, two blind beggars, and two asses
on whose backs Jesus triumphantly enters Jerusalem, in the new edition of the
gospel.
[56] As some of the
geography of the narration seems to be alluding allegorically to temporary
events, Mark’s community would have likely been located in the region of
Decapolis or southern Syria. And as the
text appears to be defending a set of
values against a Jerusalem based Jesuine tradition that was migrating, it is
probable that Mark’s community was settled in the region prior to the new
arrivals.
[60] Mark at times
creates paradox by reversing the attributes of the subject and object in his
narration; in the story of the paralytic, the descent of the patient to Jesus
in the house inverts the descent from heaven of the healing spirit into the
man.
[61] Bi-polar disorder would have been probably
the most common background to pneumaticism and apocalypticism , although the
new creed likely was informed also by struggles with postictal psychosis in
temporal lobe epilepsy and remitting schizophrenias.
[62] The distress of
Jesus in Gethsemane, and the night session of the Sanhedrin may be another clue
that Mark was familiar with the sayings of Thomas. GT(69): ‘Blessed are they
who have been persecuted within themselves; it is they who have truly come to
know the Father’.
[63] The incident with
the disciples of John and the Pharisees in 2:18-20, points to the other extreme
of the observed dysregulated eating in manics – it is “feast or famine”. “Loss of water and lack of nourishment” is cited as typical
for manic reactions, A.H. Maslow, B. Mittelmann, Principles of Abnormal
Psychology, Harper 1978, p 510.
[64] The assessment of
Paul as suffering from manic depressive illness is based on his description of
the bipolar nature of his Christ experience in 2 Cor 12:2-9. Further diagnostic clues are to be found in
: 1 Th 2:18, Cor 1:8-9, (depression) , 1 Th 5:2, 6 2 Cor 11:27 (insomnia), 1 Cor 2:1-4, Gal
4:13-14 (depressive psychosis), Gal 1:15-16 (euphoric grandeur), Rom 9:1-2, 2
Cor 2:4 (anxiety, depression) , 2 Cor 4:10, Rom 6:3-6 (self-interpreted bipolar
states), 2 Cor 8:2-3 (compulsive generosity), 2 Cor 11:22-28 (persecutory
mania, anxiety), Phl 3:8 (depression), 1
Cor 15:32, 2 Cor 5:13 (psychosis). Paul’s antinomian verve and creative
semantics also fit a typical bipolar personality profile.
[68] Emil Kraepelin, Manic Depressive Insanity
and Paranoia, tr. R. Mary Barclay, Edinburgh, 1922, p. 106
[70] Under
James’s leadership in Jerusalem, Mark’s Lord-of–the-Sabbath argument likely
would not have gained acceptance. The Nazarene exiles after the war however
were presumably open up to some of Paul’s antinomian sentiments, especially
those pointed against the Pharisee puritanic interpretation of the halakha .
The incident with Cephas at Antioch in Gal 2 testifies probably to a relaxed
form of observances among the original disciples.
[71] The miracle
duplicates the restoration of the withered hand of king Jeroboam in 1 Ki 13 by
a nameless “man of God”.
[73] The Paulines had no regard for the Nazarene ‘Jesus’
traditions; they had no confidence in what the missions asserted about Jesus as
they did not respect them.
[74] Teneamus
quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est. Let us hold onto that which was
believed always, everywhere and by everyone.
[75] My
perspective is buoyed by Mary Ann Tolbert’s approach: But
suppose Matthew and Luke, for different reasons and in different ways were
attempting not to clarify and extend Mark’s vision but to refute and undermine
it. Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s
World in Literary-Historical Perspective, Berkeley 1996, p 28.
[76] Mt 7:4-5, note Matthew’s clever twist to
Mark’s διαβλεπω (Mk 8:25) which was rhetorically returned as the result of a two-step process, much like Mark’s 4:12 μηποτε επιστρεψωσιν in the saying about the pearls before swine.
[77] It is
unlikely that the Paulines associated Christ with David. I
do not believe Rom 1:2-6 comes from the
same hand as 1 Cor 1:18-31. The issue
here is that the former
seems innocent of Paul’s ‘imitatio’ which lies at the core of the teachings. Εκ σπερματος Δαυιδ κατα σαρκα in 1:3 also
contradicts directly 2 Cor 5:16
[79] The repeated
passive aorist οφθη is in 1 Cor 15:5-8 is probably
one of the features in the passage that point to it as referencing the earliest
gospel. The writer of the passage
probably did not realize Mark meant it sarcastically. The other ones are εγηγερται τη τριτη ημερᾳ, κατα τας γραφας, ειτα τοις δωδεκα, the first one likely attempting to correct Mark’s ‘after three days’ in 8:31,
9:31, 10:34.
[80] Mk 9:8 may have been interpolated to assert
specifically the three
received the vision. Mark’s most common adverb ευθυς is here replaced mysteriously by a hapax εξαπινα.
[81] Mark evidently uses
ironic reversals to enhance the feel of mystery for his tale. Thus the observed
penchant of demoniacs to abuse verbally figures of authority is reversed to assert Jesus’ control over them, the classical visualization of restoring
spirit descending into the patient is reversed in story of the paralytic, the
day of the Lord coming as ‘a thief in the night’ is asserted as a party
arresting Jesus as if a ‘robber’, and
finally the absurd Pilate’s decision to release a violent criminal who by
definition was an ‘enemy of Roman people’ in place of Jesus.
[82] That the sensing of inner light projects externally
and is seen by kindred souls
was known in later Christian mysticism. See e.g. the story told of St. John of
the Cross, in R.M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, Citadel 1961, p. 120
[84] The figure transparently alludes to Paul’s 2 Cor
3:18 And
we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed
(μεταμορφουμεθα) into his likeness from one degree of
glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
[85] the
fear of the disciples to inquire about Jesus’ resurrection is also featured in
9:32, and by Peter ‘not hearing’ Jesus saying that he will precede the
disciples to Galilee in 14:28.
[87] That Luke knew
Matthew flows from their apparent collaboration on two large amending formulas
against Mark’s gospel: 1) the
investiture of the disciples with apostolic insight and authority, and 2) the
bodily rising of Jesus and the appearance by him to a group of the
disciples. In both instances, Luke appears wishing to
reduce Matthew’s upset of the Markan gospel plan. Luke’s nativity story also
seems unlikely to have been constructed independently, given the alternative
genealogy which looks too formulaic to
have originated in lore. If one looks for a ‘smoking gun’, Lk 4:22 would do it.
Luke’s incredulous residents of Nazareth, ask “isn’t this Joseph’s son”
against Matthew’s “isn’t this the carpenter’s son”. That Luke would create a variant of the same
question independently outside the scope of Q looks very improbable.
[88] Luke’s formulaic ‘and those
who were with them [the eleven]’ (και τους συν αυτοις) in 24:34 echoes Mark’s 4:10 quibble
and likely asserts Pauline primacy of access to the risen Lord. ‘Simon’ in 24:34 is unlikely Simon Peter, as
Luke uses that appellation only when Jesus addresses Peter directly, same as
with the one direct address in Mark (14:37).
[89] The contrast between
spirituality and religiosity, or the ‘convulsive’ versus the ‘obsessional’
aspects of faith, has been brilliantly described by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in his
novel The Brothers Karamazov.
[91] Heikki Räisänen,
The ‘Messianic Secret’ in Mark,( tr. by Christopher Tuckett), Edinburgh, 1990,
pp. 27-28
[92] The
Pentecost founding event seems to have been concocted to defeat Paul’s scorn
for the belief in the magical properties tongue-speaking in 1 Cor 14. Paul says specifically in 1 Cor 14:23 ‘If, therefore, the whole church
assembles and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will
they not say that you are mad?’ How could this be a hypothetical if such an event was acclaimed
(Acts 2:2-13) as the traditional founding of the church which he is believed to
have joined ?
[93] This
excludes commands not to speak of miraculous cures which are takes on the
glossolalic property of the spirit, scorned by outsiders.
[95] Mark’s tendency to
reverse, ‘retard’ or misappropriate logical components in narration has been
well illustrated by Robert M. Fowler,
Let the Reader Understand, Minneapolis, 1991, pp.92-98
[96] Kraepelin
cites the tendency of the florid manics to disrupt church services by screaming
and singing, and otherwise target the symbols of power (eg. by ‘forcing their
way to a palace’), op.cit., p.62. This behavioural pattern throws new light on
the cleansing of the temple. Worth
recalling here is also Paul’s legendary disruption of the praying glens in the
Macedonian Philippi (Acts 16:16), and Muhammad’s (by proxy) in Makka as
recorded in ibn-Ishaq’s Life of the Prophet.
[97] Fredriksen,
op.cit., 44, compare her presenting the
disconnected, disorganized, rapidly serialized, heroic motifs with Kraepelin’s
observation of his charges: The delusions which forthwith emerge, move
very frequently on religious territory: the patient is a prophet, John II., is
enlightened by God, is no longer a sinner, is something supernatural; he fights
for Jesus, has to fulfil a divine mission , is a spirit, hides the world-soul
in himself, intends to ascend to heaven, possesses secret power over mentally
afflicted people. He preaches in the name of the holy God, will reveal great
things to the world, gives commands according to the divine will. Female
patients are queen of heaven and earth, the immaculate conception,
female clergyman[sic], mother of heathen children; they have a child by God,
are going to heaven to the bridegroom of their soul; Christ has restored their innocence in them. The devil is done
away with; the patient has taken all the suffering of the world on himself; it
is a wonderful world op.cit.68-69
[98] The
Thomasian community likely was the first to develop the Jesus therapeutic
lore. In their rendition, the
persecutory mania was a side-effect of the obtruding grandiosity. GThomas (69)… Jesus said, "Blessed are they who have been persecuted within
themselves. It is they who have truly come to know the Father. ..”
[99] The
oppressively needy, menacing nature of the crowds around Jesus is asserted well
before the final days in Jerusalem. Note the packed house preventing the entry
of the paralytic (2:2), the planned escape from the crowd bent on crushing him
(3:9), the pressing of Jesus in the
story of the woman with the issue of blood (5:31), and the uncanny knowledge of
the people in the districts of the place where Jesus planned to rest with his
followers, which was given privately to them (6:31-34) and the arrival of the
multitude at the destination ahead of Jesus’ party.
[100] The idea was mocked
first by Matthew, who had the two co-crucified robbers revile Jesus. Matthew 27:44 lampoons Pauline systauroō supplying a redundant
preposition syn (with) to the already prefixed word indicating that the robbers
were crucified with Jesus. The effect would be an instant howl to anyone who
knew what the allusion meant. I hold that the reviling is of Matthean origin, and was later assimilated into Mark
(15:32). Matthew interpreted
the robbers as specifically invoking
Paul’s mystical co-crucifixion and the λεσται as reference to Isa 53:12, εν τοις ανομοις ελογισθη, ie. as Paul’s followers freedom from “the law”. The image of the co-crucified probably
inspired Matthew 5:18-19 and the anti-Pauline ‘doublets’ in the stories of the
Gadarene demoniac, the blind beggar at Jericho and the donkey (in Jewish
tradition, a symbol of unruly truculence) on which Jesus entered
Jerusalem. That Mark 15:32 has a later harmonizing gloss is also argued for by
the verb oneidizō occurring as a hapax in Mark, but having multiple uses in Matthew (5:11,
11:20).
