Literary Approaches to Mark
By literary approaches, I refer to those methods that concentrate mainly on the text of the gospel without any concern for the way that text came to exist. They are basically synchronic rather than diachronic, for they assume the autonomy of the text to convey meaning without the control imposed on it by the author or the social location that gave it birth. Among these methods, we find narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, structuralism, semiotics—as well as various post-modern approaches such as reader-response and, especially, deconstruction. For the sake of this work, I limit myself to a brief examination of narrative and rhetorical criticism.
According to Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, the term “narrative Christology” was introduced by Robert Tannehill in his article, “The Gospel of Mark as Narrative Christology.”50 She quotes Tannehill as saying that “we learn who Jesus is through what he says and does in the context of the action of others.”51 She goes on to affirm that the main question of narrative studies on the gospels is: How does the story mean?52 She acknowledges the importance of the historical context in which the gospel was produced and its religious significance for Christian faith (What does the story mean?), but her own research is strictly literary. It concerns itself with the narrative aspects of the gospel, which include settings, characters, plot, and rhetoric, all of which are conscious devices utilized by an implied author to try to communicate with an implied audience.53
My own approach in this book is slightly different. I take seriously the social context of the author and the way in which he is trying to address some problems arising from his context by means of a literary production. Therefore, I concentrate on one of the aspects of Malbon’s method, namely, the rhetoric of the gospel, the way in which the evangelist has placed the traditions available to him, as well as its own redaction of them in order to convey an understanding of who Jesus was that would answer some of the questions the community had. In that sense, this work could be described as an example of socio-rhetorical54 Christology more than narrative Christology. I will be more interested in the what than in the how of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus, although how the evangelist puts together his resources will play an important role in my argument. This is illustrated mainly by my work in chapter 2, where I discuss the rhetorical center of the gospel and its theological implications. I conclude there by saying that the whole gospel betrays an intentional form used by the evangelist to drive home his main theological point.
Also important in this rhetorical analysis of Mark is how the evangelist has incorporated into the narrative some key religious and philosophical concepts of the Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, which Robbins calls “intertexture,” the relationship of data in the text to various kinds of phenomena outside the text, including oral-scribal, historical, social, and cultural intertexture.55 In chapter 1, I analyze two expressions that are examples of intertexture: “disciple” and “Son of Man.” Disciple represents a case of what Robbins calls echo, meaning by that a word or phrase that evokes a cultural tradition,56 both in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world. I examine then the traditions behind the idea of disciple/discipleship present in the first-century Mediterranean world. The other expression, “Son of Man,” is an example of re-contextualization, an aspect of the oral-scribal intertexture that utilizes words from biblical texts without necessarily stating that the words are written anywhere else.57 In Mark 13:26, the reference is to Daniel 7:13–14, but the evangelist does not mention, as he does in 1:2–3, the Hebrew Scripture text he is using. In this book, unless explicitly stated, all occurrences of intertexture are referred to as rereadings, which is the preferred expression for theological reappropriation used by Liberation Theology exegetes.
Conclusion
Recovering an early Christology that sees Jesus as the ideal disciple of the kingdom of God is a constructive and creative task that moves us from the comfort zone in which orthodoxy has placed us into the realm of possibility and imagination. This task makes us all Christologists, builders of new understandings of who Jesus was and therefore is for certain communities. It assumes that Christologies have always been, and therefore are, community-constructed models, that is, ways of talking about Jesus that are born out of a community’s theological identity. They all bear the marks of contextuality and contingency and, therefore, are not universal and objective but particular and subjective. They are born not in busy minds detached from the real problems of the world, but in busy hands engaged in a praxis that tries to change the world. My hope is that this book will demonstrate precisely that.
1. By Christology, I simply mean a discourse about Christ that is based on the historical recollections of the community informed by its current situation. In that sense, any talk about Jesus that tries to make his person and message relevant for a given community is a Christology. Christology is born then in the crucible of memory and praxis, or remembrance and practice. Its purpose is to guide the community in times of struggle by giving them a sense of identity and by encouraging them to remain faithful to the God of Israel. For a similar understanding and treatment of Christology, see Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 1–15.
2. To quote Jon Sobrino: “The diverse Christologies of the New Testament were elaborated from two poles. Jesus of Nazareth was one pole. The other was the concrete situation of each community. Each had its own cultural backdrop and its own set of problems both within the church and vis-à-vis the outside world. The resurrection of Christ made their faith possible, but in the elaboration of a Christology they had to deal with the concrete features of Jesus’ life. They would have to select and choose between those elements, rejecting some and accepting others. In today’s situation the various churches are confronted with the same task.” Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, 13.
3. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, xvi, criticizes the tendency in traditional and dogmatic Christologies to reduce Christ to a sublime abstraction that introduces a separation between the total or whole Christ on the one hand and the concrete history of Jesus on the other. This quite often leads to an alienating understanding of Christ, as seen in spiritualizing practices that invoke vaguely the Spirit but do not look for the concrete spirit of Jesus as the driving force behind his ministry.
4. Tilley, Disciples’ Jesus, 37.
5. Sobrino, Christology at the Crossroads, xxii.
6. Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, xxix.
7. Greene, Christology in Cultural Perspective, 1.
8. My understanding of “discourse” is informed