Jesus and After | From Readers #5

THE LAYERS OF MARK

Reader: I have been reading with considerable interest your book "Jesus and After." Thank you for your excellent work. I would much love to see your best guess as to the original version of the Gospel of Mark. I would think you would be the person to put it together.

Author: You are quite right: the Gospel of Mark is the heart of the matter. It is the earliest Gospel, and if it contains an earliest part, that part is of immense importance. So, of course, are the additions, since they show the early religion in the process of growing into the later religion. The Jesus book rests on full reconstructions of Mark (and of Luke, and of the Pauline letters, and so on), but except for a few cases, it does not display them, since the result would have been unwieldy. But yes, that full reconstruction of Mark - both the core and the successive additions - is in the works. When it will appear I can't say at this moment, but every expression of reader interest pushes that book a little nearer the top of my list of things to do.

One of the interesting features of the later additions to Mark is that they show "Jesus" trying to persuade his disciples of new ideas, chief among them being the conversion of Gentiles. The original Jesus followers were Jews, coming out of the Old Testament view of things; they were people specially chosen by God. That outsiders could share in the benefits was an unwelcome thought to many, and these stories are Mark's way of persuading them. It has been thought (and a whole book, Theodore Weeden's "Mark: Traditions in Conflict," 1971, is there to expound the thought) that Mark was written "against the disciples." No, that would be self-defeating; that theory fails to distinguish the core and the additions in Mark. In the core, the disciples are positive.

(Ted and I are friends, and we have argued the point back and forth, so far without either convincing the other).

These arguments are not for everyone. In school, we are told what the answers are. We are not (or not very often) taught how to decide between two possible answers. But for those who are interested in this question, the place to go is the professional literature. In this case, our journal Alpha. The first volume (2017) contained a piece called Time Depth in Mark, which set out the case for a gradually increasing acceptance of Gentile converts in the later layers of Mark. In the next volume (cover date 2018, but it is a bit delayed; it will hopefully be out soon), there are not one but two full reconstructions of Mark for consideration. They agree at many points, but differ at a few. One of the reconstructions is mine, and probably that will be the foundation of the book you have asked for. In the meantime, Alpha can be ordered at the link given below. I hope you will find those early arguments helpful.

The Author

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