Hearing Mark
- Hearing Mark
We face three key challenges when we set out to read Mark.
1. Our reading of Mark is diluted by harmonisations with other gospels.
2. We are reading what is initially an oral "document" from a distant culture.
3. We bring our own presuppositions as we begin to read.
Not addressing these challenges means we may misread the text out of ignorance, or be mis-directed by unrecognised biases.
We do not come to Mark as a fresh text
When I first read Mark, I had spent the best part of 20 years in church learning about Composite-Jesus, a blending and harmonising of the Jesus of four gospels, multiple epistles, multiple Methodist ministers, and the attitudes of my parents. All of this slow-cooked in the social juices of a small country town. In my consciousness, John's dignified crucified Lord—When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit—drowned out the horrified and abandoned Jesus of Mark 15.
In this book, I will rarely mention the other gospels, and usually only to highlight their differences with Mark. In any reading of any biblical text, our discipline should be to listen to the author, not the harmony of the chorus which sings to all of us. We would be the poorer if Mark were our only Gospel, but harmonising his gospel with the others hides his particular genius.
Cultural Incomprehension
Sitting in community meetings in another culture, I found that even when I could follow the gist of the conversation which occurred in a blend of the local languages and my native English, I sometimes still had no idea what was happening. At other times, I sensed there was another conversation going on beneath the surface conversation, but could not fathom what was being said. This is the experience of many folk living in another culture. When we come to Mark, we are reading words from another culture, a different language, and a different era.
Mark was produced in a situation of low literacy.1 Most people would necessarily hear Mark, not read him.2 There is a brevity to Mark because of this—the entire text can be read to an audience in about the same time as a 90 minute movie—but it is a loaded brevity which we have to learn to hear.
Because the lives of Mark's audience were not saturated by TV, social media, and text, oral memory was much better than today. When an audience knows its scriptures, a few words, or an echo, can speak as loudly as long paragraphs. Mark says in Chapter 6 that Jesus had compassion on the crowd because "they were like sheep without a shepherd." For his first century listeners he has just "read out" all of Ezekiel chapter 34, and reminded them of Psalm 23 and other scriptures. We will find the brief text of Mark is actually much larger or wider if we will learn to hear and read him in this way.
C. Clifton Black makes the following comment about the text of Mark 13, after listing the large number of recognised3 rhetorical strategies used in the chapter:
Equally impressive is the skill with which the tropes and figures have been blended: they do not attract to themselves undue attentions; most would probably be missed by those who silently read the speech but did not have it recited aloud. At the time of the oration's performance, even its auditors would not have been entirely conscious of this panoply of ornament; at the subliminal level, however, the various techniques would register with persuasive effect.4
In another text, Black notes that Mark's Gentile listeners' appreciation of his allusions to the Old Testament texts would be "wobbly."5 This will be true for many of us.6 And we have the added issue that, reading in English, we will miss much of his word-play, even from the very first verse.7 Yet hearing the gospel will still register with us; it is firstly an oral drama, not a text to analyse. My growing suspicion is that frequent listening to the text well-read (or reading large blocks of text out loud myself) grants me insights in addition to those which come from poring over the text itself. It was constructed to be heard.
The destruction of Jerusalem
The reason I am emphasising the orality of Mark, and the value of listening to it, is because Mark is writing about Jesus the Son of God at a time when everything is being, or has been, destroyed. In 66CE, at Beth Horon, Israel inflicted some of the heaviest military losses Rome had ever experienced in an established province of the empire. 6,000 troops were killed. In response, Rome made Jerusalem an object lesson for anyone else considering rebellion, re-establishing its dominance with the destruction of the Temple and most of Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people were killed. Jewish people were refused entry to what little remained of Jerusalem, which became an encampment of the Tenth Legion, and later, a Roman colony.
I noted above the difference between the depiction of Jesus' death in Mark and John. Mark's crucifixion is a stark description of torture, whereas John's text is much more the description of a martyrdom which tells of the failure of the torturers, and of death. To highlight what Mark is doing, (at the risk of injustice to John) in a text of martyrdom, "if not in reality, martyrdom does not hurt.”8 In contrast to John, Mark describes the erasure9 of Jesus' world, and speaks to all those others whose world has been erased.
In this, Mark is offering us a way (hodon) to meet Jesus the Son of God even in a time when everything is destroyed or falling apart. He is not offering us a theological thesis. "Mark's story is more a 'subject' with which to interact than an 'object of belief,' says Maia Kotrosis.10 She says this is "not easy, given the ways piety hardly permits spontaneous reaction to Mark’s story." Neither is it easy given the incredible privilege that most of us live with in "the West." How might we be reading Mark if we, in 2024, were barely surviving in Gaza?
If we practice the skill of listening to, and reading, Mark's heavily laden brevity we will understand that for a traumatised church, trauma can be referenced with very few words. To say My name is Legion11 in Mark 5 can be to trigger trauma. Little else needs to be said. Everyone listening to Mark knows the man's dire deranged illness is a symptom of Rome, and they share some of his experience.
These few examples indicate to us that there is huge emotion and detail in Mark. His "one sitting audio book" is condensed in a way which our undisciplined reading habits find difficulty seeing. Slow and careful listening and reading will bring the book's depth to our attention. Once seen, it remains.
Mark is so much a "trauma gospel" that Mendenez-Antuna calls it "The Book of Torture."12 I am blessedly lightly touched by trauma, but still need to face down hyper-vigilance and involuntary responses to trigger factors. I find that repeated reciting and immersing of myself in prayers of the church can be astonishingly potent and stabilising during times of distress. In this world which is falling apart, what if I were to immerse myself not only in the text of Mark, but in the hearing of him?
1. Catherine Hezser concludes that for the first century CE Palestine had a very low literacy rate, "possibly as low as 3%." See Justin P Haley. "Pauline Pseudepigrapha and Early Christian Literacy: Are the Clues Hidden Right in Front of Us?" Religions 2023, 14, 530. (https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14040530 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions (Retrieved 130/8/2024) He is referring to the book Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck) pp. 496–97.
2. There is evidence of Mark being shaped for the listener. See "Orality and Gospel Research Revisiting Mark’s Gospel" Alan H. Cadwallader pp25-48, and Black, Rhetoric, pp64: "a Gospel that was originally heard, not read."
3. To be clear, these are not modern ideas but clearly documented and well known techniques in Mark's world. The first chapter of Black's Rhetoric gives an introduction to this.
4. Black, Rhetoric, pp61
5. Black, Mark, eBook section: Mark 1:2-3
6. I suspect we will gain much by reading and reading the Old Testamrent references in Mark
7. In the Greek, the first verse (apart from the first word) is loaded with assonance. The transliterated Greek of Mark 1:1 is Archē tou euangeliou Iēsou Christou Huiou Theou,. The ou at the end of each word was pronounced something like the ou in the English word route.
8. Cobb, L. Stephanie. 2016 . Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Christian Martyr Texts.Oakland, CA: University of California Press pp136 Quoted in L. Menendez-Antuna. "The Book of Torture. The Gospel of Mark, Crucifixion, and Trauma." Journal of the American Academy of Religion pp8 fn.
9. Cf Menendex-Antuna, pp6
10. Kotrosis Rereading Mark… pp20
[11] “Legion” refers to none other than a unit of Roman soldiers. It is Roman occupation that torments this man. It is not so much that the man’s pain and possession is a metaphor for Roman occupation. In the ancient world, the realms of spirits and politics, which much of modern Western culture usually treats as distinct, were regularly mixed, crossed, linked, and reflected in one another. It is most honest to Mark’s context then to read this scene in Mark 5 literally: the man is possessed and pained by Roman occupation." See Kotrosits Re-reading Mark… pp50
12. L. Menendez-Antuna. "The Book of Torture. The Gospel of Mark, Crucifixion, and Trauma." Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Good people.
