Why does the Gospel of Mark begin as it does?

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Spring, 2003 by Santiago Guijarro

Abstract

Mark's Gospel does not follow the rules of Hellenistic "lives," which usually began by praising the ancestry and education of the main character. This is due to the fact that the data available to Mark were inappropriate for that purpose. Nonetheless, the beginning of Mark's Gospel has the same purpose as the beginnings of other contemporary biographies: to show the ascribed honor of his character. According to Mark, Jesus' honor does not come from his human family; it is due to his being God's Son. Through a ritual process, centered upon a liminal stage of revelation and testing, the evangelist shows Jesus' true identity as a holy man, capable of brokering God's patronage on his people.

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In recent years, research on the beginning of Mark's Gospel has explored the possibilities offered by different models of literary analysis (Rhoads, Dewey and Michie; Boring; Mell; Naluparayil; Struthers Malbon; Dormeyer; Sankey). Similarly, the use of social science models has led us to a deeper knowledge of its context (McVann; Van Eyck; DeMaris). In the path already opened by these studies, the present work starts by asking a basic question: Why did Mark begin his Gospel as he did? To answer this question it will be necessary to place the beginning of the Gospel within the framework of ancient rhetoric, within the context of the first-century Mediterranean culture, and within the narrower context of Jewish religion.

Mark 1:1-15 and the Beginning of the Hellenistic "Lives"

In the first verses of Mark, scholars recognize the presence of a couple of peculiar elements, absent from the rest of the Gospel. In these verses, indeed, we find that the relevance of John the Baptist is stressed and that events are told in a seemingly out-of-time atmosphere. Likewise, this passage contains a high concentration of strange phenomena: open skies, a voice from heaven, actions of the Spirit, Satan, and the angels--and a distinct symbolic character in geographical places: the desert, the Jordan (Marcus: 137-39). Yet, despite the general consensus on these observations, scholars disagree as to the length and nature of the "beginning" of the Gospel.

Regarding its length several hypotheses have been advanced; those with a wider acceptance place the end of this beginning either at Mark 1:13 or at Mark 1:15. The first theory, mainly based on narrative grounds, underlines the peculiar Connotations of time and space, and the fact that Jesus appears in these verses as a passive character (Struthers Malbon: 306-10). The second, which will be adopted in this study, is grounded on the analysis of its literary structure, thus distinguishing a prologue (Mk 1:1-3) and a "diptych" where John (Mk 1:4-8) and Jesus (Mk 1:9-15) are introduced in a parallel way. The unity of this beginning is reinforced, from a literary viewpoint, by the use of the term euaggelion both at the beginning (Mk 1:1) and at the end (Mk 1:15) of the passage; as well as by the parallelisms found between the presentation of John and Jesus: egeneto ... baptizo ... en te eremo ... kerysso (Boring; Klauck: 19-34).

The second point of disagreement concerns the literary nature of the beginning. It has frequently received the title of "Gospel prologue," although the designation usually has no technical sense. Only D. Dormeyer (199-203) has suggested that it be used in its technical sense. According to him, Mark's "prologue" is similar to that of other "ideal biographies" of Roman and Hellenistic literature, in which the main topics of the narrative were spelled out at the beginning by way of oracles and announcements. Prologues of this kind, in epic biographies, were patterned after Homer's Odyssey (Od 1:1-21). However, both the identification of the Gospels with this literary genre and the alleged similarity between the beginnings of those works and the beginning of Mark's Gospel are far from convincing (Burridge: 99-100). On the other hand, H.-J. Klauck has compared the beginning of Mark with the "proemium" or "exordium" of literary speeches, whose main goal was to appeal to the benevolence of the reader and to introduce the topics to be covered in the discourse. At the end, nonetheless, Klauck (34-35) decides not to go all the way with his own argument and returns to the traditional designation as a "prologue."

These two proposals either neglect or pay little attention to Hellenistic biographies. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that they take the Gospels to be a separate genre, and, on the other hand, to the fact that there are very few similarities between the beginning of Mark and the beginnings of those biographies. Nonetheless, both presuppositions must be reconsidered in light of the close relationship between the Gospels and the Hellenistic lives from the viewpoint of literary genre.

After a detailed comparison between the Gospels and some of these biographies--from earlier, contemporary and later times--R. A. Burridge has concluded that the gospels belong to this genre, comprising in ancient times a wide repertoire of narratives about the life of concrete characters. Burridge's study shows that the "life" was a literary genre somewhere between history and praise (Burridge: 61-69). Yet, for the sake of precision and to apply the names given by ancient rhetoricians, we must say that the "life" is a narrative (diegesis) which describes the character of a person, usually with a praising touch (enkomion). This definition accords with what Luke says of his Gospel and other similar writings, as he calls them diegesis (Lk 1:1).