Page:The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality.pdf/2

Production of Mark taken the production of the written Gospel seriously. Certain data beliefs and assumptions concerning the Gospel have become so dominant that very little progress has been made in the history of interpretation of the Gospel (see e g Peabody 1987:3ff).

In this essay I will discuss the importance of the unsolved problem of the production of the Gospel of Mark. To achieve my goal, I will first pay attention to current views on the origin of the material. The idea is to illustrate the implications of the traditional focus on the origins of the Gospel. In the next part of the essay I will turn to the production of the Gospel from the perspective of intertextuality. In this section I will focus on the implications of a totally different perception of the phenomena of text and textual relationships. 



2. MARK AND ITS PREDECESSORS It is no longer possible to determine with any certainty who Mark, as we normally call the author of the Gospel of Mark, really was. Neither is it absolutely certain how he went about writing his Gospel and where he got his material from. A period of three or four decades must have passed after the death of Jesus before Mark decided to write his story. What happened during that period lies in the dark.

It is normally argued that the followers of Jesus transmitted his words and deeds by telling and retelling things he did and said. In view of the folkloric nature of many of the stories of and about Jesus, the aphoristic character of many of his sayings, the many parables he apparently told his followers, and the role of oral communication in that period, it is probable that Mark was informed about the story of Jesus by way of tradition. It is also probable that his audience would have known these traditions and others, such as the institution of the Lord’s Supper, and controversy stories. It is therefore possible to argue that Mark based his written story of Jesus on traditional material which he received and decided to put into written form. This is also the way in which the origin of the material was explained in the early church. The earliest witness to the authorship of Mark is the quotation from Papias of Hierapolis (c 140 CE) in the history of Eusebius (Hist Eccl [I] 39:15), according to which the Gospel was based on memory of the things Peter had told Mark (see also Breytenbach 1992).

What other sources did Mark use? One of the interesting things about early Christian literature is that although there was only one Jesus, we have many Gospels. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke — the so-called Synoptic Gospels are closely related and have much material in common. Some form of dependence is therefore presumed (see Sanders & Davies 1989). The dominant assumption is 386