Page:The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality.pdf/4

Production of Mark were regarded as Kleinliteratur, the products of the transmission of tradition by illiterate, unknown persons — a collective community (see Schmidt 1923 & Güttgemanns 1970). Mark’s task was to collect these traditions and to put them into a narrative framework. His contribution was limited to the collection of material which he knitted into a loose composition of episodes concerning the deeds and works of Jesus. Mark was regarded as a stringer of pearls (see Schmidt 1923:127f) or a collector of traditions (Dibelius 1971:3). This should be understood against the background of the emphasis on the interest in what lies behind the text and not what is in the text.

The situation changed in the late 1950's with the rise of the so-called redaction-critical approach to the Gospels (see Marxsen 1959 & Peabody 1987). The material in the Gospel was increasingly regarded as edited tradition — an idea which goes far back, but one that had only recently developed. Although the Gospel as a whole came into focus, the interest was in the redaction of tradition. This resulted in detailed investigations concerning tradition and redaction in the Gospels. In the case of Mark it was extremely difficult to determine exactly what could be regarded as tradition and what could not, because of the absence of copies of the presumed sources. On the basis of style, regular occurrence of certain words and phrases, views that were peculiar to the specific Gospel, so-called seams or breaks in the text and other features, scholars reached a certain degree of consensus about redaction and tradition in the Gospel of Mark.

Mark’s (theological) emphasis was determined by interpreting his redaction of tradition. At least a certain amount of creativity — however limited — was ascribed to the redactor. Mark’s own contribution to the story of Jesus came into focus despite the fact that he was soon described as a conservative redactor (see Pesch 1976). The emphasis which Wrede (1969) had put on Mark’s creativity in 1906 was newly appreciated.

In circles where Mark was regarded as a composer, he received more credit for what he had achieved, and attention was given to the Gospel message as a whole. It was, however, only in the late 1970’s that scholars started paying serious attention to Mark’s Gospel as a narrative, and to Mark as an author or author/narrator and to the Gospel as an autonomous text.

The renewed interest in Mark as author and his Gospel as a narrative opened new possibilities in the interpretation of different aspects of the Gospel. It was discovered that the story had been told from a certain narrative point of view, why time and space play an important role in the Gospel, and that characters, including Jesus, were presented in conjunction with the story line — in short, that narrative analysis posed new challenges to interpreters of the Gospel (see Vorster 1980; Hahn 1985 & 388