Page:The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality.pdf/7

W S Vorster and his Gospel should be seen as oral literature. Mark told his story of Jesus orally and at some stage dictated it to somebody who wrote down his words. It still bears the signs of oral literature. Again, Mark is taken seriously as the producer of a text and not simply as a conduit through which a stream of tradition flowed, or a (passive) exponent of a community out of which his text arose (see also Vorster 1980).

The next question is whether we can say more about the actual process of the making of the Gospel by using a concept of the phenomenon text which is different from the concept we know (the traditional approach we have dealt with above), and by asking different questions concerning the making of texts. My hypothesis is that a concept of text different from the one we are used to in New Testament scholarship, and a rethinking of the process of production, can help us understand the Gospel of Mark and its relation to precursor and other texts. This would, however, imply a total rethinking of the traditional approach.

The idea that any text is a network or mosaic of different texts referring to other texts is challenging. The concept ‘intertextuality’ has not been sufficiently explored by New Testament scholars (see however Draisma 1989; Phillips 1991; Vorster 1992).

There is no reason to doubt that the written Gospel of Mark echoes many different precursor texts and intertextual relationships. In this regard the use of the Old Testament in Mark’s Gospel is helpful. I have elsewhere argued that Mark’s use of the Old Testament is totally different from that of Matthew or MarkLuke [sic] who use the Old Testament within a promise-fulfilment scheme (see Vorster 1981). Allusions to and quotations from the Old Testament are usually absorbed into Mark’s story in such a manner that, except for a few cases where he specifically mentions the origin of the quotation, the allusions and quotations form part of the story stuff. They are so embedded into the story that, if it were not for the references in the margins and a knowledge of the Old Testament, the reader would not have noticed that Mark uses an allusion or a quotation (see Mk 15:24). This is best seen in Mark’s story of the passion of Jesus.

It has often been noticed that psalms of lamentation such as Psalms 22, 38 and 69 concerning the suffering of the just, are knitted into the passion narrative in such a manner that one can say that the passion narrative of Mark is narrated in the language of the Old Testament. The point is, however, that the allusions and ‘quotations’ form such an integral part of the passion narrative that it ts impossible for the naive reader to realize that the text is enriched by its intertextual relationships concerning the suffering of the Just.

One of the significant things about the use of the Old Testament in Mark is that he had no respect for the original context of the quotations and allusions to Old Rh