Page:The production of the Gospel of Mark – An essay on intertextuality.pdf/9

W S Vorster What is apparent regarding the use of the Old Testament in Mark seems to be even more applicable to the tradition incorporated in the Gospel of Mark. Let us take individual units such as controversy stories between Jesus and his opponents in the Gospel of Mark as an example.

From a form-critical perspective most of these stories presuppose a sociological situation of conflict in early Christianity. In addition, some of the stories are transmitted in Mark’s Gospel in a mixed form — that is, a story which relates conflict between Jesus and opponents within the framework of a miracle story. These stories seem to have been created around a saying of Jesus and reflect situations in early Christianity which the other evangelists used in their own stories about Jesus. In retold form, these stories were used not only for different purposes but also for different messages, depending on new situations.

Retelling involves creativity, whether in oral or in written form. It is impossible to tell the ‘same’ story twice. Each telling has its own context and its own message. The truth of this statement is confirmed by the retelling of the stories of the Old Testament within the Old Testament, as well as in later Jewish literature. Each time a Story or event is retold, it is done for a specific purpose and from a specific point of view. In other words, each account involves creativity. The same applies to oral transmission of history.

Even if Mark’s version of narrative units is based on authoritative transmission of tradition, or on written accounts of certain chunks of material in his Gospel, he made up his own story by putting the narrative units into the order he wanted and into the framework he developed. It is important and significant to see that Mark knitted the Jesus tradition into a new narrative web of his own.

Even if he had based his version of Jesus’ speech on the Mount of Olives in Mark 13, for instance, on an existing Jewish flyleaf, as is often assumed, this narrated speech of Jesus, which is a network of quotations and allusions to the Old Testament, has its own Marcan message and function (see Vorster 1987). As it stands, it refers back to precursor texts and to intertextual codes of apocalyptic disruption and disaster, but it also takes up the apocalyptic theme of the imminent coming of the Son of Man, which is a Marcan creation (see Mack 1987). The same applies to other material in the Gospel of Mark which can probably be connected to pre-Marcan collections or pre-Marcan written or oral compositions.

In addition to the many studies on the texts behind and in the Gospel of Mark, two recent attempts have been made at describing the Gospel as the rewriting of Old Testament stories. Although I am not convinced about the total outcome of either (see Roth 1988; Miller & Miller 1990) they have both indicated how important it is to regard Mark’s Gospel as a creation of a new text. The Millers correctly Rh