The Book of Mark

Mark

The Book of Mark

According to Burton Mack's analysis of the synoptic gospels, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, the Gospel of Mark was likely written in 70 CE in Syria. The Gospel of Mark tells the story of a Jesus who is not born in an overly divine fashion in the sense that it contains no story of Mary's impregnation by the Holy Spirit nor Jesus persecution by Herod. Nor does it contain an extensive Judaic linage of the figure of Jesus, or extensive sermons, like the book of Mark. Instead, it begins with Jesus' baptism as a teacher by the hands of John the Baptist.

According to Mack, the Jesus of Mark's envisioning is an angry, rather terse parable-teller and speaker of wisdom literature, designed to be obscure in meaning than easily understood. He is a man whom stands outside of conventional, Judaic society and is crucified by a world that little understands or wants to know him. (Mack 313) One of the key aspects of the Book of Mark Jesus' last words, which stresses the betrayal and desolation and silence of the Jesus upon the cross, rather than his beatific resignation and acceptance.

The Gospel of Mark ends in a kind of narrative silence, as the women seeking to anoint Jesus' body only find an empty tomb and a cryptic message. Mark is without the more miraculous, closing tales such as that of 'doubting Thomas,' as featured in the other gospels. The scholar Vernon Robbins has also noted the previous Passover meal structure places an emphasis on the imminent "absence" rather than the presence of Jesus in heaven. (Robbins, 1983)

Mack suggests over the course of his work on the gospel that Mark as an author created an early ideological alliance between two different Jesus traditions popular at the time that were expanded upon in the later gospels of Matthew, Luke, and the non-synoptic gospel of John. Burton Mack thus traces the Gospel of Mark as an synthesizes what he terms 'the Jesus movement,' namely the aspect of Early Christianity that stressed more what Jesus said in contrast to the saving aspect of Jesus' coming to earth and dying in a cosmological and messianic fashion. "For Mark the figure of Jesus as the founder of the new movement was the place to start a new reflection, and the place to end it." (319) Mark is likely the earliest of the canonized gospels, but is probably predated by a number of gospels known as 'sayings gospels,' such as "The Gospel of Thomas," and "Q-source" both of which lists famous phrases allegedly recounted by Jesus over the course of his ministry on earth. (Cameron, 1982) Mark aligned these sayings gospels, which stressed the radical nature of Jesus' teachings, such as the parable of the fig tree, with the significance of Jesus' death.

Thus, Mark's Jesus is a Jesus of rejection by the Jewish establishment. (It should be noted that Mark, as a follower of Jesus, was himself Jewish.) Although Mark was "aware of the meaning of Jesus' death in the myth and ritual traditions" of Hellenic cultic practice, he was more inclined than those of these traditions to interpret the writings of Jesus in light of wisdom tales of how to live, by dying to a worldly life and reinterpreting Judaism of the time. (Mack 320)