Literary and Reader-Centered Approaches to Mark: A Bibliography

This blog has focussed on getting at the history behind the text:  who wrote the Gospel of Mark, when was it written, where was it written, to whom was it written, what are its sources and how was it used as a source, what form did its oral or written traditions take before they were included in it, how did the evangelist edit the traditions, is the text a window into the life of Jesus or a mirror into the beliefs of the Christ community?  But I have spent less time on literary-critical approaches that tend to bracket historical-critical questions (authorship, date, provenance), especially as our reconstructions of the “authorial intention” or the historical situation behind the text is always tentative, to closely read the text itself.  This approach may be interested in the narrative techniques of the story (plot, setting, characters, point of view, etc) and how meaning is produced in the interaction between text and reader.  This has also led to various ideological approaches that emphasize the reader’s own location and brought new perspectives to bear on the text, which may be a corrective to some blindspots of past interpreters who pursued different questions or helps to reveal ways the text can be read as liberating or alternatively the voices it may have marginalized or excluded.  Here is a short bibliography of different literary or ideological readings of Mark (feel free to add more in the comments).

• Anderson, Janice Capel and Moore, Stephen D.  Editors.  Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992.
• Belo, Fernando.  A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark.  Translated by Matthew J. O’Connel.  Maryknoll: Orbis, 1981.
• Best, Ernest.  Mark: The Gospel as Story.  Revised Edition.  Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.
•  Dewey, Joanna.  Markan Public Debate:  Literary Technique, Concentric Structure and Theology in Mark 2:1-3:6.  Chicago: Scholars Press, 1980.
• Fowler, Robert.  Loaves and Fishs: The Function of the Feeding Stories in the Gospel of Mark.  Chicago: Scholars Press, 1981.
• Fowler, Rober M.  Let the Reader Understand:  Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark.  Harrisburg: Trinity, 1991.
• Gray, Timothy C.  The Temple in the Gospel of Mark: A Study in Its Narrative Role.  Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.
• Horsley, Richard.  Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.
• Humphrey, Hugh M.  ‘He is Risen!’:  A New Reading of Mark’s Gospel.  New York: Paulist, 1992.
• Iverson, Kelly R. and Skinner, Christopher W.  Editors.  Mark as Story: Retrospect and Prospect.  Atlanta: SBL, 2011.
• Kingsbury, Jack Dean.  Conflict in Mark: Jesus, Authorities, Disciples.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989.
• Jack Dean Kingsbury, The Christology of Mark’s Gospel.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989.
• Levine, Amy-Jill.  Editor.  A Feminist Companion to Mark.  Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 2001.
• Liew, Tat-siong Benny. “Tyranny, Boundary and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel.”  Journal for the Study of the New Testament 73 (1999): 7-31.
• Politics of Parousia: Reading Mark Inter(con)textually.  Biblical Interpretation Series 44; Leiden: Brill, 1999.
• Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers. “Fallible Followers Women and Men m the Gospel of Mark.”  Semeia 28 (1983): 29-48. 
•  Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers.  Narrative Space and Mythic Meaning in Mark.  San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.
• Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers.  In the Company of Jesus: Characters in Mark’s Gospel.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000.
• Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers.  Mark’s Jesus: Characterization as Narrative Christology.  Waco: Baylor University Press, 2009.
• Maloney, Francis J.  Mark: Storyteller, Interpreter, Evangelist.  Peabody: Hendrickson, 2004.
• Moore, Stephen D.  Mark and Luke in Poststructuralist Perspectives: Jesus Begins to Write. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Moore, Stephen D.  “Mark and Empire.” Pages 70-90 in Recognizing the Margins: Developments in Biblical and Theological Studies. Essays in Honor of Sean Freyne.  Edited by Werner G. Jeanrond and A. D. H. Mayes. Dublin, Ireland: Columba, 2006.
• Myers, Ched.  Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus.  Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988.
• Myles, Robert J.  “Dandy Disciples: A Queering of Mark’s Male Disciples.”  Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4 (2010): 66-81.
• Peterson, Dwight N.  The Origins of Mark: The Markan Community in Current Debate.  Leiden: Brill, 2000.
• Powell, Mark Allan.  “Toward a Narrative-Critical Understanding of Mark.”  Interpretation 47 (1993): 341-46.
•  Rhoads, David and Michie, Donald.  Mark as Story:  An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel.  Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982.
• Rhodes, David, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie.  Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel.  Second edition.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999.
• Smith, Stephen H.  A Lion With Wings: A Narrative-Critical Approach to Mark’s Gospel.  The Biblical Seminar 38.  Sheffield:
  Sheffield Academic Press, 1996.
• Tannehill, Robert C. “The Disciples in Mark: The Function of a Narrative Role.”  The Journal of Religion 57 (1977): 386-405
• Tolbert, Mary Ann.  Sowing the Gospel:  Mark’s World in a Literary-Historical Perspective.  Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989.
• van Iersel, Bas M.F.  Mark: A Reader-Response Commentary.  London and New York: T&T Clark, 1998.

Distinctive Features of Mark Part IV: Markan Hyperbolic Language

Another key feature of Mark is its use of literary exaggeration.  I have already discussed the example of “and immediately” which seems to magnify the excitement of Mark’s fast-paced narrative.  In this post I want to look at some other Markan exaggerations such as the use of “all” (πᾶς) which, would be unrealistic if taken literally, but seem to be deliberate hyperbole for rhetorical effect.  To give a few examples:

“And there went out to him [John the Baptist] all the country of Judea, and all the people of  Jerusalem; and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins” (Mark 1:5)

• It is unlikely that the entire of Judea and city of Jerusalem was depopulated to go out to get baptized by John, but it does serve to magnify the importance of what John was doing.  It is also interesting how Mark reverses the normal values attached to geographical spaces like Jerusalem (centre, urban, civilization) and the wilderness (chaos, liminal) (see Eric C. Stewart, Gathered Around Jesus:  An Alternative Spatial Practice in the Gospel of Mark)

“And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee… That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.  And the whole city was gathered together about the door…  And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out.”  And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons” (1:28, 32-33, 38-39)

• Mark depicts one very busy day in Capernaum!  Again, it seems to magnify the importance of Jesus as news spreads immediately throughout Galilee and Jesus heals all the sick or those seeking exorcisms.  Jesus is also described as travelling throughout the “towns” of Galilee and healing in their local assemblies (“synagogues”), though conspicuously the Markan Jesus is never located in the two major urban centres of Sephoris and Tiberius.  This again may reverse the elite values attached to these places as these urban centres are seen as exploitive and parasitic on village life.

“For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they wash their hands, observing the tradition of the elders” (7:3)

• Not all of the first-century Jews adopted the extra-biblical purity halakhah of the Pharisees.  However, contrary to some scholarship Mark is not ignorant about the purity system (see James Crossley, “Halakah and Mark 7.4 : ‘…and beds’“; ”Halakah and Mark 7.3: ‘with the hand in the shape of a fist’“) and it must be remembered that the evangelist is describing the practice polemically rather than objectively.  The Epistle of Aristeas 305-6 uses a similar generalization of “all” when seeking to explain the Jewish practice of handwashing to a non-Jewish readership.

“he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and he would not allow any one to carry anything through the temple…  the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him; for they feared him, because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching” (11:16, 18)

• I discussed in a past post why I think the historical Jesus likely uttered a threat against the Temple with a symbolic gesture of overturning a few tables, but Mark clearly exaggeratees the scene in stressing Jesus’ unrivalled authority.  If Jesus was able to shut down the entire cult of the massive Temple complex in the midst of the busy time of Passover when pilgrims flooded the city, there is no chance that he would not immediately have been taken into custody or killed.

Distinctive Features of Mark Part III: Odd Explanatory Asides with “Gar”

One thing that Mark is fond of is the use is gar-clauses in making explanatory asides in the narrative (21 times).  Just by typing “conjunction gar in Mark” into a google search engine, I found some discussion of the Greek conjunction gar (for) at the online Biblical Greek Forum.  Many of Mark’s gar-clauses seem oddly placed and even potentially embarrassing, which is why Matthew and Luke often edit them out.  To give a few examples from the NRSV:

“he [Jesus] saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake—for they were fishermen” (Mark 1:16)

• This added explanation may be a little redundant.

“And immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve  years of age)” (Mark 5:42; the english translation here somewhat masks it by leaving the gar untranslated and interpreting this as a parenthetical aside)

• What does the girl’s age have to do with the fact that Jesus raised her from the dead?

“Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened” (Mark 6:52)

• Unlike the parallel in Matthew where the disciples respond to Jesus walking on water by paying obeisance to the Son of God, Mark’s version has the troubling implications that the disciples hearts are heardened.  It is also odd that the gar-clause explains their reaction here based on their earlier ignorance of Jesus’ feeding miracle.

“When he [Jesus] came to it [the fig tree], he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs” (Mark 11:13)

• Mark’s gar-clause explains why Jesus did not find any fruit on the tree, but then lashing out and cursing the tree hardly seems fair.

All these instances could be taken as examples of Mark’s rough style, but they may also serve a useful purpose for the narrator.  In the last post, we saw how Mark’s description of the girl as 12 (like the hemorrhaging woman suffering for 12 years) may be key to the symbolism of the story and that the cursing of the fig tree is linked to the judgment on the Temple.  A well-known article that calls attention to the odd gar-clauses and seeks a deeper meaning behind them is C.H. Bird, “Some Gar Clauses in St. Mark’s Gospel” JTS 4 (1953): 171-187.  In his excellent work on reader-response criticism and Mark, Robert Fowler also offers an explanation starting on page 92 that you can access on google preview from his book Let the Reader Understand.

Distinctive Features of Mark Part II: Markan Sandwiches

Mark often interrupts one story by seemingly inserting another unrelated story, following a pattern A1 (story one) – B (new story) – A2 (completion of story one), but in a way that they seem to mutually interpret one another.  This technique of intercalation, or Markan sandwiches, has been identified most prominently at Mark 3:20–35; 5:21–43; 6:7–30; 11:12–22; 14:1–11; 14:1-11, 14:53-72 (some other bloggers have listed further examples here, here, here).  So, for instance, the story of Jesus raising the 12 year old (cf. 5:42) daughter of the synagogue ruler Jairus is interrupted by the healing of the woman suffering from haemorrhages for 12 years, so Mark may want to teach something about faith by juxtaposing these two stories together and the female characters may also symbolize the restoration of Israel (e.g., 12 tribes).  The framing of Jesus prophetic denouncement in the Temple with the cursing of the fig-tree and its subsequent withering forms a commentary on what will happen to the fruitless Temple (11:12-22).  The efforts of Jesus’ own kin (probably what Mark intends with the Greek hoi par autou) to restrain him and Jesus’ redefinition of his family as those who do God’s will frames the section on blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, so rejecting Jesus as crazy is equivalent to the scribes accusation that he is possessed by Beelzebub.  If you are interested in further details, see online James R. Edwards, Markan Sandwiches: The Significance of Interpolations in Markan Narratives” Novum Testamentum 31 (1989): 193-216.

Distinctive Features of Mark’s Gospel Part I

Over the next few posts I want to look at some of the distinctive features of Mark’s story-telling.  Some might classify these as redactional, and they could very well be, but since we do not have Mark’s sources then we cannot be certain.  An example is εὐθύς (immediately) or  καὶ εὐθὺς (and immediately) which I was originally tempted to name my blog before I discovered another blog with this title.  To see how often this is found in Mark and masked in some English translations, I have selected “Young’s Literal Translation” from www.biblegateway.com of Mark 1:16-45

And, walking by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon, and Andrew his brother, casting a drag into the sea, for they were fishers,and Jesus said to them, `Come ye after me, and I shall make you to become fishers of men;’and immediately, having left their nets, they followed him.  And having gone on thence a little, he saw James of Zebedee, and John his brother, and they were in the boat refitting the nets,and immediately he called them, and, having left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, they went away after him.  And they go on to Capernaum, and immediately, on the sabbaths, having gone into the synagogue, he was teaching, and they were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as having authority, and not as the scribes.   And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out,saying, `Away! what — to us and to thee, Jesus the Nazarene? thou didst come to destroy us; I have known thee who thou art — the Holy One of God.’  And Jesus rebuked him, saying, `Be silenced, and come forth out of him,’and the unclean spirit having torn him, and having cried with a great voice, came forth out of him,and they were all amazed, so as to reason among themselves, saying, `What is this? what new teaching [is] this? that with authority also the unclean spirits he commandeth, and they obey him!’  And the fame of him went forth immediately to all the region, round about, of Galilee.  And immediately, having come forth out of the synagogue, they went to the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John,and the mother-in-law of Simon was lying fevered, and immediately they tell him about her,and having come near, he raised her up, having laid hold of her hand, and the fever left her immediately, and she was ministering to them.  And evening having come, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all who were ill, and who were demoniacs, and the whole city was gathered together near the door,and he healed many who were ill of manifold diseases, and many demons he cast forth, and was not suffering the demons to speak, because they knew him.  And very early, it being yet night, having risen, he went forth, and went away to a desert place, and was there praying;and Simon and those with him went in quest of him,and having found him, they say to him, — `All do seek thee;’and he saith to them, `We may go to the next towns, that there also I may preach, for for this I came forth.’  And he was preaching in their synagogues, in all Galilee, and is casting out the demons,and there doth come to him a leper, calling on him, and kneeling to him, and saying to him — `If thou mayest will, thou art able to cleanse me.’  And Jesus having been moved with compassion, having stretched forth the hand, touched him, and saith to him, `I will; be thou cleansed;’and he having spoken, immediately the leprosy went away from him, and he was cleansed.  And having sternly charged him, immediately he put him forth,and saith to him, `See thou mayest say nothing to any one, but go away, thyself shew to the priest, and bring near for thy cleansing the things Moses directed, for a testimony to them.’  And he, having gone forth, began to proclaim much, and to spread abroad the thing, so that no more he was able openly to enter into the city, but he was without in desert places, and they were coming unto him from every quarter.

By writing this way Mark may wish to heighten the dramatic action right from the start of Jesus’ ministry or it may be an indication of the rough style of the evangelist that will be refined by successors such as Matthew and Luke.  A useful article online that cautions against overreading Mark’s usage and that it may at times just function as a conjuction is by Rodney Decker, “Temporal Deixis of the Greek Verb in the Gospel of Mark with Reference to Verbal Aspect“

Mark and Newer Methods

There is an interesting debate on the necessary tools of the trade by Larry Hurtado and BW16 (also here, here), between a traditional textual analysis with emphasis on language acquisition versus more interdisciplinary approaches and engagement with capital “T” Theory (cf. Pat McCullough’s post explaining the need for biblical scholars to engage theory).  My background is a BA in a Christian Liberal Arts University College where I was introduced to most major theories of biblical studies from the Documentary Hypothesis to the New Perspective on Paul and to Hermeneutics (from the ‘hermeneutical circle to author, text or reader-based criticism).  My MA at the University of Alberta was very interdisciplinary (I took classes in other religions, Anthropology, History of Historiography and Literary Study of the HB) and my advisor introduced me to the field of secular “Religious Studies” (especially social scientific approaches from Emile Durkheim to JZ Smith, Burton Mack).  Now at Sheffield, since the concentration is focussed on “biblical studies,” doctoral students have the option to apply a variety of methods to the biblical text from traditional exegetical ones to newer developments in cultural studies and reception history.  However, while I have posted on historical-critical effort to get behind the text (source, form, redaction), I wish I was more conversant in theory and hesitate to post on newer approaches lest I misrepresent them.  A useful introduction to them as they relate to NT Mark, from narrative, reader, deconstructive, feminist or post-colonial criticism, is found in Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (2nd ed., Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).