The Rhetoric of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

Strickland

Introduction

Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours,

then perhaps you might say he was degraded.

But you’ve got to stick to one set of postulates.

You can’t play Electro-magnetic Golf

according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.

—Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Let the reader understand.

—The Gospel of Mark

At the dawn of the form-critical era of New Testament scholarship, Rudolf Bultmann confidently described how the discourse material in the Gospel of Mark came together. As with other synoptic material, Bultmann argued, the discourses in Mark are composites of various traditions that came to the evangelist only after a complex history of development. Though the core of some of these traditions may go back to the historical Jesus, their final forms are the results of years of hard use by the church that completely reshaped them into the voice of the church. Mark collected these traditional units,[1] which generally circulated independently of one another, and combined them around loose themes to create the discourses of Jesus in his Gospel. These disparate traditions, Bultmann was convinced, did not naturally fit together, and since the editor of the Gospel made little effort to reshape the units into one coherent composition, the discourses of Jesus in Mark reveal a number of incoherencies, unnecessary duplications, unwieldy repetitions, examples of awkward syntax, failures in sequential logic, and historical implausibilities. In short, Bultmann was unable to read the discourses as unified speech acts within the narrative of the Gospel:

The speech material was composed when one mashal was joined to another and small groups formed. Sometimes these came together because of some catchword, or a similarity in content or some outward likeness. This also accounts for the longer speeches; i.e., collections of particular units. But this does not account for organic compositions, speeches that are a real unity, dominated by a specific theme and systematically arranged, unless the peculiar character of the ancient traditional material has been completely altered. Happily that did not take place in the Synoptic Gospels.[2]

Bultmann’s conclusions regarding the lack of organic composition and real unity in the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark are typical for much of twentieth-century scholarship. Until only the last three decades—in which a strong literary interest in Mark’s Gospel has emerged—Markan scholarship had been primarily concerned with historical questions: questions regarding the historical Jesus, the early church, or the theology of the evangelist or of his so-called community. For such scholars, the entire narrative of Mark has generally served as little more than a loose collection of materials drawn from a variety of sources that predate the Gospel itself. Thus, the reading methodologies of these historical critics have been specifically designed to look behind the narrative: the traditional units in Mark are distilled from the overall Gospel and placed within a larger repertoire of historical data concerning Jesus and the early Christian communities. As a result of their reading methodologies, historical critics have perceived only fragmentation in the Markan discourses of Jesus, and the overall rhetorical unity of the discourses has been ignored or denied. Instead, historical critics have considered Mark’s handling of the pre-synoptic traditions and sources to have been awkwardly rigid or just downright clumsy.

Since the early 1980s, however, a number of literary-sensitive studies of Mark’s Gospel have been made with surprising results. Rather than splintering the narrative in order to contribute to an interpretive repertoire of historical issues, literary critics have drawn from repertories composed of historical, sociological, and narrative data to inform various readings of the narrative itself, and have found a high degree of inner consistency and congruency in Mark’s work. Often for these critics, the same phenomena regarded by historical critics as indications of traditional seams or redundancies left from vestigial sources are rather attributed to deliberative storytelling techniques common in first-century narratives—or for that matter, in narratives in general.

If one draws from the repertoire of material embracing first-century Greco-Roman rhetoric, a strikingly different picture of the discourse material in Mark emerges from that purveyed by the historical critics. Instead of appearing awkward or clumsy, the discourse material in Mark emerges as skillfully composed, and the narrator of the Gospel can be heard as an effective storyteller. Since the discourses are, in fact, narrative representations of speeches, it makes sense to hear them as speeches, drawing upon our knowledge of compositional and rhetorical techniques taught in the first-century milieu. Several recent studies have made use of Greco-Roman rhetoric to examine the overall Gospel of Mark. These studies have provided persuasive evidence that Mark was a skillful writer who efficiently integrated his various narrative and discursive elements into a coherent whole.

A few investigations have actually attempted to evaluate the various discursive elements in the Gospel in terms of Greco-Roman rhetoric, but as yet no study has applied a disciplined rhetorical methodology to each of the major discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. This book analyzes the four major discourses of Jesus in Mark (Mark 3:20–35, 4:1–34, 6:53–7:23, and 11:27‒13:37) in the context of Greco-Roman rhetoric in an attempt to hear them as a first-century audience would have heard them. The analysis will thus uncover how the discourses are constructed, what issues each discourse seeks to treat, how the argumentation, arrangement, and style of each discourse contributes to its overall purpose, and how the discourse fits into the overall narrative context of the Gospel. The analyses will show that, contrary to what many twentieth-century historical critics have found, first-century audiences of Mark would have found the discourses of Jesus unified, well-integrated, and persuasive. It will also show how the speeches of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel contribute to Mark’s overall narrative accomplishments.

Chapter 1 briefly explores the ways the discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel have been treated by source, form, and redaction critics before turning to more recent literary and rhetorical studies. It is shown that historical critics have read the discourses as disjointed because they employed historical methodologies, seeking only to peer behind the discourses, using them as windows (with numerous surface distortions) upon extraneous historical data. Literary critics, however, have brought narrative, rhetorical, and sociological methodologies to the discourses and have been able to read them as narrative representations of coherent speech acts, uncovering their rhetorical patterns and taking them as unified portraits or landscapes rather than as windows. With its focus on the narrative accomplishments of the author—its examination of the warp and weave of the actual story of Mark—literary criticism has provided a larger framework for rhetorical analyses of the discourses of Jesus in Mark. Several rhetorical works are surveyed in chapter 1 to provide a context for our own work, which will study the four major discourses as examples of primary Greco-Roman rhetoric.

Chapter 2 seeks to justify the goal of this book by arguing that first-century readers would have heard the discourses as narrative examples of primary rhetoric and would have evaluated them in terms of the canons of Greco-Roman rhetoric.[3] It is argued that the author of the Gospel was quite familiar with the general dimensions of Greco-Roman rhetoric and exploited these in his narrative in order to achieve his own persuasive aims. A methodology is proposed to aid modern readers in analyzing the discourses as primary rhetoric. This methodology is largely derived from the work of George A. Kennedy, although his methodology is broadened to account for the persistent interplay between the narrator’s own level of rhetoric and that of the character of Jesus in each discourse.

Chapters 3 through 6 extensively apply the rhetorical methodology to the four major discourses of Mark: Satan cannot cast out Satan (3:20–35), Whoever has ears had better listen! (4:1–34), What defiles a person? (6:53–7:23), and The marvel of the coming Son of Man (11:27–13:37).[4] The application of our rhetorical methodology will show how first-century audiences would have heard the discourses, and what they would have understood them to be about. The study will also reveal intricate and consistent compositional, stylistic, and logical patterns in each discourse. These patterns create a sense of unity and effectiveness within each speech, usually missed by the historical critics. Furthermore, as the discourse group is progressively studied in the book, it will become apparent that the narrator of Mark consistently followed a well-defined approach to composing the discourses, and that the discourses present a powerful image of Jesus as one who speaks persuasively within the world of the Gospel. These chapters thus expose a narrator who is not clumsy in discourse construction, but who is actually quite skilled both at composing speeches  and  at  integrating  them  into  the  overall  plan  of  the narrative.

The conclusion briefly summarizes the findings of the study and discusses some implications of Mark’s rhetorical abilities. An appendix gives a brief sketch of the history of Greco-Roman rhetoric for those who are not familiar with the interpretive milieu that has informed our method.

From the outset of the Gospel of Mark, the narrator wants the readers to recognize Jesus’s skill as a public speaker. In the earliest reference to Jesus’s teaching in the Gospel (Mark 1:21–28), he is shown to be an effective speaker through Mark’s use of the inclusio he taught as one having authority (vv. 21 and 27). In this short, introductory paragraph, the narrator points out twice that Jesus’s listeners were amazed at his teaching, encouraging the readers also to find amazement in Jesus’s authority as a speaker.

To rediscover how Jesus’s discourses in Mark can provoke amazement—or at least a modest degree of admiration—this book calls for a return to a very old way of hearing the discourses of Jesus in Mark. Ironically, the discourses themselves are concerned with how one listens to Jesus in the Gospel. Perceptual terms abound in the discourses that call for listeners to pay attention, to listen, to watch. Especially in the second major discourse, Mark 4:1–34, Jesus is concerned that individuals may hear his teaching but fail to grasp it. The renowned parable of the sower is concerned precisely with the issue of how one hears, and so Jesus frames the parable with the call, Whoever has ears to hear had better listen!

If contemporary readers listen through the ears of the Greco-Roman rhetorical milieu, the discourses of Jesus can be heard as unified and persuasive, comfortably at home both in the Gospel of Mark and in their social and literary world. Perhaps Jesus’s own words, spoken while describing how to listen to his teaching, best suggest the need to use appropriate methodologies for listening to discourse material:

Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what that person has will be taken away.

Our argument does not require any particular theory as to the identity of the author of the Gospel of Mark. Nevertheless, for convenience we refer to the author as Mark, consistent with the Papias tradition recounted by Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.39.13). ↵

Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, rev. ed., trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 322; emphasis ours. ↵

By primary rhetoric we mean that of the character Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and by secondary rhetoric we mean the rhetoric of the narrator. The terminology follows the work of George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 4–5. Mary Ann Tolbert (Sowing the Gospel [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989], 11–12) provides a rich description of how these two levels can interplay in the Gospels. Obviously the two levels of rhetoric overlap, since the first is part of the strategy of the second. ↵

Each chapter begins with an effort to translate the speech in a manner sensitive to its rhetorical qualities. Since these translations attempt to represent more strictly the rhetorical forms of the original, they are often awkward by standards of English grammar and syntax. ↵

1

The Discourses of Jesus since Form Criticism

Throughout its nineteen centuries of circulation, the Gospel of Mark has been asked numerous questions.[1] Each generation of admirers and critics has looked to the Gospel for information desired in its own era. As groups and individuals in each milieu bring their peculiar questions to the Gospel, they form methodologies appropriate for finding the answers they seek. Thus, all readings of the Gospel are particular to their own cultural and historical contexts, and all methodologies derive from distinct orientations.

Twentieth-Century Historical Scholarship

In general, the questions twentieth-century Western scholars brought to the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark were dominated by historical concerns. This historical orientation was the natural result of the emergence of the nineteenth-century consensus regarding the Jesus material in general, and specifically, regarding the relationship between the Gospel of Mark, the Jesus of history, and the traditional material produced in the interim between the two. Through the quest of the historical Jesus and the search for a solution to the synoptic problem, nineteenth-century scholars had generally concluded that the Gospel of Mark was chronologically first and that it represented a fairly reliable picture of the Jesus of history. These two pillars of Markan scholarship, often termed the Markan hypothesis, came after nineteenth-century scholars broke with centuries of dogmatic use of Mark’s Gospel and ventured out on a purely historical—though not unbiased—investigation of the Jesus material.[2]

The historical orientation of nineteenth-century scholarship was primarily concerned with the relationship between the three Synoptics and with a reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus. The same historical orientation, though, led twentieth-century scholars to focus on the Gospel of Mark itself. The reasoning was convincing enough: if Mark’s Gospel was chronologically first and thus the earliest account of the life of Jesus, it must be submitted to careful scrutiny in order to determine its value as a source for the historical Jesus.

Thus, in academic circles, twentieth-century readers of the Gospel of Mark brought a host of historical questions to the Gospel in general and to Jesus’s discourses in the Gospel specifically: How accurate historically is Mark’s depiction of Jesus and of his sayings? How was the Gospel and its discourse material composed? What sources did Mark employ, and from where did these sources come? What does the Gospel with its sayings material tell us about the early Christian community? Such questions necessitated the development of specific reading methodologies designed to peer behind the Gospel of Mark and its discourses to the historical exigencies sought. Several methodologies were developed during the twentieth century to answer these and other historical questions extraneous to the narrative. A great deal of information has been provided by these historical methodologies, but the precise narrative accomplishments of the Gospel as well as the rhetorical accomplishments of its discourse material have always fared poorly in the treatment of traditional historical methodologies.

The tone for twentieth-century scholarship was firmly set by Willem Wrede, whose Das Messiasgeheimnis (1901)[3] drove a wedge between the historical Jesus and Gospel of Mark by showing that the latter was theologically rather than historically oriented. In short, Wrede argued that Mark was something of a creative author whose story of Jesus was not simply a historical account of the life of the Galilean but was a theological piece intended to make a religious statement. Though twentieth-century scholars were slow to accept Wrede’s contention that Mark was something of a creative artist, after Wrede’s Messiasgeheimnis every serious student of Mark has had to acknowledge the existence of a certain distance—a historical and literary gap—between Jesus and the presentation in Mark’s Gospel. For the first half of the twentieth century, Markan scholarship was driven by the need to account for this gap.

The earliest response to this gap was to posit the presence of pre-Markan sources that would somehow account for the relationship between the historical Jesus and the first written Gospel: a collection of so-called Peter-traditions, a Sayings Source (Q), an apocalyptic fly-leaf, an Aramaic account of the Galilean ministry, a Hellenistic Passion narrative, and the like. Source critics thought that they could establish the parameters of these hypothetical pre-Markan sources by examining various narrative and discursive seams in the Gospel of Mark, separating repetitious and redundant elements, uncovering historical and psychological implausibilities or variances in narrative perspectives, and identifying irregular lexical choices. Approaching the discourses with the critical goal of identifying their pre-Markan sources, source critics learned to look behind the discourses at the contents and orientations of their supposed pre-Markan sources.[4]

In order to strengthen their case for the presence of pre-Markan sources behind the discourses in Mark, source critics were forced to make much of apparent narrative and discursive seams. Having exaggerated these joints in the discourses, however, source critics were then unable to read the discourses as coherent speech acts and consequently found themselves having to explain why Mark had failed to combine them deftly. Two general solutions to this problem were offered by source critics. Some critics, such as Johannes Weiss,[5] R. P. J. Huby,[6] and Arthur Cadoux,[7] claimed that Mark was too concerned with preserving the integrity of the source material to incorporate that material in a smooth fashion, since it would have required altering the contents of the material. Other critics, such as Julius Wellhausen,[8] Alfred Loisy,[9] and Benjamin Bacon,[10] explained that  Mark  was  simply  too  unskilled  as  an  editor  to integrate the source material smoothly into his narrative. In either case, source critics generally considered Jesus’s discourses in Mark incoherent and disjointed compilations—aggregates of source material loosely arranged around a common theme or word group. These discourses are not organically unified speech acts with a consistent style, arrangement, or logic, source critics argued. Instead, as Cadoux explains,

Inconsistency of narrative and difference of outlook and interest are taken as evidence of difference of source. Doublets, or more or less variant accounts of what seems to be the same incident or saying are taken to come from different sources. Difference of outlook and interest or discrepancy of narrative between a passage and any two other sources is taken tentatively as suggesting that the passage belongs to the third source.[11]

By 1919, source criticism in Markan studies was giving way to the Formgeschichtliche Methode. Form critics shared the historical interests of source critics and their proclivity to read behind the narrative, but form critics sought the background of the Gospel material in a proposed body of general traditions (rather than fixed written sources) that went through rather extensive development in the early church before being collected and adapted by the evangelists themselves. The form critics were in agreement that the Gospel of Mark, including its discourse material, is composed of a number of disparate traditions artlessly arranged in an artificial framework and that the traditional material can hardly be considered well-integrated into a coherent story.

The task of the form critic was thus to identify the form of tradition present in each Gospel pericope—since identification of the tradition’s form provides the necessary clue for verifying its function in the church—and to uncover the history of each tradition’s development from its origins to its present state in the Gospels. Dibelius[12] and Bultmann[13] defined the typical discourse forms of the synoptic tradition in two broad categories: illustrations (called Paradigma by Dibelius and Apophthegmata by Bultmann), which presented a rounded story culminating in a decisive saying by Jesus; and sayings (called Paränese by Dibelius) composed of maxims, parabolic sayings, prophetic and apocalyptic sayings, community rules, and the like. For each form of discourse material, form critics argued, there is a different Sitz im Leben, or developmental setting, within the life of the early community. For the most part, Aramaic influences within a tradition were taken by form critics to indicate Palestinian origins and thus, more antiquity. Constructions peculiar to the Greek language or to the non-Jewish church were taken to indicate Hellenistic influences and thus, later accretions to the tradition. In addition to identifying actual traditional forms, then, form critics attempted to separate Aramaic influences from Hellenistic influences within the traditions to reveal the history of development of these traditions.

The form critics thus continued the historical propensity to read the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark backward—looking at the present state of each tradition and postulating how that tradition developed in the church prior to its adoption by the editor of the Gospel. By using the other canonical Gospels, as well as noncanonical source material (such as the Gospel of Thomas), form critics thought they could provide a fairly comprehensive history of each tradition that lies behind the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, and thereby redefine the Jesus of history and identify the theology of the emerging church.

In addition to the seams found by the source critics, then, the historical work of the form critics has resulted in two more methods of fragmentation in the study of the discourses in Mark. First, multiple traditional forms within any given discourse were considered to indicate disparate contextual backgrounds to the elements of that discourse. Thus, for example, since he was able to locate two clearly identifiable apophthegmata in Mark 3:20–35 (3:22–30 and 3:31–35), it was obvious to Bultmann that the discourse as it now stands in Mark’s Gospel is not really one well-integrated discourse but an artificial composite that distorts the original orientation of each tradition it uses.[14] A second fragmenting method used by the form critics was the application of linguistic data to delineate between Aramaic and Hellenistic influences upon the tradition, an application that resulted in an even greater appearance of incoherence in the Markan discourse sections as they presently stand. Bultmann applies this method exhaustively to the discourses, constantly splintering them into various layers of developmental history, each layer awkwardly overlaid upon the former. As a result of the fragmenting process of form criticism, the discourses of Jesus in Mark emerged as fractured and incohesive patchworks of material, often with disjointed or even conflicting layers of meaning.

With the publication of Willi Marxsen’s Der Evangelist Markus (1956),[15] a new methodology—Redaktionsgeschichte—was applied to the Gospel of Mark to answer a new set of historical questions. Assuming that the so-called editor of the Gospel of Mark had a theological agenda behind his Gospel, the redaction critics reversed the order of the form critics: starting with the (presumed) traditions behind the narrative, the redaction critics sought to explain how and why the evangelist made use of them. The redaction critics thus found a purpose to Mark’s editorial activity, and in order to uncover this purpose they examined the seams of the narrative, the arrangement of the traditions, and the minute alterations made by the evangelist to these traditions, as well as the overall thematic interests in the Gospel.

With the redaction critics, the congruity of the discourses of Jesus often fared slightly better than with the source and form critics, for even though they admitted the presence of disjunction and incoherence, the redaction critics generally found that the evangelist had imposed a light sense of unity upon the traditional material in the discourses. For example, Marxsen admits that Mark 13 is composed of several disparate traditions and actually contains contradictions as a result of Mark’s conflation of these. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, a subtle, overarching purpose emerges in the editorial activity of Mark—specifically, an effort to alter his community’s apocalyptic world view into an eschatological one.[16]

After Marxsen, redaction critics wavered back and forth between positions that acknowledged Markan creativity, hence perceiving more unity to the discourse material in the Gospel (e.g., Étienne Trocmé,[17] Joachim Gnilka,[18] and Dieter Lührmann[19]) and those that denied creativity, generally searching for redactional purpose only in a few editorial words and in the general arrangement of the traditions (e.g., Walter Grundmann,[20] D. E. Nineham,[21] and Rudolf Pesch[22]). In both cases, however, with redaction critics, the concern remained primarily historical, as they continued the tendency to look behind the text, seeking the historical theology of the Markan community or that of the evangelist himself. Redaction critics continued to base their understandings of the Jesus discourses upon the evangelist’s presumed use of pre-Markan traditions, rather than attempting to account for the various elements in the Gospel in strict narrative or rhetorical terms. Furthermore, because redaction critics often found the genius of Mark’s peculiar theology to lie where his use of the traditions actually differs from that of Matthew and Luke, redaction criticism developed a subtle tendency to interpret Mark through the eyes of the other Synoptics. The constant comparison of the discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel with similar discourses in the other Synoptic Gospels has done little to aid in the appreciation of Mark’s own rhetorical accomplishments in the discourses of Jesus.

Source, form, and redaction critics in the twentieth century thus generally concluded that the discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel as they presently stand are incoherent and awkwardly composed. J. Meager states the position to which historical critics had come regarding the discourses of Jesus in the three-quarters of a century after  Wrede:  [In  Mark’s  Gospel]  the  leaven  of  clumsiness  is manifestly operative, on various scales and in varying degrees, throughout the received material.[23] Such scholars cite several reasons for finding incongruities in the discourses: apparent seams, an apparent lack of sequential logic, repetitions, doublets, historical and psychological implausibilities, thematic disparities, linguistic variations, and the like. Yet these tensions only arose in the history of research when readers began attempting to read behind the text.[24] This was the driving force behind twentieth-century historical criticism: the desire to see through the narrative to historical realities that lie behind the Gospel itself, such as the life of the historical Jesus, the early Christian community, or the Sitz im Leben of the individual evangelists. For traditional historical critics, the Gospels are mere mediums for the historical phenomena sought: they are accounts or records of something extraneous to the narrative. The rationale for treating the Gospels as accounts rather than as narratives[25] has varied between the extremes of source critics, who often believed that the Gospel writers depended upon reliable eyewitnesses of Jesus for their material (die Petrusüberlieferung), to form critics, who often asserted that the evangelists were mere collectors (Sammler) of traditions that were actually created by the church. In both cases, the assumption was the same: the Gospels were not the products of the creative genius of their authors. The historical critics determined that the Gospels are not true literature. Instead, they are mere records—perhaps poor records—of Jesus or the early Christian community. The value of the Gospels lay in whatever historical evidence they provide for the Gospel critics.[26]

The desire to peer behind the discourses is what led historical critics to assume that repetitions within them are evidence of multiple sources rather than the use of rhetorical devices intended to highlight, recapitulate, or otherwise draw attention to an issue. It curbed the historical critics’ ability to see framing words, periodic sentences, or chiastic episodes as rhetorical strategies; instead, historical critics were led by their presuppositions to consider these devices to be indications of traditional layers awkwardly juxtaposed by sometimes clumsy redactors. Slight scene changes, such as Jesus’s turn from the Pharisees to the crowds in Mark 7:1–23, were considered redactional seams rather than common storytelling transitional methods of the period (or, in this case, of any period). In short, it led them to break the discourses into pieces and to claim that no coherency could be found.

The Transition to Literary Approaches

In some ways, the historical preoccupation of twentieth-century biblical scholarship merely reflected what was happening in more general literary circles of the time, where there was little emphasis on literary aesthetics but a great deal of emphasis on historical and biographical backgrounds.[27] The determination that Mark is, as the redaction critic Étienne Trocmé suggests, a clumsy writer unworthy of mention in any history of literature,[28] however, was actually aided by the tendency to compare the Gospel of Mark to the high-cultured literature of the Greco-Roman milieu.[29] If the canons of Greco-Roman literature are limited to the standard works used in the ephebic schools (Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, Virgil, Terence, Cicero, etc.), by comparison the Gospels appear to be something other than literature: collections of traditions, combinations of sources, community products, cult legends, and so on.[30] As early as the church fathers, the Gospels were declared to be nonliterary in this sense.[31] Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship concurred, opening the door to the variety of theories discussed above about how these nonliterary productions came to be, about their nature, their genre, and so forth. It was only in this environment that, for example, it could be argued that the Gospels form a unique genre.[32]

Since the late 1960s, however, the Gospels have begun to be more closely compared with ancient literature and have been shown to have been more at home in their literary milieu than previously thought. Various scholars have found in the Gospel of Mark elements of Greek drama, including both tragedy and comedy,[33] Greco-Roman biography,[34]aratology,[35]apomnemoneumata,[36] eschatologically oriented historiography,[37] and general popular literature such as the novel,[38] the Hebrew Bible or Jewish apocalyptic,[39] even the Greek epic of Homer.[40] No consensus has been reached on the genre of the Gospels, but this is understandable when one realizes that the Gospels were produced by and for the nonaristocratic populace—they were popular literature.[41] Precious little of the literature produced by the nonelite masses in the Greco-Roman world remains. Genres are determined by reading conventions, and reading conventions are, in turn, shaped by the social world of the authors and readers of literature. Since those who preserved Greco-Roman literature were mostly from the aristocracy and their interests were primarily in their own elite literature, there is little literature available today from the majority of society with which to compare the Gospels.[42] Mark’s Gospel belongs to the level of popular literature, which does not read like the literature of the elite, but which is still capable of accomplishing its narrative aims among the largely illiterate populace of the Greco-Roman world. Seen this way, the literary quality of the Gospel of Mark has been increasingly recognized by the work of the literary critics. As Bryan states in his study of Mark’s genre:

Mark’s Greek is the language of popular written style (which tends to be close to spoken language) rather than that of the literati. It could have been read aloud to good effect, and would have been understood by everyone present, whatever their level of education.[43]

Whatever the genre of the Gospels, the recent work of literary criticism has brought a new set of questions to the Gospel of Mark, and new methodologies have been developed to answer these questions.[44] Literary criticism tends to ask questions about the narrative itself, rather than about historical issues the text might discuss. Petersen explains the difference between historical and literary critics:

One could say that the historical critic looks through the text to what it refers or points to and treats the text as evidence for something else, while the literary critic looks at the text for what it says in itself by means of the patterning or shaping—the informing—of its content.[45]

Thus, literary critics have brought to Mark questions about its particular narrative accomplishments (How is the plot of Mark developed? How are the characters depicted? What are the stylistic implications of the narrative and its discourses?), about the social setting and the sociology of the narrative (How does the narrative speak to various social classes? What ideology does the story convey?), about the particular literary setting of the Gospel (What is its genre? How does it relate to the storytelling techniques common to its day?), as well as many other questions. The applications of these methodologies to Mark have produced a new view of Mark’s literary pedigree. Contrary to some of the conclusions of historical criticism, over the last thirty years literary criticism has uncovered an organized and coherent texture to the story of the Gospel and to its discourses. Literary critics take seriously the fact that, no matter what its relationship to historical  people  or  events,  Mark’s  Gospel  as  we  have  it  tells a story and creates its own narrative world.[46] This story world is the construct of a narrator, who has carefully composed each part of the narrative  to  contribute  to  the  whole.  Thus,  whereas  historical critics tended to dissect the discourses of Jesus in Mark and to attempt to locate them in the history of pre-Markan traditions, literary critics have attempted to read them as unified discourses and have tended to see them as well-integrated parts of the overall narrative of the Gospel.

Literary approaches are legitimate precisely because Mark can be read as a coherent narrative, and there is no evidence that Mark did not fully intend his Gospel to be heard by his audience as a unified, well-integrated presentation. The Gospel narrator tells a single story about a central character, moving from a clear beginning to a definite end. The story bears a unified narrative point of view, the characters are consistently portrayed, and the thematic and organizational elements are constant. Even the language of the Gospel is surprisingly consistent in terms of the syntactical style, the choice of words, and word formations. Further, the story raises issues that it later resolves; predictions are made that are later fulfilled; expectations are raised, later to be realized. To cite the critics Rhoads, Dewey, and Michie regarding Mark, The unity of the Gospel is apparent in the remarkable integrity of the story it tells.[47]

The transition to literary approaches in Markan studies over the past thirty years has been remarkable. Prior to 1980 it was difficult to find a commentary that treated the narrative of Mark seriously. In the last twenty years, however, one might have difficulty finding a commentary that does not use some literary model for interpreting Mark’s Gospel. As Juel suggested even as early as 1994, there is virtual agreement among students of Mark that his Gospel is worth reading as a narrative and that the Gospel must be treated, at least to some degree, as a complete story.[48] Harrington sums up the shift well:

Perhaps the most important development in Markan studies over the past twenty years has been the shift in emphasis from the world behind the text (history, sources, etc.) to the text itself and to the reader of the text. For most of the twentieth century the focus in Markan research was on the person of Jesus (Mark as an entry point for recovering the historical Jesus), on the sources collected and used by the Evangelist Mark (form criticism as a literary and historical tool), and on the life and times of the Markan community (redaction criticism); however in recent times there has developed a greater concentration on how the form of Mark’s text that is available now to us communicates and on how it has been read in the past and is read today.[49]

Literary approaches to Mark’s Gospel have come to dominate Markan studies. As Horsley says, during the last two decades the ‘reading’ and literary analysis of Mark and other Gospels has become a virtual growth industry.[50] Such approaches have taken many directions. Indeed, recent decades have seen an explosion of interdisciplinary literary approaches to the Gospel of Mark, driven by sociological, political, anthropological, linguistic, semiotic, postmodern, feminist, ideological, psychological, and other interests.[51]

A number of these have adopted more traditional literary approaches and seek to explore the nature of the narrative of Mark’s Gospel more or less for narrative reasons (i.e., to understand the relationships of the various elements of the narrative world created by Mark’s story). These readings develop numerous methodologies whose strategies and terminologies frequently overlap—reader response criticism, compositional criticism, narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, genre criticism, anthropological/social criticism, and the like.[52]

Rhetorical-Critical Studies

Many literary critics thus begin with the recognition that, whatever sources might lie behind Mark’s Gospel, the final product contains a story  that  is  the  result  of  creative,  purposeful  choice.  One  of  the tasks of the literary critic, then, is to show how the narrative and rhetorical choices made in the narrative influence the whole of the story.[53] A number  of  literary  studies  have  been  made  of  the  Gospel  of  Mark, as well as of individual narrative elements in the Gospel. The discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel, however, are narrative representations of speeches, and as such they require special sensitivity both to narrative and to rhetorical issues. Over the past three decades, several studies have made substantial attempts to account for the choices present in the discourses of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel in specifically rhetorical terms. A survey of the few works that have will help situate this present work in the history of recent literary/rhetorical research on the discourses of Jesus.

The structural studies by Jan Lambrecht[54] and Joanna Dewey[55] demonstrate that, when read from the perspectives of literary criticism, the discourses of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark present themselves as structurally unified. Both Lambrecht and Dewey consciously move away from redaction criticism, treating instead the formal features of various discourses in Mark and pointing out well-developed structural plans based on such devices as chiasms, link words, parallelisms, and inclusios.

Lambrecht disagrees with the bulk of Markan scholarship and argues that Mark 13 is not a loose collection of free logia or a reworked apocalyptic flyleaf. Rather, it is a unified composition resulting from the artistry of the redactor, who completely imposed his own interests and techniques upon whatever material he had at his disposal. Furthermore, Lambrecht finds the entire discourse to be well-integrated within the overall context of the Gospel, appropriately functioning as Jesus’s farewell discourse. Lambrecht’s final schema of the discourse is very detailed, but his synopsis reveals the formal  structure  he  believes  the  redactor  has  imposed  upon  the material:[56]

The intricate chiastic structure of the discourse that Lambrecht identifies gives the discourse unity and provides clues for its interpretation. Further integration is provided by the use of a number of inclusios in the discourse:[57] εἰπὸν ἡμῖν and ἤρξατο λέγειν αὐτοῖς (vv. 4–5a) with προείρηκα ὑμῖν (v. 23b); βλέπετε μή τις ὑμᾶς (v. 5b) with ὑμεῖς δὲ βλέπετε (v. 23a); πλανήσῃ (v. 5b) and πλανήσουσιν (v. 6b) with πρὸς τὸ ἀποπλανᾶν (v. 22b); ἐλεύσονται (v. 6a) with ἐγερθήσονται (v. 22a); ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματί μου (v. 6a) with ἐγερθή-σονται (v. 22a); Ἐγώ εἰμι (v. 6a) with ψευδόχριστοι (v. 22a); πλανήσουσιν (v. 6b) and (βλέπετε) μή (v. 5b) with μή (πιστεύετε) (v. 21c). The use of chiasms, inclusios, and other structural devices provides Lambrecht with sufficient evidence to declare the discourse an Einheit des Ganzen hin zum Teil.

Dewey’s study of various Markan pericope is similar to that of Lambrecht’s analysis of Mark 13. Although she focuses primarily on the Streitgespräche of Mark 2:1–3:6, Dewey also applies her rhetorical critical methods to Mark 4 and to Mark 11–12. Dewey takes her methodological point of departure from James Muilenburg, who, at the end of the 1960s, had called for more rhetorical studies of the Bible.[58] For Dewey, the task of rhetorical criticism is to study the compositional and stylistic techniques of the Gospel narrative, showing how all its parts fit together in order to determine what the narrator meant. Like Lambrecht, Dewey finds Mark to be something of a literary artist. Mark is a writer of considerable narrative skill, adept at interweaving the elements of his story.[59]

The glue that holds the narrative of Mark’s material together for Dewey, as for Lambrecht, is made of formal compositional features: chiasm, word and form repetition, framing, inclusio, interpolation, and the like. Her analysis of Mark 2:1–3:6 (the bulk of her study) reveals a chiastic structure to the material linked by a number of compositional devices. Turning to the discourse of Mark 4, Dewey is also able to find a chiastic structure governing the entire discourse:

She is able to identify even further a concentric structure to the first half of the discourse:[60]

This structure, Dewey argues, highlights the parable theory of verses 11–12. Though Dewey concedes that there may be a few narrative inconsistencies in the discourse (e.g., the change in audience), she thinks that ancient readers would have seen the overall unity and interpreted the discourses using these formal patterns as a guide.[61]

By using a variety of rhetorical techniques, Dewey argues, the Markan narrator has provided a frame for the Jerusalem public debates of Mark 11–12.[62] This frame for the discourse section is created by the entrance into and the exit from Jerusalem (Mark 11:11 and 13:1). Within this frame, Mark has interposed and overlapped units  to  create  a  tight  interweaving  of  the  sections  that  gives a climactic progression and forms effective dramatic narrative by its adept placement within the context in the overall narrative.[63]

Benoît Standaert[64] shows that the entire Gospel of Mark is unified by what he terms a rhetorical/dramatic structure, and he demonstrates that the world in which Mark’s Gospel was produced was saturated with self-conscious rhetorical interests. Standaert copiously notes the pervasive presence of Greco-Roman rhetorical and dramatic traditions in Mark’s Gospel, and, like Lambrecht and Dewey, he also shows formal structuring devices, such as concentric patterns, chiasms, and inclusios. Strangely, however, Standaert does not always consider the discourses to be fully integrated in the sense of orations with consistent and progressive rhetorical argumentation. For example, about chapter four he concludes,

The parabolic discourse of chapter 4 in Mark does not constitute a single unified oratorical piece: brief narrative propositions subdivide the chapter into seven distinct units (3–9, 10–12, 13–20, 21–23, 24–25, 26–29, 30–32), framed by an introduction (vv 1–2) and a conclusion (vv 33–34).[65]

Rather than finding consistent rhetorical argumentation in the Markan discourses, then, Standaert finds structural order. This is important for our study because it helps clarify the