Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark VII: It's All Over

Okay, I finished the Greek-reading of the Gospel of Mark last night, with some sense of accomplishment. It's a short and simple text and it is (merely) Biblical and not (gasp) classical--but it was still a stretch and it was nice to get all the way to the end. I guess two summary thoughts crowd out others. One, it is a rather different Jesus than I remember from the movies in Vacation Bible School--crankier, more contentious and challenging. Or to turn it round, a whole lot more interesting than the picture of gossamer serenity that dominates so many readings. And two, it's a pretty strong piece of story telling. You could certainly read it in an evening (if reading in a language you understood, heh heh). I have heard it said it could be read aloud in just two hours, and I suppose it is plausible to speculate that here (as with Homer?) we have a text that had an oral (here, perhaps a collaborative) life before it was ever written down.

It does seem a bit improvisational in structure. Things get repeated--perhaps most notably that feeding of the multitude, leading the reader to speculate on whether it's just accidental or whether there is a larger purpose. The "little apocalypse" does seem to have been just lowered in through the ceiling. Even so, though, he whole moves with a directness and energy that settle it firmly into the catalog of good stories.

I think I'll go on with this reading/translating stuff, although I need a breather, and I think for the next round I may move away from the Gospel--Revelations sounds like fun, and the Greek looks doable. I'm not sure how much I'll blog it: I am glad to have the commitment device (and I have just lately learned about StickK. But reading back, I'd say I find some of my own comments a bit cheesy--not wrong precisely, but stuff that is likely to be irritating to perfectly nice people who never did me any harm. There ought to be better uses for my time.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark VI: Approaching the Main Event

Well, you don't have to wait for this one: here in Chapter 14 of the Gospel of Mark, we begin the narrative of the main event--preparation for crucifixion, to be followed by the deed itself, and resurrection. The story is familiar enough that the Greek is even easier to guess than before, but there are still parts that seem unfamiliar. I don't remember, for example, the woman who poured a bottle of ointment over his head. The text presents a challenge to the translator: for the ointment, the text says " nardou;" footnotes translate "oil of nard;" many translations say "spikenard," which leaves me none the wiser. Wiki identifies "Spikenard" as a flowering plant, "used as a perfume, an incense, a sedative, and an herbal medicine said to fight insomnia, birth difficulties, and other minor ailments."

In any event, the unnamed pourer finds herself in trouble with her mates who complain that the ointment was worth "epano denarion triakosion,"--more than 300 something, but what? The Greek "denairon" suggests Roman "denarii;" a number of translations do indeed say "denarii." King James and others say "pence." The American (sic) standard says "shillings." Weymouth sys "fifteen pounds." One is tempted to say that the effective sum is anybody's guess, but the New Living Translation says "a year's wages" which is functional but not literal (the New International Version says more than a year's wages"), so even functionality does not settle matters.

What we do know is that it is enough for the observers to complain about, leading to an oddly dismissive response from the man (sic?) at the center of the portentous drama:

And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me.

For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.

By the end of Chapter 14, it is pretty clear who the instigators are in this plot: scribes, Pharisees and elders -- "grammateis, "Pharisaioi" and "presbyteroi." Why they should want to make such a big deal out of what appears to be no more than routine sectarian rancor is not (at least so far) explained; and if they did, it is equally unclear why they didn't just have a couple of toughs take him out in the alley.

It is a matter of interest, surely, where the whole story, particularly the edifying detail, all comes from. If you are a believer, the answer is that it is in Holy Scripture and that is it. Even if you are a skeptic, you may believe: Bart Ehrman, a leading critic of Biblical inerrancy, argues that the very fact that the story runs so contrary to a standard mythology--that fact alone, he contends, argues for its authenticity. Others--Burton Mack?--note that 40-odd years have passed since the apparent moment, long enough to leave the truth so shrouded in legend that one may despair of ever reaching through to it. But this brings us full circle: if it really is a fiction--if Mark did make it up--than you have to want to know more about just how he did it.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark V: The Little Apocalpyse

I continue reading (or "decoding") the Greek original of the Gospel of Mark--

Chapter 12 is, in a sense, sameold sameold: more quarreling with the establishment (scribes and Pharisees). But Jesus gets more programmatic: here we find "Render under Caesar..." (Mark 12:17); also "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Mark 12:31). There's also a parable about a "husbandman" who kills the son of the man who owns the vineyard, and come to a bad end; also another, stranger story about a woman who married (in succession) seven brothers, all of whom "left no seed." The question is: whose wife will she be in heaven (the answer seems to be "none")?

None of this really anticipates the extraordinary Chapter 13, the so-called "Little Apocalypse," in which Jesus offers his forecast, and it's not a pretty one: "nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles..." (Mark 13:8). "Little," I take it, means in contrast to the last book of the New Testament, the "Revelation" or (big) "Apocalypse." I've heard it said that Revelation is the most-cited book in the Bible, and I can believe the "Little Apocalypse" shares its place as a generator of any number of end-time cults (there's even a PBS Frontline Special on the topic, timed to coordinate with the coming of the new millennium in 2000).

But I gather this minatory "prediction" is also taken as evidence that Mark wrote after the Destruction of the Second (Jerusalem) Temple in 70AD and thus enjoys the most powerful ally of any predictor, thee benefit of hindsight. Indeed I gather that the whole point of the Gospel of Maark is to stitch together a new self-understanding for the nascent Christian community as it undertakes to rebuild itself out of the ruins.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark IV: Out Stealing Horses

Chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark must be the oddest I've read so far. This is the one where he drives the moneychangers out of the temple. We've all heard about that one. But it is also the one in which he rebukes a fig tree. He also sends the boys out to steal a horse.

You think I make this stuff up? Here is the fig tree (Mark 11:13-14):

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.

And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.

And the horse. Well, perhaps a "colt," but still (Mark 11:2-6):

...Go your way into the village over against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring him.

And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither.

And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him.

And certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye, loosing the colt?

And they said unto them even as Jesus had commanded: and they let them go.

Some will say this isn't theft because consensual. I'm not so sure. Imagine only slightly modernized version. Two strangers show up and start untethering your horse.

--Hey, where you goin' with that horse?
--The boss needs him!
--Oh. Okay.

"Christ's coming into Jerusalem" recounts a commentator, "thus remarkably shows that he was not afraid of the power and malice of his enemies." My guess is that the police court judge is going to have a real good laugh over that one.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark III

Wups, here it comes! I had remarked on how unremarkable was the career of Jesus in the early portions of the Gospel of Mark. But then out of nowhere (as it seems) in the middle of Chapter 8 (verse 29), we get:

And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

Then in verse 31:

And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Cat's pretty much out of the bag now, wouldn't you say? I think this is the first time the word "Christ" (i.e., "Messiah" or "anointed one") has been used in Mark. But just to remove any doubt, next in Chapter 9 we find Jesus climbing "a high mountain," there to disport himself with Elias and Moses. And as if to drive the point home, here's the voice again, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, saying (Maerk 9:7) "this is my beloved Son: hear him."

Generally, Chapters 9 and 10 include more routine garden-variety healing, but also an increasing amount of programmatic preaching, the sort you would expect from an agent of the Almighty. The interesting wrinkle is that at least as presented so far, all this is supposed to be a secret among the special friends. Mark 8:30, omitted between the two verses quoted above, says:

And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

So also in Mark 10:32:

He took again the twelve, and began to tell them what things should happen unto him.

Fine, but the question remains: why the big secret? If there is this grisly life (!) plan, and if he knows it and the disciples are to know it, why should they "tell no man" what is up?

I'm sure that barrels of ink have been spilled over this one and I am only guessing, but two thoughts. One, the writer does seem to be talking out of both sides of his mouth here. We have this "tell no man" stuff. But on the same page, almost in the same paragraph, we see Jesus speaking--and the crowd responding--in a manner as if to suggest that they know perfectly well what is afoot.

And two--this is only speculation, but I wonder if the writer didn't feel the need to defend against a certain kind of critic. That is: apparently quite a few scholars agree that a good deal of the "Christ" apparatus was made up after the fact--in the 30s, 40s and 50s. I wonder if the author felt he had to defend himself against those who would say: well, if all this was foreordained, how come nobody knew about it at the time? You're covered if nobody knows except those who are in the club.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark II: The God Story

The late Herb Gardner used to have a riff about "The God Story"--the story of a small boy, born in a Pennsylvania mining town, who grew up to be God ("mama, I think I'm God!") I thought of "the God story," as I was reading the first few chapters of the Gospel of Mark. I was thinking: had I been doing the scouting report, I would not have identified this kid as the one who would grow up to be King of Everything. Granted, he seems to have a knack for driving out demons and healing the sick (one, by spitting), but hey, who among us does not?

Aside from that, Jesus seems to spend most of his time engaged in what Burton Mack would recognize as "pronouncement stories--anecdotes common in the tradition of the Cynics, pithy exchanges with a hostile or skeptical interlocutor in which the favored subject always gets the last word (but then, we aren't told what the other guy said after the last word). So, when someone asked Antisthenes why he kept low company, he replied "Well, physicians attend their patients without catching the fever" (Mack, 95). So, when his antagonists asked Jesus why his people ate with unclean hands, Jesus said "it is not what goes into a person, but what comes out that makes him unclean." Passable material in its own right, I suppose, but it mainly presents a man who has some cleanliness issues with the Pharisees. As to the bigger stuff, we'll have to wait and see.

I mentioned yesterday that I did find the Salome story. I might have added that until a couple of years ago, I just assumed something so saucy could not possibly be part of Holy Writ. I had a fairly decent bout of religious instruction in Presbyterian Sunday School in the 1940s, but I guess they skipped that part. But here it is: Mark 6:17-29; cf Matthew 14:3-11. [Update: But whups--it turns out she isn't named in either version. It was so obvious to me what story I was reading that I missed that point. Evidently for her name, you have to go to Josephus and his Jewish Antiquities.]

I said we wouldn't guess that he was bound for greater things. Let me revise that. In Mark 1:7, John the Baptist says "There cometh one mightier thn I after me, the latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose." And in verse 11, "a voice form heaven"says "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." You can't buy publicity like that.

Liveblogging the Gospel of Mark I

When I set out to learn Greek, my goal was to read Thucydides. Hah, fat chance. No one told me that Thucydides was hard even by Greek standards, and that given my resources and abilities I had best (as my high school guidance counselor might have said) select some more suitable employment.

By contrast I did my best to stay away from the Bible, which I thought "just not classical enough." But a while ago, cooling my heels in the jury-pool waiting room, I wrapped my mind around a copy of New Testament Greek: A Reader from the Joint Association of Classical Teachers in Britain. I should have foreseen: like all JACT's stuff, this one is a masterpiece of pedagogy: impeccably edited with just the right amount of help to keep you going. Given a lot of hours in a windowless room, it was a perfect companion and I may even have learned a bit.

I didn't follow up on JACT at the time, but just lately, reorganizing a bookshelf, I stumbled on something I didn't know I owned. It's called A Reader's Greek New Testament.* It's not as elegant as JACT, and there are none of those little prodding footnotes that you get in so many student editions. What it does have is a ton of vocabulary: it footnotes virtually every word except the most common. In an introduction, the editors explain that to master this much vocabulary on your own, you'd have to knock off about ten words a day for two years. As the editors do not add, not bloody likely. The (pious) hope is that by reading along with the vocabulary crutches, you will pick up at least a good deal of the vocab on your own.

Oh, goody, I thought. I can read the New Testament. Wait, the whole thing? Again, not bloody likely. For one thing, do I really need to read, say, all those minor letters that are in there only because the editors made mistakes about their authorship? Do I really need to read all of the (admit it, now) sometimes mad ravings of St. Paul?

Well, so maybe some Paul. And Revelations ought to be fun. And the Gospels, oh yes the Gospels. Well, one Gospel.

I actually started with the Gospel of Matthew; I read a few chapters and it was going okay but then it occurred to me: by almost universal assent, the Gospel of Mark is said to be the earliest composed. Might as well approach this task in an intellectually disciplined manner. So I abandoned Matthew (for the moment?) and tackled Mark.

So far, to my pleasant surprise, it is going okay. I'm most of the way through Chapter 6 (of 15) which means, inter alia, that I already got the story of Salome (although I can't seem to find the line that goes "the hell we won't Salome said, and kicked the chandelier!"). I do indeed need the vocabulary notes, though the grammar is pretty straightforward--and though it may be simple, I'd say it is also pretty good review-practice of some basic forms.

As a pony, I also keep around the copy of The New Oxford Annotated Bible, which Mrs. Buce picked up in graduate school. I've also taken a flyer at Burton L. Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of Christian Myth (1995). Mack is a big fan of the Gospel of Mark--he calls it "a literary achievement of incomparable historical significance," (181). The book as a whole is absorbing and instructive, but I mustn't let myself get distracted.

Of course I still don't know if I have the stones to keep going at this. I'm posting this now as a kind of hostage, to commit myself through a form of public shaming. I'll keep you posted. Or maybe I won't. But who knows, if this works, then someday I might even get back to Thucydides.
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*Richard J. Goodrich and Albert L. Lukaszewski (Zondervan 2003).