Introduction to Mark's Gospel Revised Common Lectionary Year B by Rev Dr Graham G Palmer

Mark

By Rev Dr David G Palmer

Introduction

As a Supernumerary Minister of the Methodist Church, I am pleased to be invited to supply my introduction to Mark’s Gospel. 

I offer here an artwork and some notes of mine. The artwork itself has been produced at Double A0 size for exhibition purposes and is now one of a series that I have had reproduced and miniaturised in charts, jigsaws, mugs, mouse-mats, place mats and greetings cards in an attempt to stimulate and renew interest in the church in a serious study of the New Testament Books. 

The artwork, if you are looking at it on screen, can be enlarged electronically, of course. 

If my notes are too short for you here, there are my books and my website with its fuller presentation of this article, under ‘Samples’: www.davidgpalmer.co.uk.

Rev Dr David G. Palmer, Church Gresley, October 2014

Mark's Gospel

Mark’s Gospel was likely written in Rome soon after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of its temple in 70 CE. The need for ‘Good News’ had to be met, and quickly. The return of the victorious General Titus with his spoils from Jerusalem’s temple, coupled with the news of the annihilation of most of the inhabitants of both Jerusalem and Judea, signalled (as it was thought then) the end 
of the Jewish faith. The ‘Mother Church’ of the new Christian Jewish sect (linked with the temple and keeping to the law) was gone too. Someone elsewhere, therefore, had to make sense of these cataclysmic events. Christians were everywhere scattered around the Roman Empire. Now they were adrift. It was they, in the first instance, not ‘the world’, who needed this Gospel. 

This, then, is the reason why this book’s theology of the atonement focuses on Jesus’ body as ‘the new temple’. It is a new teaching. It did not come from Paul who wrote his letters in the 50s and 60s. This is new thinking and it links the events of 70 CE with the writing of this Gospel. This book was going to be important. It would shape the thinking of the church, of itself as a discipleship movement in the world. It needed to be written well. It had, therefore, to be written to the rules of Ancient Rhetoric that pertained in the First Century [1]. These rules had to do with Idea, Structure, Style, Memory and Delivery. To get at the Gospel writer’s ‘Big Idea’ we have to understand the book’s structure. But to get at this, we first of all have to reckon with his writing style. 

The Title to this Gospel is found in the likely original opening words: ‘Beginning / of the gospel / of Jesus Christ’. It is a three-part construction. The Prologue is similarly arranged. Contrary to much scholarship on the matter, 1.2-20 describes its limits. Parsing establishes this [3]. Day One of ‘Logue’, the narrative of the Gospel, begins at 1.21. The first readers of this Gospel’s manuscript would have spotted these things. As a result they would have expected more of the same writing style throughout the rest of the document. And they wouldn’t have been disappointed! In the Greek, the first day’s telling covers a full 24 hours from dawn, through the twelve hours of daylight and the four watches of the night, to just before dawn on the following day. The writer’s choice is the Civil Day. Armed with these facts, we can go on to uncover the book’s structure.

For each of his Four Series (as my artwork presents them), the writer employs an arrangement that he adopts from the structure of Homer’s Iliad, which consists of a Prologue, a Logue (of Three Days, a Turning Point and Three Days) and an Epilogue. Each of the Series in Mark’s Gospel comprises Seven Days. They are in similar arrangement to that of Homer, ABB’XABB’, where a threesome of days, ABB’ in the telling, is balanced by a second threesome of days, ABB’, around a central day, X. The First Day, A, is introductory, the Second Day, B, is a first development and the Third Day, B’, is a second and concluding development. The overall structure of ‘four’ by ‘seven’ had meaning in the Century. ‘Seven’ represented ‘perfection’, ‘fulfilment’, or ‘completion’. ‘Four’ equated to the ‘four winds’ (for us today, the four points of the compass). The book has universal significance. 

Because we can define the Days in their Series, we can establish that the writer organised his work as a matrix which works vertically, horizontally and, at its middle, diagonally also. Take time to explore the artwork and you will see what I mean. Dualities are everywhere in this Gospel. This arrangement of this Book makes it, above all else, memorable. In an age of learning that was not based like ours on everyone’s ability to read, but was characterised by the oral-aural method, arrangement was hugely helpful [3]. Further, the Logue required both Prologue and Epilogue. Without an Epilogue no audience would have risen to leave!

In the artwork, I express the sunset of the first day’s telling and the sunrise of the last day’s telling, and I have shown the extending rays, in turn, over the different ‘halves’ of the matrix. The whole of the left ‘half’ of the matrix is about Jesus bringing the Old Covenant to a conclusion through fulfilling all its requirements. The whole of the right ‘half’ is about Jesus establishing the New Covenant. To present this Gospel meaningfully to an audience, the reader/reciter has all the help he (she?) needs. The writer enables him/her to deliver the text accurately from memory and ‘expose the speech with art of grace, dignity, gesture, modulation of voice and face’ [4].

We are thus propelled to understand the Big Idea of this book. While the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of its temple and the annihilation of most of the ‘Jerusalemites’ and ‘Judeans’ (see 1.5 for a link) is indeed very bad news, there is, nevertheless, really Good News (even in the Greek, ‘Bravo News’?) to share [5]. The Gospel tells in a fast moving and rivetingly alternating way how the sun set on the Old Covenant and rose on the New. Centring firmly on Jesus (his mission, death and resurrection), this Gospel demonstrates that Christianity is the new world religion. It is Judaism’s replacement and rightful successor! 

Notes

1. For Ancient Rhetoric, see David G. Palmer, The Markan Matrix: A Literary-Structural Analysis of the Gospel of Mark, Ceridwen Press, Paisley, 1999; also David G. Palmer, New Testament: New Testimony to the Skills of the Writers and First Readers, Fourth Ed., Ceridwen Press, Church Gresley, 2013.
2. By parsing, I mean that by subjecting the Greek text to grammatical scrutiny phrases and sentences can be defined.
3. We do, of course, see how visual messaging in our culture has become almost as important as the word.  
4. From Cicero, De Oratore, 55 BCE.
5. The eu in euangelion, the Greek for ‘Good news’, means ‘well’, ‘well done’, ‘bravo’.