John's Transformation of Mark

Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, Catrin H. Williams, Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond, Catrin H. Williams

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567691910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

John's Transformation of Mark brings together a cast of internationally recognised biblical scholars to investigate the relationship between the gospels of Mark and John. In a significant break with the prevailing view that the two gospels represent independent traditions, the contributors all argue that John both knew and used the earlier gospel. Drawing on recent analytical categories such as social memory, 'secondary orality, ' or 'relecture, ' and ancient literary genres such as 'rewritten Bible' and bioi, the central questions that drive this volume focus on how John used Mark, whether we should speak of 'dependence, ' 'familiarity with, ' or 'reception, ' and whether John intended his work to be a supplement or a replacement of Mark. Together these chapters mount a strong case for a reassessment of one of the key tenets of modern biblical criticism, and open up significant new avenues for further research.

1

John’s Transformation of Mark: Introduction

Eve-Marie Becker, Helen K. Bond and Catrin H. Williams

John and Mark – Mark and John: two gospel narratives, somehow related yet at the same time distinct, endlessly prompting questions about their relationship. Which author has built on whom, when, why and how? The present volume seeks to address these questions by presenting a proposal resulting from a multi-perspective reading of Mark in relation to John, namely John’s transformation of Mark.

Scholarly debates about the relationship between the canonical gospels have a long history. Since at least the time of Tatian’s Diatessaron and patristic exegesis, various attempts have been made to find meaning in the fourfold gospel canon. New Testament interpreters have sought ever since to relate the four gospel narratives to each other and to establish plausible explanations for how, why and in which order the gospel writings were composed. New Testament scholarship has, in this respect, directed significant attention to the question of the relationship between Matthew, Mark and Luke. Various attempts have been made at solving the so-called ‘Synoptic problem’, although most of the proposed hypotheses about Synoptic relationships – in whatever configuration – are underpinned by theories of literary dependence.

The precise relationship between John and Mark also has an extensive history of scholarly attention. Long regarded as a spiritual interpretation of the earlier three canonical Gospels, a broad scholarly consensus (at least in North America) has, throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, tended to regard John’s Gospel as quite independent of the other gospels and related to them only on the level of prior tradition (whether oral, written or some combination of both). However, the idea that there exists some kind of a literary connection between John and the others never completely went away, and it is even enjoying a resurgence in much recent scholarship. It is these issues, with reference specifically to Mark (rather than the Synoptic Gospels more generally), that are the focus of this particular collection of essays.

The majority of papers in this volume were first aired at a conference held in the Titania Hotel, Athens, Greece, 4–6 August 2018, prior to the SNTS meeting at the same venue.

Although two of the conference organizers were already convinced that the author of John’s Gospel had not only known Mark’s Gospel but had reflected deeply upon it, the aims of the conference were more modest. Contributors – all of them internationally recognized experts in the Gospels of either John or Mark (or both) – were asked simply to compare various themes and motifs across the two works, taking a view on any possible relationship between them only if they felt so disposed. Our expectation was that the group would include several scholars wishing to maintain the view that the two gospels represent independent traditions, and we were anxious to include as broad a range of perspectives as possible.

As paper after paper was delivered, however, in a mercifully air-conditioned room overlooking the Parthenon, a curious thing began to emerge. Every contributor, without exception, expressed the considered opinion that John had reworked the earlier gospel in some way or another, and the conversation quickly began to focus on recent analytical categories such as social memory, ‘secondary orality’, or ‘relecture’, on ancient literary genres such as ‘rewritten Bible’, historiography and bioi, on whether we should speak of ‘dependence’, ‘familiarity with’, or ‘reception’, and on whether John intended his work to be a supplement or a replacement of Mark. As we pulled together the various threads at the end of the conference, there was a general desire to be rather bolder in the published version of the essays. The conference’s rather diffident original title – ‘John and Mark: Is There a Connection?’ – became the much more confident current title – John’s Transformation of Mark.

As already noted, the ‘independent tradition’ theory has been the dominant hypothesis in Johannine studies for several decades, but it is important to remember that it is only that – a hypothesis. It took hold in a very different scholarly climate when form criticism with its emphasis on oral traditions and community transmission shaped the agenda, with little appreciation of the Gospels as literary works crafted by creative authors in control of their sources. Added to this is the scholarly assumption that any discussion of the relationship between John and Mark has to be conducted along the same lines as Synoptic relationships, that is, the close, almost scribal, editing of Mark by Matthew and Luke. The last decade has seen a much greater recognition of the strategies and techniques applied by ancient authors in their use of sources, relying much more on paraphrase and selective use of material rather than close verbatim reproduction of earlier texts. In this respect, the way in which Matthew and Luke use Mark is anomalous rather than John’s use of his predecessor. The recognition that Mark and John both share the same genre, both start and finish in broadly the same place, and both are preoccupied with the death of Jesus are further important arguments for why readers should have confidence that John did not compose his gospel in total isolation from Mark.

The essays in this volume are exploratory in nature and we have not attempted to come to any consensus on exactly how, why or when John used Mark. Was John drawing on the written text, recasting his recollection of an oral reading of the earlier gospel, or a combination of the two? Did he intend to supplement, replace or complement the earlier work? Some contributors to this volume come to firm conclusions on these matters, others take as their starting point the assumption that John has used Mark and then test the explanatory power of this new hypothesis on various passages and themes.

The collection begins with a survey of earlier scholarship. Harry Attridge helpfully leads us through the data and provides an overview of the various positions regarding the parallels between the Gospels of Mark and John. He demonstrates how the view that John knew and used the Synoptics generally and Mark in particular was widely accepted from patristic times through to the nineteenth century, though the opinion that the two gospels represented independent traditions dominated much twentieth-century scholarship. Many scholars explained the common elements by appealing to a written source, often described as a ‘Signs Gospel’, or to common oral tradition. Some recent scholars have argued that the gospels mutually influenced each other during the process of their gradual composition. The evidence, he suggests, particularly in the details of passages that seem to be built on elements derived from deconstructed Markan pericopes, supports the judgment that there was substantial, but very creative, use of Mark by the Fourth Evangelist.

The next few essays consider various creative ways and fresh methodological paradigms in which we might think about the relationship between John and Mark. Jean Zumstein hypothesizes that the relationship is a typical case of hypertextuality. He argues that John wrote his work based on a previous generic model, namely Mark. But the Gospel of John is not a simple repetition of Mark, it is a derived text that bears the hallmark of a process of transformation. Various key texts, he argues – the Temple incident, the miracle of the loaves, the walking on water, Gethsemane, the footwashing – are classical examples of this process.

Chris Keith’s essay supports theories for Johannine knowledge of the Gospel of Mark by engaging critically with Percival Gardner-Smith’s influential argument for Johannine independence. Gardner-Smith focused heavily upon Johannine disagreements with Mark’s Gospel and argued that such disagreements indicate that the author of John’s Gospel could not have known Mark’s Gospel. Employing the concept of ‘critical inheritance’ from social memory theory, Keith argues instead that the reception of inherited tradition consists of simultaneous acceptance of some aspects of the prior tradition and rejection of other aspects of it. Thus, and contra Gardner-Smith, disagreement with a prior tradition can function as an indicator of knowledge of that prior tradition.

Catrin Williams adds the concept of ‘rewritten Bible’ and other Jewish forms of ‘rewriting’ to the discussion. Authoritative texts, she notes, were often subjected to a process of rewriting in late Second Temple Judaism, a phenomenon that has received considerable attention in recent debates about the category of ‘rewritten Bible’ or ‘rewritten Scripture’. Her essay examines some of the compositional features attested in early Jewish rewritten texts (such as Jubilees, the Genesis Apocryphon, and 4 Maccabees) in order to determine how the points of contact between such features and John’s Gospel can inform the discussion of John’s familiarity with, or even its ‘reworking’ of, the Gospel of Mark. She considers various ancient Jewish ‘rewriting’ techniques and strategies, including the issue of how authority is understood in rewritten compositions with reference to their underlying base text.

Addressing the topic from a rather different angle, George Parsenios argues that John develops and expands material from Mark by recourse to classical literature. Mark, for instance, places in the mouth of Jesus the phrase ‘I am’ (ἐγώ εἰμι). John follows suit, but he develops this phrase even further by placing it within the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 John’s Transformation of Mark: Introduction
• 2 John and Mark in the History of Research
• 3 The Johannine ‘Relecture’ of Mark
• 4 ‘If John Knew Mark’: Critical Inheritance and Johannine Disagreements with Mark
• 5 John’s ‘Rewriting’ of Mark: Some Insights from Ancient Jewish Analogues
• 6 Defining and Debating Divine Identity in Mark and John: The Influence of Classical Language and Literature
• 7 Parallel Traditions or Parallel Gospels? John’s Gospel as a Re-Imagining of Mark
• 8 Beyond History: How John Transcends Mark and Ancient Historiography
• 9 The Beginnings of Mark and John: What Exactly Should
• 10 Jesus in Sharper Relief: Making Sense of the Fourth Gospel’s
• 11 John the Baptist in Mark and John: An Exercise in Comparison
• 12 How John ‘Rewrites’ Mark as Seen in John 5.1–18
• 13 From the Expectation of the Imminent Kingdom to the Presence of Eternal Life: Eschatology in Mark and John
• 14 Ethical Concepts in Mark and John: A Comparative Approach
• 15 The ‘Speeches’ in Mark and John: Comparative Readings
• 16 The Lost Temptation of Christ? John’s Philosophical Rewriting of Markan Temptation Scenes
• 17 The Plot to Kill Jesus in Mark and John: Reflections on the Literary Relationship between Two Early Christian Theological Biographies of Jesus on the Basis of a Detail in Their Storytelling
• 18 The Triumph of the King: John’s Transformation of Mark’s Account of the Passion
• Bibliography
• Index Ancient Sources
• General Index
• Copyright