Starting with Mark

I've decided to start my study with the book of Mark.  Although it is not the first book in the order of the New Testament, it is the earliest written of the four and sets the style for the other three particularly the synoptic gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Starting out, I am going to use this blog entry to spell out what I know, or think I know about this gospel, before I begin my study.  These are my preconceptions, what I think I know about the writer, his audience, and the time period and culture the book was written in.  This isn't a scholarly paper so I'm not planning on sourcing much.  Just to say that most of these ideas are not original but come from my own culture of growing up in the church and the various books I've read.

I started out noting that Mark is the earliest of the Canonical Gospels.  It is believed to be written around 60 CE, 20 years after Jesus' death.  The Gospel was originally anonymous and it wasn't until the second century that we have writers attributing the authorship to Mark, a figure offhandedly mentioned in Acts and First Peter as a companion of Peter in his travels and nephew of Barnabas.  The mythology claims that Mark recorded these stories from Peter on his missions to spread Jesus' teachings.

Another important tidbit that I have read is that the book was written for a non-jewish audience.  This is speculated because the writer spells out Jewish practices as for someone unfamiliar with them. This is important because it gives us insight into the audience the book was written for, a community either of gentiles or one that had a predominately non-jewish membership, probably living outside of Isreal.  Were they "God fearers", gentiles that subscribed to the Jewish religion, readers of the Septuigant, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, or fresh converts to this new Jewish sect?  Did they live in Rome or Syria or Egypt?  Why would they be interested in the teachings of this Jewish Rabbi that was a nonconventional interpretation of a religion from another country?

Our oldest fragments of this book are in Greek as are all our earliest samples of the gospels.  It is speculated that, given the grammatical errors, that this was not the author's first language. Greek was the language of commerce throughout the Roman Empire, so it is not surprising that if someone was writing for a group beyond a strictly Jewish academic audience that they would write it in Greek since it could be communicated to people from a number of nationalities and native languages. Would this be odd for writings of the time on the teachings of other Jewish Rabbis?

What the heck is this?

What the heck is this?  Well, I've grown up in the christian tradition.  It's my culture and my heritage.  I wanted to take a fresh look at that heritage and figure out how it related to my place in the world.  What is so special about these stories that they are the foundations of my culture and what can I find in it that I can relate to today. Hence this study of the gospels.  I called it a literary look because I'm more interested in what the authors were trying to say than what is literal or what the "facts" of the stories are.  What I would like to do is try to focus on what the authors wanted to convey.  Who were they writing to?  What was the context?  Why did they tell their stories in the way that they did.  Of course, I know so very little of the authors and the people they were writing for.  I come with my own cultural background, preconceptions and bias.  However hopefully by trying the identify my bias and ignorance, I can minimize it.  As well, I am hoping that by doing this as a blog, that others more knowledgeable about first century history may be willing to enlighten me, answer some of my questions, or point out some of my biases.

Talking of biases, let me say a little bit about myself.  I am not a New Testament scholar or student of religion.  I did do a Bachelors of Arts.  I majored in History, but that was mainly an excuse to dabble across the humanities taking a number of Literature courses, Psychology and Sociology.  My literature studies have encouraged a habit of looking for themes, metaphor, allusions and the other tricks of writing.  My studies in history have impressed upon me the importance of understanding the perspective of the author.  We put a lot of emphasis on understanding the background and culture of the historians we read in order to appreciate their prejudices and the slant they took on the events they discusses compared with other historians from different periods and different schools of thought.

I must also confess that I have been impressed by Marcus Borg's non-literal and literary focus on the books of the Bible in a number of his books.  I would like to use a similar lens with my own examination.