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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Mark starts out according to the Today's English Version (TEV) by stating, "This is the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God." (1:1) This sentence plunges the historian into all sorts of problems, most of which revolve around the words "Good News." Mark isn't a history about Jesus Christ. We don't have any of the footnotes, bibliographies, or other scholarly conventions that go with history. At the same time, this isn't a primary document. It doesn't purport to be an eyewitness account of the events it records. Mark is the first-century equivalent of a published secondary source. The author is obviously writing about the past but not the way historians write about it. How, then, does this "good news" (gospel) treat the past? How did the author accumulate his material and how did he decide which parts of that material to include in the gospel? The author cared about the veracity of the story. So, how did he decide what was the truth about Jesus? What standards for the inclusion of material did he adhere to? How does a gospel approach to the past differ from the historian's? How do their understandings of the truth of the past differ? We're going to have to infer some of the answers to these questions, admitting from the beginning that final answers aren't possible.
There's more we'd like to know. We'd like to know just what primary sources the author did have available. Did these include eyewitness accounts? We can assume there were written documents and accounts (see Luke 1:1-2). Just what form did Mark's written sources take? How many sources were there? How many different traditions about Jesus did they represent? There's no way to answer these further questions conclusively, but as we go along we'll find that it's important to keep asking them. In any event, if we're to learn anything of historical value from Mark it's vitally important that we reach some conclusion, however tentative, about how the author conceived of the past and used oral and documentary sources to recreate it.
2011 postscript: I am currently reading a fascinating book entitled, , by , which argues that Mark is based on eyewitness accounts, primarily those of the Apostle Peter and that it includes a number of ancient literary conventions common to works of history and biography. It is, in other words, a form of ancient historiography. If [author] is correct, some of the statements in this posting and some that follow need to be modified.
