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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
The previous posting in this series, "Beyond Historical Recovery - Mark 1:16-20 (x)," points to some of the problems Mark poses the historian. First and foremost among those problems is the question of sources. What sources did the author have and how reliable were they historically? There's no way of knowing for sure, but we can make some informed guesses about Mark's sources. They would have been of several kinds. First and most certain would be the church's oral traditions. Mark was only a generation or a little more from Jesus, which means that those oral traditions were still fresh and almost certainly still informed by the memories of older members who had first-hand, or near first-hand knowledge of the events of Jesus' life. Second, and almost as certain, were the written records already extant. Historians feel relatively sure that there were compilations of Jesus' teachings already in existence by the time Mark was written. It's likely he had access to some of them. Third, it may be that Mark actually interviewed original members of the Jesus Circle, though this is less certain. If Mark was written in Rome, as most scholars believe, there's no reason why some of them might not have moved to Rome. Or, perhaps, Mark was well-traveled enough to have met early disciples elsewhere. Four, besides these three more specific sources of information, the author's own personal Christian experience would have been an important source of what he (or she?) included in the gospel. Five, and by extension, the author's Christian community would have influenced the writing of the gospel through its shared general perceptions about Jesus. It would be incredibly helpful if we knew which of these sources the author actually had and in what combination.
2011 comment: In his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006), Richard Bauckham presents a strong case against the whole idea of "oral traditions" being a historical source for the Gospels. He is convinced that they are built mostly out of the living memories of participants in the events recorded in the Gospel or others who heard the stories about these events directly from participants. Bauckham particularly revives and gives support to the ancient tradition that Mark contains the memories of the Apostle Peter. According to him, the Gospel writers followed the conventions of ancient historians by relying primarily on living memory (oral history) and did not put much store in written accounts of events. Thus, he would put living memory first, written accounts a distant second, and drop oral tradition entirely. The man seems to know what he is talking about, and his arguments are worthy consideration—if perhaps pushed too far at some points.
