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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Commentators note that Mark has a terse, sparse literary style. The author doesn't give us very much information in his stories. The story of the healing of Peter's mother-in-law is no exception. That's why it's fascinating that the author does give us some historical detail. This healing took place in Peter and Andrew's home, which suggests that the disciples didn't entirely "down tools" and leave everything behind. They, at least, still frequented their homes. Even more interesting is the fact that Jesus' healed Peter's mother-in-law. Nothing in the story requires that little detail, and Mark's healing episodes seldom contain such personal information. Now, if the author had either an oral tradition or an oral history source, this is about as much information as we could expect. Oral history interviews seldom illicit precise details, because people forget much of that "background stuff." They remember (and often disremember) a few salient points that stuck in their memory. This passage "feels" like that same type of thing. Because of the personal details of location and person healed, I'd almost bet this story came from one of the participants or someone who heard the story from a participant. It might be second hand, but I doubt if it would be any more distant from the event than that. It's entirely possible, then, that this event took place in the "real" world of the empirical past and that the author received his information many years later from an oral source close to the event.
2012 Comment: I should probably explain that at the time I wrote these reflections on Mark from a historian's perspective, I was employed by the Church of Christ in Thailand as head of its Office of History and spent some thousands of hours interviewing church folks about their church's history. Most of my work but not all of it was focused on churches in northern Thailand. It was the similarity between what I read in the Gospel of Mark and what I experienced in my work as a historian that led to these postings in the first place.
