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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Mark isn't just telling a story. He's presenting gospel data and lines of argument. In posting 29 (xxix) of this series, I argued that most of Mark 2 contains a definition and description of the nature of Christian community. At the same time, Mark is also pointing to a progression in the tension between Jesus and the over class. That theme runs through the chapter. In 2:7, the Pharisees are critical of Jesus' forgiving a man's sins, but they don't actually voice their thoughts. Jesus read their minds, as it were. In 2:16 the Pharisees voice their criticisms of Jesus' eating with sinners, but not directly to him. They go to his disciples. Finally, in Mark 2:24, the Pharisees voice their criticisms of the disciples picking wheat on the Sabbath directly to Jesus. On one level, the whole sequence seems entirely artificial in its construction. It's much too neat for the real world. At another level, however, I suspect that Mark is pointing to something that did happen. The more the over class came to know about Jesus the more openly critical they became of him. I can just hear some informant telling the author of Mark, "At first, you know, the Pharisees didn't say much. They mostly just listened. But we knew they weren't happy about things. And Jesus kept egging them on, kept criticizing them to their faces. And he encouraged us to do things that only made matters more tense. After awhile they started to question us and question Jesus more and more openly. Things soon got really bad." This is completely speculative, but if the author did use oral sources and was told things like this, then we can see him crafting his raw data into gospel data, a set of stories that capture several intertwining themes and carry the gospel story forward with dramatic effect. In any event, there's no good reason why the author's gospel description doesn't contain strong hints as to historical realities.
2012 comment; Another possibility is that the author's informations related stories similar to the ones contained in Mark 2, and it was the author who discerned the pattern of increasing conflict from them. If this was the scenario, then the stories in Mark 2 even more closely mirror actual historical events than I speculated as possible back in 1998. There is a larger point here, which is that it is not at all far-fetched to think of Mark's material as coming from oral history sources. We can see credibly how his stories and his arrangement of them could reflect the living memory of his sources.
