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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
The common view among mainline academics seems to be that the Synoptic Gospels were cobbled together by "editors" whose main task it was to integrate oral and written traditions about Jesus into a coherent unit. Their creativity as writers was largely limited to the choices of material they made, how they combined that material, and the order they gave to it. Many would argue that it's incorrect to consider the Gospel writers as authors. Others see those writers as creative individuals, worthy of the title of "author" but still as mostly re-working the traditions they relied upon.
We need to think more about this. The author of Mark was a highly creative individual. He may well have invented the gospel genre. He has a central theme, namely the unfolding the divine identity of the man Jesus. He shows a clear awareness of historical developments. His sources didn't just appear magically on his writing table. He had to go out and collect those sources. He might have conducted interviews in the process. It's very difficult to believe that the author hadn't gone through a personal discovery of who Jesus was for himself. That experience would have had a formative influence on how he wrote his Gospel. Isn't it possible that what we have here is, in fact, the original work of an ancient research historian, based on his sources as any history must be but still an original work? I think so.
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2012 reflections: The argument I pursued back in 1998 is an important one. If it is correct that the author of the Gospel of Mark was a credible ancient historian and the gospel reflects actual events, then its stories cannot be simply dismissed as a work of zealous fiction. I'm not claiming here that the Gospel of Mark is proof that Jesus was the Christ, but I am saying that those who followed him believed him to be so with what they took were good reasons just as those who resisted him did so for what they thought to be good reasons. The judgment that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and is our Lord and Saviour is a faith judgment not a historical one. The judgment that Jesus was a remarkable individual who taught with power, performed what the people of his day considered miracles, challenged authority, sided with the poor, and ministered to them is one historians can make. Indeed, it was the judgment of several ancient historians including the authors of the four gospels.
It is clear that the author of Mark wrote as a person of faith. My argument 14 years ago and today is that the author also wrote as a credible ancient historian who worked with sources, shaped the data mined from those sources, and did what historians do, which is to tell the story of the past. We moderns may discount the conclusions the author made in faith, but we cannot simply explain away the data that informed the author's faith. That's the point.
