 |
| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
In his commentary on Mark, entitled Mark (p. 63), Lamar Williamson Jr. observes that Mark 2:1-12 is "unusually detailed and vivid," which leads "some commentators" to take these vivid details as evidence for eyewitness testimony. As has been clear in previous postings, I'm increasingly convinced that those who think Mark availed himself of first hand oral history data are correct. It seems entirely likely that Mark actually interviewed people in assembling his gospel. There was a tradition in the later early church that the author of Mark received his information from Peter. There's no way to assess now the truth of that tradition, but it could be that the early church was recalling, at the very least, that Mark was based on oral sources close to the events recorded.
If the author of Mark relied on oral data, that reliance has important implications for the historian's use of Mark. On the one hand, oral historical data is notoriously unreliable because it's dependent on fallible human memory. People remember even important events incorrectly. They get details wrong or can't remember them. It's the bane of church historians in Thailand that they have to rely heavily on oral data for studying Thai local church history. In the case of Mark, one can account for the confusing mix of concrete details and broad generalizations as being partly a consequence of having to rely on oral data.
On the other hand, judiciously used, oral history data reveals the texture of the past in a way difficult to obtain from written records. Imagine the opportunity Mark may have had in interviewing people who knew Jesus intimately. Their experiences with Jesus would have given him a vivid sense of who Jesus was, how he spoke, and the impact he made on others. And, again, we find in Mark just such a vivid, startling account of the man Jesus.
ab
2012 reflections: When it comes to the study of the past, it is generally not that wise to claim, "There's no way to assess now the truth of that tradition." Scholars are using inventive new approaches and techniques, some based on computer analysis, to do just that. I've mentioned Richard Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2006) as one example. Bauckham devotes a chapter to what he calls the "Petrine perspective" of the Gospel of Mark and concludes on the basis of his research that, "...it is entirely plausible that this kind of individuality [of Peter as portrayed in Mark] is the kind that was conveyed by Peter's own recounting of the Gospel stories." I don't think that Bauckham settles the matter, but he does demonstrate how new research approaches can give us plausible scenario's concerning the material used in the gospels. Thus it is better to say that the matter of Peter's role in the writing of Mark remains unclear rather than baldly, boldly claim that we'll never know what it was.
