Another thread about the gospel of Mark as a story.

[Ben C. Smith]

Clive rather anticipated me in the idea for this thread.

I think Mark tells a pretty good story. That is, I think that Mark was at least as much a storyteller as he was a theologian or a propagandist. Luke can spin a decent story, too, but I for one seem to sense that for Luke the story often takes a back seat to theology. Matthew I am far less impressed with when it comes to telling a story; he lacks the verve and wit, I think, that Mark possesses. John strikes me as a good storyteller, perhaps of a kind with Mark, but the gospel of John bears the marks of pretty heavy editing, which can sometimes obscure the story. Not that the other gospels have escaped such editing; not at all. But John seems to me to evince more of it than the other three.

I grew up in Sunday School, the eldest son of an evangelical family. My father was a Baptist pastor when I was born, but soon felt called to the mission field. He felt called to Bolivia at first, but a doctor told him that he had some kind of condition that would become aggravated by high altitude; so eventually he felt called to Mexico, where I ended up spending 9 years of my youth. Not long after their arrival in Mexico, my parents drifted to the Pentecostal side of the low-church spectrum, and they have been there ever since.

Sitting in church, bored out of my mind, was a common experience for me throughout both my childhood and my adolescence. When I was about 9 years old, a year or so before the move to Mexico, in order to stave off the seeping progress of ennui, I decided to start reading the Bible in church, mainly because I had one at hand (my relatives always made sure I had an excellent reference Bible available, using holiday gifting as the excuse) — and nobody was going to fuss at me for reading the Bible during the class or sermon like people might if I were reading something else or playing games.

Certain parts of the Bible repelled me, of course. It was going to be nearly a decade before I really started to appreciate the prophets, for example. The book of Proverbs was (and still often is) mind-numbing. The Psalms were hit or miss for me. The epistles were either way over my head (Paul) or too condescending (John). I was left mainly with the narrative books and the book of Revelation.

Unfortunately, the book of Revelation was rarely read on its own terms and was mined mainly for clues to what was going to happen any day now in world history; it was never presented as a book one should just sit down and read from beginning to end, and this was still several years before I finally decided that the evangelical doomsday scenarios were too cartoonish to be real, that I was not sure what Revelation meant, but it most certainly did not mean that. Also unfortunately, there are parts of the narrative books of the Bible that are annoyingly overtaught in Sunday School. These parts include the Creation story (nobody distinguished between two or more different accounts in my background), the story of Noah and the Ark, a few of the stories of Moses (especially as a baby in a basket), and nearly all of the most accessible pericopae in all four gospels. So those narrative sections were off limits for me, ruined by flannelgraph.

Flannelgraph, noun

• a storytelling system that uses a board covered with flannel fabric, usually resting on an easel, often associated with evangelical Christian Sunday School programs

Jesus was by far the most popular character on the flannelgraph board. Here he is teaching the multitudes:



Here he is giving his disciples a great catch of fish:



Notice the position of his arms. I think I am going to start entering rooms like that, to give myself an air of drama and importance. Here is Jesus sitting on a rock, welcoming a child with a picnic lunch (which I imagine is about to feed thousands):



And here is this exact same Jesus sitting on (or perhaps hovering next to) a donkey:



This, my friends, is how to ruin the gospel stories for generations of children.

But there were other narrative sections in the Bible that received much less coverage. When my family moved from the Midwest to San Diego, California, in preparation for the move to Mexico, I joined a Sunday School class at Laurel Bible Chapel partway through a discussion of the story of Lot's wife. This lady was turned to salt! I had never been taught this story before, and it sounded pretty amazing. So I started reading the patriarchal portion of Genesis (far, far away from the Creation and Noah's blasted Ark), which entertained me for a few weeks, I think. At some point, however, the real narrative gem of the Old Testament (from a young boy's perspective) was revealed to me in a sermon to which I was actually paying attention from time to time: the Elijah-Elisha cycle. Wow! Hungry bears, fire from heaven, and a general streak of rebellion against stuck-up authority figures. This was good stuff. I think my later fascination with wizards of the kind found in fairy tales, fantasy novels, and Dungeons & Dragons handbooks stemmed ultimately from my interest in Elijah and Elisha. Other narratives won my attention, as well, despite some of them having made infrequent appearances in flannelgraph. I liked Esther, parts of Daniel, and Jonah. (The Apocryphal books were not yet readily available to me; evangelicals do not go in for that sort of nonsense.)

I was in my early teens when I finally read a nonnarrative book that interested me, one that had gone completely unnoticed all this time: the book of Ecclesiastes. I loved the permeating pessimism and the sense of angst and depression; hey, I was a teenager, after all. The author seemed to me to drop the ball at the end when he got all optimistic and upbeat (comparatively speaking); but still, Ecclesiastes ended up opening the door to a narrative book that I had previously dismissed: the gospel of Mark. I began to notice at some point: there is some dark and moody stuff in Mark, as most of you know. And Mark could be so quirky! That young man running away naked into the night, for example, or Jesus getting angry with people for reasons that were not always clear. The flannelgraph Jesus could be super serious, but he never got angry for no apparent reason.

My previous dismissal of the gospel of Mark was based, of course, on its association with the other gospels on the flannelgraph board. In truth, Mark itself, on its own, is very rarely discussed in these kinds of churches. Without a regular liturgical cycle to keep all of the texts in rotation, evangelical preachers and teachers will almost always choose a pericope in Matthew or Luke over its parallel in Mark. It may be easy for outsiders to suppose that evangelicals were disturbed by what they found in Mark and avoided it for that reason, but that is not the case from my experience: people tend to lump the gospels together as complementary and routinely miss the tensions between them completely. They ignore Mark for two principal reasons: (A) Matthew and Luke contain virtually every important narrative detail that Mark contains and many, many more (who is going to read Mark's version of walking on water when in Matthew's version Peter walks on water too?); and (B) Matthew and Luke are easier to moralize (Peter walking on water is such a ridiculously easy thing to connect with).

I read Mark during my teen years through slightly opened eyes, enjoying its gloomier atmosphere on its own merits rather than letting Matthew and Luke shine their collective light on it all the time. And Mark is still my favorite of the gospels, canonical or otherwise, with John coming in second (a development that came only in adulthood; for a long time I could not stand what has been called this gospel's circular, highhanded reasoning). I do not necessarily think that Mark is the first gospel or the last word on gospel texts, but my attraction to it has complex roots that run deep.

All of this leads me back to my main point. Ecclesiastes may have been what opened my mind to a different cast of literature available in the Bible, but what drew me, in my new frame of mind, to the gospel of Mark was the fact that it took that somewhat darker approach and turned it into a good story. I could now read the miracle accounts with fresh eyes, and they could for the first time remind me of those rollicking, picaresque legends from the Elijah-Elisha cycle, with their bias against authoritarianism and their carefree approach to narrative detail. I did not yet know exactly why the Jewish authorities in Mark did not want Jesus to work miracles, but it was delightful that he worked them anyway, sometimes apparently just to tweak their collective noses.

I see on this forum two very different ways of reading Mark that do not involve Mark as a story. First, there is a tendency to mine Mark for historical data. I have done this: to this day I think that Rufus and Alexander are pretty good candidates as a possible source of confirmation of some degree of historicity involving their father Simon in the passion account. Second, there is a tendency to attribute to Mark multiple layers of symbolic meanings. I have done this, as well: to this day I think that maybe Mark was crafting individual episodes of his narrative, such as the young man escaping naked in Gethsemane, as deliberate echoes of the Hebrew scriptures.

I am not in principle against either of these approaches. But I like the idea of simply reading Mark as it stands sometimes: as a story, and one capable of drawing the attention even of a jaded American teenager by now more accustomed to finding literary satisfaction in the pages of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot than in the Bible.

Ben.

[DCHindley]

Oh my!

Back in HS I knew a kid whose parents had been missionaries (not Mexico, but I'm sure it was somewhere in central America). He was from the same kind of Baptist mission environment as you, but the only thing that stood out to me was that he liked drums, but his church frowned on syncopated beats, so it was all marches for him, at least in the presence of his parents.

Mexico can be a dangerous place, I've heard.

One former co-worker had, like you, grown up in Mexico. He told me a story in which the police cornered some armed bank robbers in an alley. When they threw down their weapons and held their hands up, the police just opened fire with machine guns and killed all of them. He said his jaw dropped in astonishment and he quietly slipped behind a corner out of sight.

Later, I heard about a Roman Catholic Archbishop being gunned down right in Mexico City. Whoever it was that killed him had staged two teams of gunmen in order to make it seem as though the bishop was caught in the crossfire between two rival drug cartels shooting it out, as suggested by the Federal Police. The fact that he was "accidently" shot hundreds of times (others were killed as well, but he got the brunt of it) suggested this was just a cover story. The bishop was apparently stepping on someone's toes, perhaps in anti-corruption efforts.

Of course, I'm going to assume your experience was in the late 1970s or in the 80s. Maybe it was not as bad then. I'm not talking about petty corruption (traffic cop stops you for really no reason whatever and you slip him $10, if you're from the USA that is, as I rather doubt they would try to shake down a poor farmer taking his maize to market with his horse & wagon). I think the drug cartels really started to get rough in the 1980s & 90s.

DCH

[Ben C. Smith]

Of course, I'm going to assume your experience was in the late 1970s or in the 80s. Maybe it was not as bad then.

Right. I was there in the 80's. Also, I lived exclusively on the Baja peninsula (both Norte and Sur during different time periods). It was not nearly as bad there and then as it is now.

I'm not talking about petty corruption (traffic cop stops you for really no reason whatever and you slip him $10, if you're from the USA that is....

That kind of corruption was rampant, yes.

Sensibilities seemed different in Mexico than in the States, though. My first home in Mexico was in the charming little French-influenced town of Santa Rosalía, Baja California Sur, with a military base nearby. The soldiers from the base would go all over town, not only in uniform but also openly bearing their firearms. I harbor fond memories of playing out on a dirt street with some friends of mine one day and having to get out of the way of a military truck coming down the street. My buddies and I made gun shapes with our hands and fingers and pretended to shoot at the soldiers in the back of the vehicle, and the soldiers promptly pointed their actual rifles at us and pretended to shoot back. It was all in fun, and of course we kids loved it, but I think something like that would have been frowned upon in the careful climate we are familiar with in the States. In Mexico it seemed more normal somehow.

Ben.

[DCHindley]

I heard of the small bribe for police from a former Mexican police informant then living near San Diego (probably illegally, even with the open boarders in the early 1980s), suggesting it was necessary to augment their meager salaries.

My girlfriend at the time, who introduced me to this fellow (very intelligent, FWIW), and I drove her mom's car down through Tijuana (we did not stop to buy switchblade knives or hand grenades like the usual tourist or even dare go into a bar) down to Puerto Nuevo on the Pacific coast for a lobster dinner (I recall they were "spiny" lobsters, no claws).

We paid for Mexican auto insurance at the border, and exchanged some US$ for Pesos, but did not get a rental car, which could have resulted in serious difficulties for us.

We got lost on the way ... the beautiful 4 lane divided highway (2 each way), with brand new lane markings and overhead signs, but with absolutely no traffic, just ended abruptly. We obviously missed the signs, if any, saying "HIGHWAY CLOSED" (in Spanish, of course). Backtracking along some unpaved roads to get back on paved ones, we passed several little settlements with no cars or trucks at all, but lots of horse hitches and one or two scrawny horses, so we were definitely in the boondocks!

The ocean coastline was very rocky, with countless places which were supposed to be vacation condos and the like, but the Mexican legislature made a ruling that foreigners could not own land in Mexico, so all these half started building enterprises were just abandoned. Scores of them! I look at Google Maps now and it seems that many of them were revived at a later date, maybe with changes in local laws.

All it would have taken for that excursion to turn into trouble for us was getting stopped on the closed highway, or getting into a fender bender in a town. I knew a smidgeon of Spanish at the time (all forgotten now) but not enough to get me out of trouble. My girlfriend's mom, when she found out, had a fit, relaying all sort of rumors about cars disappearing from impound lots and ending up as Mexican police cars, and folks being kidnapped for ransom, etc.

I still have about 200 pesos from that trip.

Memories!

[Clive]

I was in Baja Mexico in October, just South of a huge statue of Jesus by the main road :_)

Was the Bible concordance you used Dake?

My experience of pentecostalism is most of the 60's, my uncle became very senior in CBN.

I never came across those feltchart things ;_)

I heard about the two creation stories at school from an RE teacher, and read the Bible primarily from NEB and Jerusalem, and vaguely remember doing an IVF 3 yr bible study thingy!

Those were the days my friend...

[Ben C. Smith]

I was in Baja Mexico in October, just South of a huge statue of Jesus by the main road :_)

This?

Was the Bible concordance you used Dake?

It was no concordance. It was a reference Bible of the New American Standard translation. The Concordance of choice was the unabridged Strong's, but that was my father's book, not mine. I just borrowed it from time to time.

My father had several books that did not quite jive with mainstream fundamentalist, evangelical thinking. For example, he had Strong's Systematic Theology, which for the longest time I assumed was written by the same fellow who produced the Concordance; but no, two different Strongs: James Strong, who made the Concordance, and Augustus Hopkins Strong, who assembled the Systematic Theology. It was in the latter that I encountered a sympathetic treatment of evolution for the first time in my life; A. H. Strong wrote in the days long before Scopes, when many in the church still felt the urge to reconcile Darwin and Genesis. Also, Strong's handling of the divine inspiration of the scriptures, while hardly critical by any measure, does not always exactly fit in with more modern evangelical views on inerrancy; certain kinds of errors were allowed, so long as they did not impugn the divine knowledge or wisdom. Strong's approach to these matters, albeit it hyperconservative through and through, was fresh air to me in many ways in my middle teen years. By the time I was in high school all the seeds necessary for breaking free of the mental bondage that fundamentalism imposes were in place: all I needed now was access to books coming from a different point of view, and that was soon to come in the form of the University of California library system, second in size at the time only to the Library of Congress amongst US libraries.

To his credit, my father never discouraged my quest for knowledge. After all, it was a similar quest that had led him to realize that the sign gifts were not supposed to die out with the apostles. He just never imagined that the quest could lead quite so far....

Ben.

[Ben C. Smith]

My experience of pentecostalism is most of the 60's, my uncle became very senior in CBN.

The Christian Broadcasting Network?

Thankfully, I did not grow up with Christian TV (in fact, I grew up with remarkably little TV overall). That would have driven me to despair, even as a youth. As an adult, trying to live as a Christian, but with very different values than most of the Christians around me, one constant source of irritation for me was the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Pat Robertson by that time struck me as well past his sell-by date, and not worthy of much consideration. But TBN was full of up-and-coming nonsense that the megachurches were simply devouring. It annoyed me that the term Christian could be applied both to Paul Crouch and to Martin Luther King, Junior; both to Benny Hinn and to Francis of Assisi; both to the televangelists and to the Anabaptists and Quakers.

[Clive]

Yes to picture and yes to cbn I suppose part of the reason I come here is guilt about my relative and trying to make amends, a form of indirect penance for a relative's sins (Eat your hearts out theologians on that one )

Dake interestingly is oec, and that is possibly another thread, why some xianities dumped science, is it another side effect of Reagan/Thatcher? Compare Carter's very scientifically based xianity.

I never had both parents into religion - it was only my mum who was a preacher. My father was self educated and took us regularly to the Science and Natural History Museums.

Another uncle wrote a biography of De Sade

[Ben C. Smith]

I never had both parents into religion - it was only my mum who was a preacher. My father was self educated and took us regularly to the Science and Natural History Museums.

Another uncle wrote a biography of De Sade

That is a pretty varied family background. Mine was much more monochrome: all evangelical, mostly fundamentalist, with a few black sheep of the rebellious or apostate variety.

[Clive]

the eldest son of an evangelical family

The eldest son of an uncle I referred to had a hard time involving a certain verse about spoiling children .....