Mark as tragedy

[Giuseppe]

What I like about Mark is surely the interpretation of his genre as allegory, but also as a tragedy.

About this last hypothesis, I see that the scholars who claim that Mark's genre is tragedy often do so because according to them the tragic hero is Jesus in person.

But they ignore, maybe, that the tragedy, in Mark, is especially about Peter and the Pillars. Their failure to follow Jesus is tragic, in my view, just as we would describe tragic the end of Macbeth, for example.

Mark is pauline. But read what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11:4 :

For if someone comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it well enough.

If Mark is pauline (and he is), then he isn't following deliberately the exhortation of Paul to not follow ''another Jesus'' (because it's clear that the Jesus of Mark is his invention and was not known by Paul).

Therefore Mark doesn't inventing his Jesus to eclipse the ''crucified Jesus'' of Paul (whom, as pauline, Mark has already).
Then Mark is introducing ''another Jesus'', precisely a Jesus who comes down on earth among Peter and the Pillars, to point out their essential blindness even before an earthly Jesus:

1) the Pillars are blind (what Mark wants to show in first place).

2) even if the Pillars had seen an earthly Jesus, they continue to be blind (the principal point of Mark).

3) even if the Pillars had seen an earthly Jesus and had want sincerely follow him, they would continue to be blind (the secondary point of Mark).

The last point, the total lack of alternatives for the Pillars, is the real tragedy in Mark.

What escapes the modern reader is that, even if apparently a subtle way of hope is left for a future redemption of Peter and co (in the ending of Mark), Peter cannot overcome the fatal contradiction of an earthly Jesus: a Jesus who, by definition (being ''another Jesus'', not the same Jesus of Paul), is not the true Jesus, therefore to follow him corresponds paradoxically to not follow the true Jesus: in any case, Peter is condemned.

The point of Mark is not that Peter is free of following or abandoning Jesus.

The real point of Mark is that Peter is unable to see and to follow Jesus, even if he had wanted to do so. Peter is condemned from the beginning to not be a true pauline.

His tragedy becomes the tragedy of all Israel.

[Giuseppe]

An echo of the same Jesus perceiving the essential vanity of his arrival on earth as a mere Jew from Nazaret (per se an irrelevant town), is in the Sowner Parable.

There Mark is saying that it's all vain the effort that himself is doing, for the following reasons:

1) the seed (''Jesus'') on the ''road'' is totally wasted. The entire mission of Jesus in Galilee (the real ''road'' crossed by Jesus) is vain.
2) the seed (''Jesus'') on the ''rock soil'' is totally wasted. See Peter. See the same tomb ''cut out of rock'' where Jesus (the ''seed'') is buried: even the same proclamation of an empty tomb is vain.
3) the seed (''Jesus'') on the ''thorns'' is totally wasted. The entire mission of Jesus in Jerusalem (where he is lastly crowned ''with thorns'') is vain.
4) only a special ''seed'' is not vain. And about that special seed, Jesus says an entire parable:

He said, “To what shall we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it. Without parables he did not speak to them, but to his own disciples he explained everything in private.

(Mark 4:30-34)

There are no doubts that ''the smallest of all the seeds on the earth'' is the Jesus who lives spiritually in Paul the apostle.

[Giuseppe]

So an interesting thesis of Adam Z. Wright, OF CONFLICT AND CONCEALMENT: THE GOSPEL OF MARK AS TRAGEDY :

The first core element I have identified in tragedy is what Hegel calls Kollision. Every tragedy contains some type of Kollision, and it can be defined as the portrayal of a conflict between two highly valued powers that make incompatible demands.
(...)
The result is that both powers, both highly valued, come into conflict with one another, and it is this conflict that we call "tragic."

(p. 83-84)
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream ... _Ph.D..pdf

According to Wright, the two powers in conflict would be Jesus and an ''established religious system'' symbolized by the Temple.

My view is that the two powers in conflict would be the celestial Jesus of Paul (the true 'historical' Jesus) and the ''another Jesus'' met by Peter and the Pillars in the story (the earthly Jesus introduced by Mark himself). These two Jesuses are highly valued, but they come in conflict with one another: to know the first means virtually to give up the knowledge of the second, and vice versa.