A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark by Cameron Evan Ferguson, Routledge, London, March 2021
Abstract
This volume presents a detailed case for the plausible literary dependence of the Gospel of Mark on select letters of the apostle Paul.
The book argues that Mark and Paul share a gospel narrative that tells the story of the life, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus Christ "in accordance with the scriptures," and it suggests that Mark presumed Paul and his mission to be constitutive episodes of that story. It contends that Mark self-consciously sought to anticipate the person, teachings, and mission of Paul by constructing narrative precursors concordant with the eventual teachings of the itinerant apostle, a process Ferguson labels Mark’s ‘etiological hermeneutic.’
The book focuses in particular on the various (re)presentations of Christ’s death that Paul believed occurred within his communities—Christ's death performed in ritual, prefigured in scripture, and embodied within Paul’s person—and it argues that these are all seeded within and anticipated by Mark’s narrative.
Through careful argument and detailed analysis, A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark makes a substantial contribution to the ongoing debate about the dependence of Mark on Paul. It is key reading for any scholar engaged in that debate, and the insights it provides will be of interest to anyone studying the Synoptic Gospels or the epistles of Paul more generally.
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From the Preview PDF: pp.2-3 of the text proper ie. of Chapter 1
Part I: Project overview
In his seminal article, “Mark—Interpreter of Paul,” Joel Marcus makes the programmatic assertion that Mark’s work is influenced by the thought of the apostle Paul. To demonstrate this, Marcus suggests a list of potential theological, Christological, and ecclesiological overlaps between the two authors, and he then analyzes the apostle’s and evangelist’s shared emphasis on the cross. Interestingly, despite Marcus’ provocative assertion, in his comprehensive Mark commentary—the first volume of which was published the same year as his article—only three short pages in his introduction discuss Mark’s potential familiarity with Paul, and an argument for dependence is never sustained. Moreover, Marcus nowhere claims that Mark had access to Paul’s letters.
My monograph will pursue what Marcus does not: a sustained case for the plausible literary dependence of the Gospel of Mark on select letters of the apostle Paul. I will suggest the historical possibility of Mark’s and his community’s knowledge of the person, teachings, and epistles of the apostle, and I will argue that Mark has self-consciously anticipated Paul and his mission within his story.
To state my thesis forthrightly: I contend that Mark adopts what I am calling an “etiological hermeneutic” vis-à-vis Paul. Mark’s story is a story of origins (see Mk. 1:1: “The beginning [ἀρχή] of the gospel [τοῦ εὐαγγελίου] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”), one which establishes continuity between the earthly life of Jesus, the contemporary situation of the Markan community, and the final ending of the world (see Mk. 13). Between the life of Jesus and Mark’s historical moment, I presume that the evangelist knows that Paul is located, and I use “etiological” to suggest that one of Mark’s primary literary goals is to create, within his narrative of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, historical precedent for the mission and teachings of Paul that occur subsequently to the conclusion of his narrative but prior to his composition of it.
The evangelist’s goal is not to repeat that which Paul has said (that is, to lift Paul from his letters and throw him some thirty years back into the past), but rather to anticipate him. Mark seeks to seed the apostle and his teachings into his text.
Mark’s project is therefore both proleptic and synecdochical: he always presumes, though he does not narrate in full, the entirety of a salvation-historical narrative that extends from one end of historical time to the other (the “gospel” [εὐαγγέλιον], an episodic narrative he shares with Paul), and his purpose is to tell a story that anticipates and concordantly connects with episodes subsequent to his 16 chapters. Believing that the mission of Paul is a part of this narrative, Mark seeks to create logical and concordant episodic precursors that will bind the missionary activity of the earthly Christ to the eventual teachings of the itinerant apostle, teachings that are themselves carried on within Mark’s community.
Depending on the particular Pauline phenomena Mark seeks to seed into his story, his literary strategies may be adapted, but his etiological hermeneutic remains fundamentally the same.
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Chapter 1 | The relationship of Mark to Paul
Building upon the works of C. H. Dodd, Richard B. Hays, and Margaret M. Mitchell, it argues that Mark and Paul deploy a shared synecdochical poetics in relation to a shared gospel narrative. It then argues that their shared gospel narrative includes an all-important episode: the resurrection appearance of Jesus to Paul himself (1 Cor. 15:8). This results in Mark's adopting an “etiological hermeneutic” in relation to Paul and his mission. The evangelist's goal is to 'anticipate' Paul (not to repeat him), and Mark thus seeds Pauline theological ideas into his text. This chapter concludes with a brief case study arguing that Mark attempts to anticipate the epiphanic performance of the cross that occurs within Paul's body by showing that the miracles that Christ's body performs throughout the Gospel of Mark iconically and synecdochically manifest the salvation that the messiah has come to offer through his death upon the cross.
Chapter 2 | Baptism into death
This chapter argues that, for Paul, baptism is a synecdochical evocation of the entire gospel narrative through the retrospective performance by the believer of Christ's death and resurrection. Believers symbolically put themselves to death and proleptically anticipate their coming salvation on the pattern of the messiah (Rom. 6:3–8), and, as a result, they are transformed and incorporated into the communal body of Jesus Christ. The chapter then argues that Mark has taken the epiphanic and transformative experience of Pauline baptism and has seeded it into his story. All of the major significances Paul associates with the rite—death, sonship, Spirit (Rom. 6; Gal. 3:27–4:6)—are found in Mark's narrative, but they are also deliberately crafted to appear anterior to and anticipatory of Paul's teachings and reinforce the apostle's insistence on the patterning of believers’ lives on that of the messiah.
Chapter 3 | The body and the blood
This chapter argues that, for Paul, the Eucharist is both an episode of the gospel narrative (it occurs on the night “on which [Jesus] was handed over” [1 Cor. 11:23]) and a timeless memorial rite that epiphanically (re)presents the death of Jesus Christ for believers ... this chapter contends that Mark incorporates the episode into his story, but he also constructs his broader narrative such that Pauline Eucharistic significances are anticipated (namely, Paul's conviction that the Eucharist affirms one's incorporation into the universal body of Jesus Christ [see 1 Cor. 10:16–17]). Mark thus self-consciously composes feeding miracles wherein the bread that is given to thousands (both Jews [Mk. 6:30–44] and Gentiles [Mk. 8:1–9]) evokes the language of the Last Supper, and, in so doing, the evangelist seeks to confirm that, when Christ believers consume that body in subsequent ritualized contexts, they are acknowledging and affirming the universal and unified community into which they have entered through Jesus’ death upon the cross.
Chapter 4| Death “in accordance with the Scriptures”
Throughout his letters, Paul presumes scriptural prophecies about, or typological prefigurations of, Jesus’ death. This chapter analyzes three scriptural prefigurations of Jesus’ death shared by Mark and Paul: the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the binding of Isaac at Genesis 22, and the slaughter of the Paschal lamb at Exodus 12. It argues that these passages would have been performed in Paul's and Mark's communities, and, because they would have been read through the lens of the Christ event, they would synecdochically evoke the entirety of the gospel narrative of which they form a part. The chapter then argues that Mark attempts to show how these prefigurations are fulfilled within the person of Jesus, while, at the same time, affirming the significances Paul has attached to them for his believing communities. Mark's claim, like Paul's, is thus that the sacrifice presented in these scriptural types, when fulfilled within Jesus (their antitype) unlocks the mission to the Gentile nations and results in a new and universal access to deliverance.
Chapter 5 | Conclusion
This chapter concludes the monograph. It rearticulates its thesis, and it briefly summarizes the various conclusions of the individual chapters. It then seeks to demonstrate the utility of an “etiological” approach in analyzing additional overlaps between the Gospel of Mark and the letters of Paul. It thus presents a final case study wherein the negative characterization of the disciples in Mark is analyzed, and it suggests that the evangelist has sought to anticipate Paul be suggesting that what truly “makes” an apostle is a resurrection appearance (1 Cor. 9:1; Gal. 1:1). Any claim to authority based upon familiarity with the earthly Christ is irrelevant, as those who knew the earthly Christ never understood him. Mark has, in other words, sought to level the apostolic playing field and set Paul upon an equal footing with the other apostles.
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