Just finished reading Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures for 1977-8, published by Harvard University Press. Kermode is writing as an expert in literature and an outsider in theology. His task is to read the Gospels, and Mark in particular, as literature, freeing our minds from the baggage that the word 'scripture' implies.It is most exciting, although it could be upsetting for an incurious believer.
Mark is important to study because it is commonly agreed to be the first Gospel to be written, and used as a source by Matthew and Luke. (The author names are traditional but we need to be cautious about their accuracy). Kermode is as interested in what Matthew and Luke do with Mark's text, as in the intention of Mark itself. He distances himself from naive assumptions that the authors reproduced what actually happened (no historian does that). By 65CE, Mark's message tells us that no one remained as an authentic eye witness of events - indeed, at the point of the crucifixion three decades earlier, there were no witnesses. People denied knowledge of Jesus, kept his mysteries secret, and bluntly kept their heads down. Whatever is said to have happened later is a fiction. Before readers get agitated, most of this comes from Mark himself. Jesus is presented as Son of God (verse 1). He talks in parables/riddles/mysteries to hide the nature of what he is saying (hence the secrecy in the title). He gets annoyed when his disciples do not understand. When Peter identifies him with the messiah, he commands silence (he does not say whether he agrees or not, but he does argue on exegetical grounds that the Messiah could not be the son of David). He offers a bleak future (Mark 13) and in the trial sequence reports that Peter denies him, a young man runs away, and generally everyone goes to ground. A Roman centurion honours him: Surely this man is a son of God but his own followers do not. He is laid in a tomb by a stranger, Joseph of Arimathea (in dexplicit contrast to John the Baptist who was buried by his disciples) and the women who come to anoint the body (already day 3) are met by a young man (the same one who ran away?) but contrary to their instuctions, tell no one "for they were afraid". So the book ends, Mark 16:8. So Jesus's death was met with denial, fear and silence, although demons recognised him for what he was. Full stop. End of story. Mark here finishes. Forget lost endings, and ignore the babblings of the current additional ending. They were afraid and silent. The story ends. This story is uncomfortable. Matthew, nor Luke, liked it and changed it. At least one alternative version of Mark existed which softened it. A church could not be founded from where Mark leaves the story.
Mark's was however a foundational story. Whatever we think of the later Gospels, and how they changed the story, we cannot forget Mark. They added birth narratives, genealogies, teaching such as the sermon on the mount, and a resurrection sequence, even an ascension.Above all they made Jesus fulfil scripture - the first clue, says Kermode, to spotting a made up story. Was Mark telling the truth? Of course not, he was writing a meaningful story emphasising things he felt strongly about. He emphasises cleanness and uncleanness, the demoniac living among the dead, the woman with the menstrual hemorrhage, Jairus's dead daughter, the death pollution gone from the tomb. Jesus represented cleanness, and pulled the world towards it.
So far we have simply read and understood the text of Mark as plainly written. Why Mark wrote the book is harder to interpret. This was a misunderstood and bad tempered Jesus. "Get thee behind me, Satan", he said to Peter. He could undertake acts of power, but faced with unbelief, "he could do no miracles (acts of power, dunameis) there. "Could not". Too much for Matthew and Luke. Acts of power, miracles, were dependent on belief. Demons recognized him, so perhaps he was a demon too? The synagogue rejected him because of his reformist tendencies - if resurrecting (second) Isaiah can be said to be reformist. He closed the book, before getting to the reference to the day of judgement. That is future. The now is about the blind, lame and captive. Real life, equity, justice and openness.
How did Mark construct his text? Kermode speaks of the powerful use of testimonium, Old Testament texts interpreted as Messianic. It seems to me that the over-riding text for Mark was Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12, generally described as the Suffering Servant passage. This contrasts the servant as an eventual exalted figure, who has reached that point by suffering. In (Second) Isaiah it may be a personification of the Jewish nation. In Mark, the story opens with a Servant quotation referring to John the Baptist, a messenger preparing the way. The Servant is despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and grief whom people hid their faces from. In the end, Jesus' followers leave him, run away, deny him, and let a stranger bury his body. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, unarguing. He took upon himself the sins of the world to heal others. He died with the wicked, hence the cross as a criminal's death; but also with the rich (in Isaiah this is the parallelism of equivalents), so Jesus had a rich man's tomb. He will have no descendants, yet world powers will take him seriously. In Mark, Jesus predicted his death immediately Peter identified him as the Messiah. He taught that the Messiah could not be the son of David, the popular warrior figure (Mark 12:35-37). People will see without being told, understand without hearing: in Mark, being told in parables prevented understanding; being told was not the answer. So the whole structure of the book revolves around the Suffering Servant. There are other proof texts too, the humble Son of Man from Ezekiel (and maybe Daniel), the cry from the cross quoting Psalm 22, "My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?" - for "It was Yahweh's will to crush him" (Isaiah 53.10). My view, in line with Kermode's general thesis that the Gospels were fictions, is that these Old Testament texts form the skeleton around which Mark's story was generated. Real information about the Jesus of history was sketchy, episodic because it was preserved in worship, and of uncertain historical authenticity. Some of the sketches about healings and teachings slotted into Mark's wider framework, their origins now uncertain. But the overall meaning given to Jesus' life and death is Mark's own creation. In it, Jesus keeps his own estimate of his mission secret, requiring silence and secrecy from his followers. This at a stroke undermines church claims attributed to Jesus himself. He is what he does - whoever has eyes to see let him see; "For what they are not told they shall see; and what they have not heard they will understand" (Isaiah 52:15). In Mark's Gospel, the disciples unfortunately never did understand.
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