Ben C Smith

1. It is possible that Eusebius (and others) thought of Mark as a υπομνημα wrongly; that is, Mark is actually a very well ordered work, completely finished in every significant respect, but the fathers mistook it for something else.
2. My preferred option: Mark is indeed a υπομνημα, but one which, like the Memoirs by Caesar, had its own charms. It is nevertheless true that, various chiasms and intercalatians notwithstanding, the main body of the gospel is a bit haphazard overall, and there are various features which are not consistent with typical finished literary works from antiquity.

Ben.

aa5874

What!!!!!.

Oh my God!!!!! Something has gone wrong. What is gMark, Ben?


GMark is well ordered in every significant respect. What!!!!

Toto

This is getting tiresome.

The second gospel a/k/a the Gospel according to Mark, is well ordered on the one hand, but on the other is written in fairly coarse Greek and contains "errors" which the later authors/editors of Luke and Matt tried to correct.

Since we know nothing of the author or his purposes, or his audience, one's imagination can run wild. Is there anything more to say about this?

Amaleq13

I recall reading a fairly compelling argument here that Mark was considered out of order compared to John which seems to have been favored by the same Fathers who offered the description.

Can't find it, though.

Ben C Smith

What, in your estimation, has gone wrong?


It is possible that the gospel of Mark is well ordered in every significant respect. Do you disagree that it is possible that the gospel of Mark is well ordered in every significant respect? What are you on about?

Ben.

bacht

Ben what do you think about the idea that Mark is actually a play script rather than a bio/history? Would that explain its differences from the other gospels, and its characterization in the patristic writings?

the_cave

Skimming through this thread...

But all of this is solved rather neatly if we assume that a proto-Mark preceded canonical Mark.

Papias seems to think that Mark's gospel was not written in order. But as aa points out, how did he know this? He must've known a gospel with a different order. But what gospel could that be?

The synoptics preserve more or less the same order--Matthew and Luke mostly rely on Mark's sequence of events. Matthew and Luke do rearrange the order of some pericopes here and there, and Luke of course has the Great Omission. But these are mostly not changes to the overall order: none of this really changes the overall order in any significant way.

But there is a gospel that presents events in a different order! That gospel is...gJohn. In gJohn, for example, Jesus upsets the tables in the temple at the beginning, not the end. He makes repeated visits to Jerusalem.

So, there was a gospel tradition that Papias knew about. It looked like a proto-John, and it preceded canonical Mark. And lo and behold...it is also said that Papias knew of "the traditions of the presbyter John". He seems to have trusted these traditions more than gMark. I'm guessing it's because...gMark used these "traditions of the presbyter John" to compose his gospel--Papias could tell this. Mark's order is stylized--read Michael Turton's commentary to learn how some have seen a chiastic style in the overall structure of Mark, how Jesus first ministers to the northern kingdom, then to the southern, and so on. Papias, I'm guessing, knew that gMark came later than these traditions of John, and were a rewrite of them.

So now we have another name for proto-Mark: The Traditions of the Presbyter John (whoever he was!) And in that case, proto-Mark could be the same as proto-John.

Ben C Smith

While I agree Mark would make a cracking good play in many respects, I do not see how it can be an actual play script. The dialogue is conversational (narrated), not dramatic; that is, it goes like...:

Peter said: This sure is an impressive building. Jesus answered and said: It is coming down.

...rather than:

Peter: This sure is an impressive building.
Jesus: It is coming down.

There is no narrator or chorus in Mark, and most ancient plays (all of them?) were written in verse. Mark is not.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

I would guess just the opposite; Papias could tell that Mark did not use the Johannine traditions, and that is why he (A) mildly deprecated Mark compared to John and (B) tells us that Mark got his stuff from Peter.

Papias probably thought the Marcan material was posterior to these Johannine traditions (which is implicit in his saying that John was a disciple of the Lord while Mark was only a follower of a disciple); but I do not think that we can assume on that basis alone that the Johannine traditions were actually prior to Mark.

Papias may be wrong about Mark getting his traditions from Peter, but I think he is insisting for us (A) that Mark did not get things in the right (Johannine) order, (B) that this is because Mark was not an eyewitness like John the disciple of the Lord was, and (C) Mark got his material from Peter, not from John.

Ben.

the_cave

Fair enough. Though since there are resemblances between gJohn and gMark, the Traditions and gMark must have shared a common source at some point.

I don't know if John the disciple of the Lord actually had anything to do with gJohn, and from Papias, we can't tell, since John the Presbyter seems to be someone else, contemporary with Papias.

I'm willing to believe that Mark got his material from someone called Peter, though in that case Peter was relating many of the the same things that were contained in the presbyter's Traditions.