Mark’s Gospel – the First Biography of Jesus

Abstract

As a literary construction, Mark’s Gospel has been read and interpreted through many prisms: it has been viewed as a riff on Homeric epic or as a homage to Greek tragedy; it has been argued that the Gospel is a kind of script for performance, the final write-up of a long series of popular public improvisations, and it is also claimed that Mark was writing up a memoir, dictated to him (or at least once told to him) by Peter. All of these approaches imply that Mark has cogency only when viewed through the lens of genre, with the particular emphasis falling on the performative cultures of the Greco-Roman world. To the genre typology can be added literary ‘biography’ (bios), which is the focus of Helen Bond’s new study of the Markan text. Bond, Professor of Christian Origins and New Testament at the University of Edinburgh, is not the first authority to have read the Gospels as biography (since Richard Burridge’s 1992 book What are the Gospels?, Mark has popularly been seen as some sort of biographical work) but in her particular analysis of Mark as a bios, Bond sets out new methodologies for approaching the text in which she roots her understanding of the genre in the Greek and Latin literary outputs produced, by and large, between the mid Classical period (c. 420 BCE) to the long Second Sophistic age (c. 70-270 CE). Most importantly she asks what difference does it make in recognising that Mark’s Gospel is a biography? To help answer that question, she delves deep into both the key source materials and the maze of scholarship which has developed on the notion of ancient biography in recent years and is influenced especially by the work of Tomas Hägg, one of the foremost scholars of the classical biographic tradition. Bond confidently guides her reader through multitudinous Greek and Roman texts, testing them for structure, detail, and topoi. In doing so, Bond recognises the difficulty we have in defining the genre and is right to emphasise the fact that many authors were not so much writing life-stories as constructing morality tales. It is that approach which underpins her reading of Mark, and her reader quickly grasps that the real life and times of Jesus of Nazareth is not the subject of the Gospel after all; the amazing (that is to say, miraculous) works and deeds of the Jesus-character is its focus. As Bond confirms early on (p. 5), ‘I regard Mark’s literary activities as a very specific reception of the Jesus tradition’ (italics her own). Moreover, eschewing the performative approach to the Gospel, her emphasis is on Mark’s bios as an important, if embryonic, stage of the emergence of a Christian ‘book culture’. Mark has an omniscient authorial voice, Bond argues, and knows the motivations of his characters, the rationale of their actions, and their placement in the Jesus story, which always privileges the protagonist himself. The many characters in the Gospel, she confirms, are mere foils to Jesus, just bit-players in his story. And ‘Mark’ himself – perhaps like many of the authors of the old Jewish scriptures remains Mark’s Gospel – the First Biography of Jesus 1046492 EXT0010.1177/00145246211046492Book of the Month research-article2021