C. C. Black, Mark as Historian of God's Kingdom

7/28/2019 C. C. Black, Mark as Historian of God's Kingdom

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Mark as Historian of God's KingdomC. CLIFTON BLACKPrinceton Theological SeminaryPrinceton, NJ 08542

Was the Buffalo chicken wing invented when Teressa Bellissimo thought of splittingit in half and deep-frying it and serving it with celery and blue-ch eese dressing? W asit invented when John Young started using mambo sauce and thought of elevatingwings into a specialty? How about theblack people who have always eaten chickenwings? The way John Young talked, black people may have been eating chicken w ingsin thirteenth-century Spain. How is that historians can fix the date of the Battle ofAgincourt with such precision? How can they beso certain of its outcome?

Calvin Trillin'UNCERTAINTY BEDEVILS every historical endeavor. Though elicited by inquiry

into a humble gastronomic item, Calvin Trillin's sober questions strike the basskey that resonates throughout this study and on which it will conclude.

I. The First Christian HistorianThe historian's art is not limited to collecting and framing traditions, however manyhe may have at his disposal. He must endeavour to illuminate and som ehow to presentthe meaning of events. He must be impelled by a desire to know and understand. IfLuke had had more traditions athis disposal, but had linked them together only as hedoes in the Gospel, he would not qualify for the title "historian." We ascribe this titleto him only because he did more than collect traditions. He tried to combine in his ownway, into a significant, continuous w hole, both the tradition current in the comm unity


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GOD ' S KINGDOM 65and what he himself discovered. Secondly, he tried to make clear the meaning whichthese events contained.^For those reasons the mantle of earliest Christian historian has been drapedupon Luke. Martin Dibelius does not argue, as he might have, that Luke's status

as historian rests on being the first to narrate the development of Christianity in thedecades after Jesus. Luke is not Ur-Eusebius. Dibelius's discritnen for historicalreportage is not material, an account of initial steps along "the Way" (Acts 9:2;19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22) among Gentiles and its parting froin the Jews. Instead,the criterion is perspectival: The historian is so recognized for construing the mean-ing of events, the communication of "a desire to know and understand" what hashappened. If that is how the h istorian's craft is understood , then, standing this sideof extensive redactional and literary investigation ofth e Gospels, there is no goodreason to reject its expression in the Third Gospel as well. By express testimony(1:1-4) Luke intends not merely to chronicle anecdo tes but to arrange them tnean-ingfully, persuasively, and with reliability. No biblical scholar would any longercharacterize Luke as a simple collector of traditions. Grant that, however, and thereremains no reason to deny that Mark, still reckoned by most as primary amongLuke's own sources, also proceeds with historical intent on Dibelius's terms. Byarranging antecedent traditions in a manner as sophisticated as it is subtle, Markis demonstrably interested in the meaning of those events he recounts. Whereas thatconcem becomes palpable in Mark's celebrated central section (8:22-10:52), thetip-off is present as early as that Gospel's first verse (1:1): "The beginning ofthegood new s of Jesus C hrist [the Son of God]."^ From the very beginning the readeris directed to interpret the meaning of what follows as glad tidings of God's ownanointed."* With com monplace allowance for differences in m odus operandi ancientand mo dem , Mark has long been acknowledged as the ftrst of Jesus' biographers.^

^ Martin Dib elius, "The First Christian H istorian," in idem. Studies in the Acts of the Apostles(cd. Heinrich Grccven; trans. Mary Ling; New York: Scribner, 1956; Gentian orig., 1948) 123-37,here 125.

"Adjudicating the text-critical problem in Mark 1:1, the jury remains out. Wh en it will returnwith a generally acceptable verdict is anyone's guess.

^ Thus Francis J. Moloney: "Every element in the [Marcan] story is there for a reason, whichwe will discover only by combing back and forth through the text until it yields its own narrativecoherence" {The Gospel of Mark: A Comm entary [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002] 22). To para-phrase M oloney's assertion in D ibelius's terms: The historian's impulse "to know and understand "is revealed in part by the principles of coheren ce she ap plies to those traditions ava ilable to her.

^ Clyde Weber Votaw, The Gospels and Contemporaiy Biographies in the Greco-Roman World(1915 ; FBB S; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970). With differences in empha sis, Votaw's conclus ions arc


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66 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71 ,20 09If ioc; or vita be recognized as a species ofthe genus historia, then to describe theevangelist Mark as a historian should no longer stretch anyone's credulity. And ifthat be accepted, then Marknot Lukemay be long overdue for recognition asthe first Christian historian, if by the second of those adjectives we mean the ear-liest account of Jesus' life narrated from a point of view that would soon beaccepted as characteristically Christian: history viewed through the confessionallens of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and ofth e nations.

It is just here that, in spite of their many intriguing theological intersections,Mark goes his own generic way, with determination and a difference, apart fromPaul: For the thing in which the Apos tle's letters evince virtually no interest a nar-rative account, located in time and space, of what Jesus said and did, and what inresponse to those events was done to him and his followersis M ark's bread andbutter.^ "Bom of woman, bom under the law " (Gal 4:4) is inadequate as the storyof Jesus' life that Mark, in sharp contrast, very much wants and considers it nec-essary to tell. We remain uncertain to whom Paul was referring as "the rulers of thisage" who "crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor 2:8), but apart from Mark and theother evangelists we would never know that Jerusalem's high priests and Ro me 'sPontius Pilate (Mark 14:53-65; 15:1-15) were among the possible candidates.Without Mark and his successors, at least within the canon, the Lord Jesus in Pau l'sletters could have becom e quite apart from the Ap ostle's intention"a Doceticfigure, a figment of pious imagination, who, like Alice's Cheshire cat, ultimatelydisappears from view."^ After Mark, that possibility remains but is considerablyharder to realize.

II. The Uneasy Consc ience of His tor iographyThroughout the course of his work the historian is selecting, constructing, and criti-cizing; it is only by doing these things that he maintains his thought upon the sichereGang einer Wissenschaft.... [S]o far from relying on an authority other than himself,' For this reason, among others, I remain uncon vinced by Joel M arcus 's argumen ts that Mark

is dcmon strably a Paulinist ("Mark Interpreter of Pa ul," NTS 46 [2000] 473-87). Although acutelyexposing Martin Werner's labored attempts to drive a wedge between Apostle and evangelist (DerEinflu paulinischer Theologie im Markusevangelium: Eine Studie zur neutestamentlichen The-ologie [BZNW 1; Gieen: Tpelmann, 1923]), Marcus has comparatively little to say on "A Gen-eral PointThe Earthly Jesus" (pp. 476-79); as a scrupulous exegete of Pauline literature, Marcusderives his sparse comm ents directly from Pau l's own. I tend toward a more elliptical correlation ofPaul and Mark, which for Marcus goes not far enough; see C. Clifton Black, "Christ Crucified inPaul and in Mark: Some Reflections on an Intracanonical Conversation," in Theology and Ethics inPaul and His Interpreters: Essays in Honor of Victor Paul Furnish (ed, Eugene H. Lovering and


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 67to whose statements his thought must conform, the historian is his own authority andhis thought autonomous, self-authorizing, possessed of a criterion to which his so-called authorities must conform and by reference to which they are criticized. . . .Even if he accepts what his authorities tell him, therefore, he accepts it not on theirauthority but on his own; not because they say it, but because it satisfies his criterionof historical tru th ... . For the historian there can never be authorities, because the so-called authorities abide a verdict which only he can give."To speak of Mark and other ancient writers as "historians" in even a sense so

highly hedged gives some historical critics the fidgets. It threatens to muddy allthose careful distinctiotis that post-Enlightenment investigators strove mightily toidentify atid preserve from taint.' The usual caveats are invoked. Unlike practicinghistorians of our day, the ancients (whether Herodotus o r Thucydides, Suetonius orTacitus, Josephus or Mark) favored typical motifs over comprehensive chronolo-gies, didacticism over neutrality, subjectivism and degrees of tendentiousness overa Rankean insistence on "how it essentially w as" {wie es eigentlich gewesen).^^ Thereal elephant in the historian's parlor is the etitwined question of transcendenceand revelation, a subject so dense that its consideration, however cursory, must bedeferred until this essay's end.

Yet no matter how boldly one marks the borders between historiographyancient and modem, many shades of gray resist suppression. There is little doubtthat the Gospel of Mark offers its readers, probably by intent rather than by default,a stylized presentation of Jesus that highlights typical traits. Mark does not offer acomplete life of Jesus, either because his sources did not permit such or becausethe evangelist was interested m ainly in what he considered religiously significant.Most likely both reasons were in play. Yet no life of Jesus produced in the pastsixty years with hope for a scholarly hearing has fundamentally contradicted mostof the materials that Mark 's comm on reader would regard as both typical and sug-gestive of "how it essentially was": Jesu s' alliance with John the Baptist; Jesus' per-formance of astonishing acts of healing in Galilee's environs; his teaching, inmetaphor, about "the kingdom of God"; the confused mixture of acceptance andrejection that his ministry generated; key moments of Mark's passion narrative.

* Robin George Co llingwoo d, The Idea of History (rev. ed.; cd. Jan van der D ussen; Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1993) 236, 238.

' Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (ed. John Bowden; trans. W. Mont-gomery, J. R. Coates, Susan Cupitt, and John Bow den; London : SC M, 2000 [based on the G enn aneditions of 1906, 1913, and 1950]).'" Leopold von R anke, The Secret of World History: Selected Writings on the Art and Science


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68 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71,2 00 9especially Jes us' disturbing activity in the temple and some Jewish -Ro m an collu-sion precipitating his death in Jerusalem by crucifixion. To accept the historicalplausibility of so many narrative traits while damning their selective typicality isa catch-22 that no historian, ancient or mode m , could hope to escape. It should befurther noted that, for reason s baffling exege tes to this day, Mark also adm its intohis narrative things that are atypical of his own portrait of Jesus, such as the eth..nie or religious ehauvinism (7:24-30) that flies in the face of his own purporteddietary and missionary liberality (7:1-23; 13:10).

At least in principle, ancient historians were not as cavalier with the facts asis sometimes a llege d." It is an equally fine question wh ether even mo dem histo-rians play strictly by rules whose disregard among the ancients is oft lamented. Itis very hard to read Barbara Tuchman's superb treatments of any subject to whichshe tumed her attention without the impression that in them she saw historical les-sons her readers would do well to contemplate. Certainly President John F.Kennedy believed that when he required his specially formed executive commit-tee to read The G uns of August, Tuc hm an's study ofth e causes of World War I, dur-ing the thirteen gorge-rising days ofthe Cuban missile crisis (1962).'- Didacticismwith a heavy hand m akes for ponderous reading; still, one wishes that the secondBush adm inistration had read with appreciation T uchm an's March ofFolly^^ beforelaunching its military adventure in Iraq (2003-). Although every successive con-tribution to the vast library of biographies of Abraham Lineoln aims to fill someimportant gap in our grasp ofthat figurebe it his alleged religious skepticism,clinical depression, or administrative genius'"*each also asks us to ponder sometrait or set of characteristics that helps us take a more satisfying measure ofth e manthan has been heretofore registered. Because Lincoln scholarship can assume gen-eral familiarity of its subject with reasonable comprehensiveness, the would-bePh.D. or best-selling author now tends toward the selective cameo, not the wall-encompassing mural.The issue of historical stylization also remains a disputed question among

" Thus Lucian: "A s to the facts them selves, [the historianj should not assemble them at ran-dom, but only after much labourious and painstaking investigation. He should for preference be aneyew itness but, if not, listen to those who tell the more impartial story, those wh om one wou ld sup -pose least likely to subtract from the facts or add to them out of favour or malice" (Lueian. vol. 6,How to Write History, etc. [trans. K. K. Kilbum; LCL; London: Heinemann, 1959J 60).

'2 Barbara W. Tuchman, Tiie Guns of August (New York: Ballantine, 1962). This book wonthe Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.'^ Barbara W. Tuchm an, The March ofFoily: From Troy to Vietnam (New Y ork: Knopf, 1984).


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MARX AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 69practicing historians. During the 1970s, in an undergraduate course on Renais-sance and Reformation Europe, I read Garrett Mattingly's The Armada with noawareness of its drubbing by some experts for its novelistic quality.'^ To the con-trary, its sparkling prose and rattling narrative made late medievalism come alive.Is Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Lincoln'^ to be pulped, because itsauthor was no professional historian and his poetry kept getting in the way?Although retaining unmitigated respect for James McPherson's studies in theAmerican Civil War,'^ for color and spectacle I still pull from my shelf ShelbyFoote.'^ Are readers like myself simply confused, or do we respect alternativeapproaches to history for the different values to which they aspire?

The one Rubicon that die Aufklrer crossed, from which there appears noturning back, is the control of the historian's imagination by corroborative evi-dence. As early as 1936, however, Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943), inhis lifetime a foremost expert on Roman Britain and the intricate puzzles sur-rounding Hadrian's Wall, dared to articulate what surely had crossed the minds ofother self-critical critics:

Historians certainly think of themselves as working from data, where by data theymean historical facts possessed by them ready made at the beginning of a certain pieceof historical research. Such a datum, if the research concerns the Peloponnesian War,would be, for example, a certain statement of Thucydides, accepted as substantiallytrue. But when we ask what gives historical thought this datum, the answer is obvi-ous: historical thought gives it to itself, and therefore in relation to historical thoughtat large it is not a datum but a result or achievement. . . . It is thus the historian's pic-ture of the past, the product of his own a priori imagination, that has to justify thesources used in its construction."

Has Collingwood thus skeptically undercut his own essays in ancient history? No,he replies:

[T]his is only the discovery of a second dimension of historical thought, the historyof history: the discovery that the historian himself, together with the here-and-now'^ Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1959). Scholarly reception of

M attingly's aw ard-win ning c lassic is detailed and criticized by Richard J. Evans, //; Defense of His-tory (New York: Norton, 2000) 122-30.

'* Carl Sandburg, Abraiiam Lincoin: The Prairie Years (2 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace,1926); idem, Abraham Lincoin: The War Years (4 vols.; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939). Th eWar Years won for its author the Pulitzer Prize.

" See, among others, James McPh erson, Battle C ry of Freedom: The Civil W ar Era (NewYork/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); idem. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Foughtin Ihe Civil K^a/-(New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).


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70 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71,2 00 9which forms the total body of evidence available to him, is a part ofthe process he isstudying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of viewwhich at this present moment he occupies within it. But neither the raw material of his-torical know ledge, the detail ofth e here-and-now as given him in perception, nor thevarious endowm ents that serve him as aids to interpreting this evidence, can give thehistorian his criterion of historical truth. That criterion is the idea of history itself: theidea of an imaginary picture ofthe past. That idea is, in Cartesian language, innate; inKantian language, a priori. . . . [T]he idea ofthe historical imagination [is] a self-dependen t, self-determ ining, and self-justifying form of thought.^"On its face this appears to put the historian at least formally on the same plane

as the religious believer. That implication CoUingwood candidly accepts : "Historyis thus the believing some one else [sic] when he says that he remembers some-thing. The believer is the his torian; the person believed is called his authority."^ 'Asking h im self wherein that author i ty l ies, CoUingwood reasons h is way, w i thoutflinching, to the anth ropo cen tric deduc tion that ope ned this section: "the d iscov -ery that, so far from relying on an authority other than himself, to whose s ta te-ments his thought must confonn, the his torian is his own authority and his thoughtau ton om ou s , se l f -autho r iz ing , pos sessed of a cr i ter ion to wh ich h is so-cal ledauthorit ies must conform and by reference to which they are cri t icized. . . . Evenif he accepts what his authorit ies tel l him, therefore, he accepts i t not on theirautho rity but on his own; not bec aus e they say i t, but bec ause it satisfies h is cr i te-rion of historical truth."^^ By reckoning with the history of historiography, Colling-wood realizes that the root issue is irreducibly theological:

[T]he facts have been obscured by a smoke-screen of propagandist literature, begin-ning with the "illuminist" movement ofthe eighteenth century and prolonged by the"conflict between religion and science" in the nineteenth, whose purpose was to attackChristian theology in the supposed interests of a "scientific view ofth e wo rld" whichin fact is based upon it and could not for a mornent survive its destruction. Take awayChristian theology, and the scientist has no longer any motive for doing what induc-tive thought gives him permission to do. If he goes on doing it at all, that is onlybecause he is blindly following the conventions ofthe professional society to whichhe belongs.^^From with in the h is tor ian ' s own f ramework, CoUingwood, among others ,^ ' '

Ibid., 248, 249.21 Ibid., 234 -35 .


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 71has identified most ofthe terms for the rest oft he argument this essay will pursue.By now, however, a few things should be painfully obvious. First, whether onespeaks of pre- or post-Enlightenment figures, the durable tension between "faithand history" has obscured their highly porous membranes. From its inceptionChristian faith has never been predicated without reference to historical personsand events,^^ just as historical recotistruction has never been conducted apart fromfaith, whether orthodox or some secularized version in reaction to it. Second, asvery likely the first to coordinate literarily the story of Jesus in a meaningful way,Mark owns the accolade of "the first Christian historian." Third, ifso, then Mark'sGospel is more than a mine of data frotn which later historians may quarry theirown reconstructions of Jesus. To think that is to regard that Gospel only as anobject for our disposition, whether academic or religious or some admixture ofboth. To the contrary, Mark is a subject, whose own historical and theologicalintegrity makes of him a fully equal partner in conversation and debate with ourown subjective biases as historians. To a degree considerably greater than manysubsequent, even highly sophisticated constructions of Jesus, Mark poses the ques-tion of authority raised by that Galilean and his association with the kingdom ofGod. By now it should be clear that such is the fundamental question not only forChristian faith but also for one's understanding and practice of history.

i n . W hose Life Is It, Anyw ay?As historians ofth e Jesus tradition we are storytellers. We can do no more than aspireto fashion a narrative that is more persuasive than compe ting narratives, one that sat-isfies our aesthetic and historical sensibilities because of its apparent ability to clarifymore data in a more satisfactory fashion than its rivals.^*

enter, com pletely and in reality, into the act of self-reflection, in order to becom e aw are of hu manwholeness" (Between M an and Man [trans. Ronald Gregor Smith; London: Kegan Paul, 1947) 124[italics in the original]).

^' Just here Martin Khler's theological critique ofthe Quest risks a parlous unilateralism(The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ [trans, and ed. Carl E. Braaten;Seminar Editions; Philadelphia, Fortress, 1964]). The same might be ventured of our generation'sKahler, Luke Timothy Johnson (Living Jesus: Learning the Heart ofthe Gospel [San Francisco:HarperCollins, 1999]), even though Johnson is little concerned with Khler's Protestant principleof doubt, not only sin, as the basis for justification by faith. Let those who remember Kahler onlyas the bte noir of nineteenth-century Life-of-Jesus research be reminded that he explicitly"apprais[ed] the development of [historical] criticism as a divine dispensation for the church"(Kahler, 148 n. 25), owing to its chastisemen t of "abstract do gm atism" (p. 46): the biblically un teth-ered fantasies of both preachers and systematicians (pp. 54-57, 67-71). Khler's battle was waged


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72 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71 ,20 09Nothing is easier, or offers more perverse satisfaction, than to position one-

self against those believed incorrigibly misguided. Rather than choose that nastypath, 1 beg the reader's indulgence for a brief, cordial argumentstripped ofbelligerencewith one whose scholarship unfailingly instructs me. In spite of itsunfortunately worded subtitle. Dale C. Allison's Jesus of Nazareth: MillenarianProphet^^ makes important contributions to the current conversation,applaud. If not blindingly original,^^ Allison's Jesus, an eschatologiealstrikes m e as far m ore plausible than som e alternatives lately proposed,^" preciselybecause it squares with the unadomed picture that Mark presents.-" And more thanmany "Third Q uesters," Allison is refreshingly humble about the historian's limi-tations, as evidenced in the quotation at the beginning of this section.

The m ore I ponder this expression of Allison's com mon sense, the m ore per-

35-36. 1 am grateful to Professor Allison for graciously and cheerfully debating with me issuesraised by the present essay.

^' Allison's use ofthe term "millcnarianism" derives from its technical use among social sci-entists and students of cross-cultural religious phenomena {Je.sus of Nazareth, 78-94). Some of itscriteria, cited by Allison, correspond to Mark's presentation of Jesus: for example, imminent catas-trophe (13:3-27), promotion of egalitarianism (9:33-41; 10:13-16: 12:41-44; 14:3-9), the shatteringof taboos (1 :40-45 ; 2:1-12; 2:2 3-3 :6), the substitution of religious for familial bo nds (3:31 -35), andunconditional loyalty (8 :34-9 :1 ; 9:42-50). Some allegedly millenarian traits are flouted by theMarcan Jesus: a fairly exelusive appeal to the disaffected (see M ark 1:19-20, 39; 2:13-14; 5:14-17,22-24, 35-43; 10:17-22; 12:28-34; 15:42-47), unfettered utopianism (see 10:29-31), nativism (see7:1-23; 10:2-9; 12:13-27), revela tion's authentication by miracle (see 1:44; 3:1 9b -21 ;4:3 5-4 1; 6:1 -6a, 45-5 la; 8:11-13; 15:27-32), and a paradisiacal restoration with the retum of ancestors (see 6:14 -29; 9:9-13; 16:6-8). Others are eolored in Mark with highly ambiguous hues, sueh as revivalism(see 3:7-12//15:6-32), political passivity (see ll: l-19//14:43 -50//14:5 3-65 //15:1-5), and a tendencyto divide humanity into camps saved and unsaved (see 4:10-l2//6:51b-52//8:14-21//10:35-45).Mark's eschatology is a tnotley affair, defying clear categorization. In any ease, nowhere in Markdoes Jesus espouse a strictly theological millenarianism (9:1; 13:32-37; cf Rev 20:1-3).* See Johannes Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation ofthe Kingdom of God (trans, and ed. RichardHyde Hiers and David Larrimore Holland; Lives of Jesus; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971; Germanorig., 1892); Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979). Incidentally, "blinding orig-inality" is an overrated academic virtue, as experience shows.

- ' Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 39-44, 95-171.'" Marcus J. Borg, Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit. Cu lture, and the Life of Discipleship (New

York: Harper & Row, 1987), whose position is adumbrated in his "An Orthodoxy Reconsidered: The'End-of-the-World Jesus, '" in The Giory of Christ in the New Testament: Studies in C hristology inMem oiy of George Bradford Caird (ed. L. D. Hurst and N. T. Wright; Oxford: Claren don , 1987) 20 7-17. Earlier in my earee r 1 rendered a favorable assessment of Borg's Jesus (see ln t 43 [ 1987] 422-24), which I now recant with some embarrassment. Borg's sapiential, non-eschatological, and


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 73plexing it seems. Methodologically, please note in this statement that it is our sto-ries that historians are called to fashion. Here Allison tacitly follows Collingwood.Silently we have slipped from the Gospels' narratives into our own. The cheerful(or vitriolic) cut-and-thrust of Jesus research implies criticism not of Mark's nar-rative but ofthe different ones we the historians construct. The persuasive rheto-ric criticized is not the evangelist's but rather that of historians whose competingstories are reckoned more or less plausible.^^ Allison recalls Thomas S. Kuhn'scelebrated notion of a convincing "paradigm," "an explanatory model or matrix bywhich to order our d a t a . . . . T he initial task is to create a context, a primary frameof reference, for the Jesus tradition, a context that may assist us in detenn ining theauthenticity of traditions and their interpretation."^^ How else could a historian,operating as a historian, proceed?^'' Just there, however, lies a fundamental prob-lem: Why must our "aesthetic and historical sensibilities" be satisfied? Since whenhave our paradigms become determinative for authentic interpretation?

Since the Enlightenment's dawning, of course. We need, however, to recallCoUingwood's reminder ofthe wobbly epistemology on which the historical enter-prise is based. Because we live in a philosophically confused erawhen was itnever so? I should at this point state as clearly as possible that my critique in noway disavows critical historical study as such, nor implies on my part any con-version to a cranky postmodernism that would reduce all reasoned arguments toblatant if disguised power plays. I suspect that much of what currently passes forpostmodernism is actually hyper-modernism, which, very much like the reac-tionary stance toward theology adopted in the nineteenth century by "the scientificview ofthe world," depends on modem values and could not for a mom ent survivetheir abolition. Since the Enlightenment, however, some things indubitably havechanged. One is Western culture's relationship to the church. Back then the questfor the historical Jesus promised, without delivering, liberation from the iron firstof ecclesiastical dogma.^^ Except for small pockets in some denominations, that isno longer a problem in the twenty-first-century West. The problem now is thechurch's general irrelevance to a thoroughly secularized culture, or the church 's allbut complete co-optation by it. Will Allison's historically reconstructed Jesusthe typically failed leader of a Jewish millenarian movement, interchangeable with

'- Ibid., 51 -54 ,95- 17 1.1 reckon Allison's point representative ofthat held by most competenthistorians now laboring in the vineyard.

' Ibid., 36. See T hom as S. Kuhn , The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1962).


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the prophet Wovoka of the 1890 Ghost Dance ''liberate anybody? I doubt it. Ishould expect Allison to counter: You're asking the historian to deliver more orother than what the historian can offer. To which 1 would reply: You bet. More tothe point, so would Mark, who, operating from different premises, could not morevociferously disagree with the conclusion that Jesus was a Utopian prophet finallyproved wrong. To paraphrase the Apostle: If for this plausible narrative only thehistorian in Christ has aspired, we are of all people most to be pitied (cf 1 Cor15:19)."

I speak of the historian in Christ, who honors the scholarly contributions ofAbraham's many children. In that regard let me mention another heavy hitterwhose work commands admiration: John P. Meier, whose magisterial MarginalJew now runs to 2,305 densely argued pages and at this writing remains incom-plete.-* Meier opens his introduction with ruminations on "The Quest for Objec-tivity":

There is no neutral Switzerland of the mind in the world of Jesus research. . . .Whether wecall it a bias, a Tendenz, a woridview, or a faith stance, everyonewhowrites on this historical Jesus writes from some ideological vantage point; nocritic isexempt... .The solution is toadmit honestly toone's standpoint, to try toexclude itsinfluence in making scholarly judgments byadhering tocertain commonly held crite-ria, and to invite the correction of other scholars when one's vigilance inevitably slips.

Likewise, Allison: "Maybe our reach for the historical Jesus must always exceedour grasp. . . . Our goal is not to be free of prejudices but to have the right preju-dices.'""'

^'All ison , 7e. of Nazareth, 78-94, 217-19. This I regard as theweakest aspect of Allison'sreconstruction, quite apart from its theological implications. Here he follows Schweitzer and hisadversaries into formal psychologism.

" Infairness to Allison, I should stipulate that nowhere inhis Jesus of Nazareth does he claimhis historically reconstructed Jesus tobe the only valid interpretation ofth at figure. Alliso n's Jesus ,nevertheless, finally bears more than passing resemblance toSchweitzer's, though conspicuouslydenuded of the latter's heroism: "[Jesus] makes the best of a bad situation: things are not what theyseem tobe; everything will beO K . . . . Jesus the millenarian prophet, like all millenarian p rophets,was wrong: reality has taken nonotice of his imagination" (Allison, 7e.si of Nazareth, 217, 218).By contrast, Mark thehistorian offers hisreaders onecrucified andvindicated, for whom and forwhose followers everything isnot "OK," a Messiah whose ministry upends what we construe as"reality."

* It should be needless to add that many responsible historians abjure any correlation of theirendeav ors with Christian faith. Still others register no such qu alms (e.g., N. T. Wright, Jesus and theVictory of God. vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996]).


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MAR K AS HISTORIAN OF GOD ' S KINGDOM 75Who determines, however, which prejudices are the right ones? In common

practice, certainly not Mark. By standard operating procedure, the redaction criticcan and should limn the evangelist's intention, but under no circumstances shouldthe critic's own Tendenz be allowed entre into the exercise. Once the evange list'sbias has been identified, then, through application of the scalpel-sharp criterion ofdissimilarity,"" that point of view should be factored out of, or at least mitigated in,the critically reconstructed Jesus of history. That process I regard as multiply prob-lematic. First, at the outset it eliminates Tendenzen possibly shared by both Jesusand the evangelist. Second, it unjustifiably elevates the historian's biasor, ifyouprefer, Meier's "adherence to certain commonly held criteria"over that of theevangelist, as though the latter were in no sense interested in the Jesus of historyand whose point of view is self-evidently inferior to our own. Third, it fostersamong many historians, and among the students and pastors they teach, an intel-lectual schizophrenia finally impossible to sustain. In effect, the historian is forcedto choose between history and theology even though (a) many historians careabout theology, and vice versa, (b) Mark is one historian who operates as thoughthe two are inextricably wedded, and (c) historians as a class are (if we acceptCollingwood's analysis) themselves believersif not in God, then in their owncritical powerswhether they acknowledge it or not.''^ Fourth, standard proce-dure dissolves the tension between faith and history by dismissing confessionalconsiderations tout court without entertaining a possibility that exegesis, as MosheGreenberg suggests, "both edifies the [faith] community and enables it to retain itsidentity through continuity with its past.'"*^ Finally, genuine conversation aboutJesus or any other subject of consequence will never take place as long as we

be left at the door before entering critical interpretation). See Rudolf Bultmann, "Is Exegesis with-out Presuppositions Possible?" in idem, New Testament and Mythology and Oiher Basic Writings(ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden; P hiladelphia: Fortress, 1984) 1 45-53. In comm on pa rlance, "pre-suppositions," "tendencies," and "biase s" are virtually synonym ous, though "b ias" in English veerstoward "prejudice," which in the United States and the United Kingdom carries a pejorative con-notation. We might say that a scholarly presupp osition is a reasonable bias that has surfaced to thelevel of consciousness and, having been purged of personal idiosyncrasies by the guild's conven-tions of chastening, enjoys general acceptance as an argumentative a priori.

*" Reginald H. Fuller {The Foundations of New Testament Christolog)' [London: Lutterworth,1965] 18) states: "As regards the sayings of Jesus, traditio-historical criticism eliminates from theauthentic sayings of Jesus those which are paralleled in the Jewish tradition on the one hand (apoc-alyptic and Rabbinic) and those which reflect the faith, practice and situations of the post-EasterChurch as we know them from outside the Gospels." Thus, Hugh Trevor-Roper (The Times Literary Supplement, July 25, 1980, 833): "Objective


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76 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71 ,20 09bracket out what we believe, as the Jews and M uslims and Ch ristians that we are,while closing ourselves off from the claims made upon us by the traditions westudy.'*'' To pretend otherwise again sets us at cross-purposes with our source mate-rial: However much one might wish it otherwise, apart from the church's faiththere can be in M ark no access to the Jesus of history. That figure simply does notexist, save in the flickering figments of our all-too-historically-conditioned imag-inations.

Such is the risk entailed by realigning the historian's relationship to Mark asone of a colleague consulting a specialist, instead of a pathologist carving acadaver. For the evangelist may pluck the probe from our hand to train it upon us.The historian is temptedindeed, if CoUingwood is correct, trained and rewardedby the guildto adopt the stance of independent investigator. If not a surgeon,then an archaeologist: The historian excavates the Second Gospel for traditional(read: heavily hypothetica l) tells of scientifically verifiable data."*^ Mark, I submit,will have none of that; for the very gospel to which he testifies undermines hisread ers' delusions of autonomy, all pretense to neutrality, human hubris in dem and-ing verification, our navet or arrogance in thinking ourselves sifters of evidenceinstead of those being sifted. Be we young students in early stages of perplexity,anxious to reconcile critical study with religious belief, or their more experiencedand jaundiced instructors, Mark's G ospel dynamites every one 's intellectualcomforts.

IV. The Echo in H am ac k ' s Wel l[I]t is beyond all doubt that Mark wants to emphasise that God's revelation happenedin the historical life and death of Jesus, that is, in a real man. . . . [Yet] this does notmean that we could see anything which could really help us in the historical Jesus,without the miracle of God's Spirit who, in the word o fthe witness, opens our blindeyes to the "dimension" in which all these events took p la ce .. .. [l]t is not the histor-ical Jesus that [Mark] proclaims. It is not a Jesus who could be reconstructed and car-ried over from his time to our time by historians. [Jesus] can only be proclaimed andwitnessed to by a believer like Mark.''*The primary thing we should note about Mark's history of Jesus is that he

wrote one at all. Unless we adopt a minority position that might be correct notwith-'*'' According to Hans-Georg Gadamer {Truth and Method [trans, and ed. Garrett Barden and

John Cum ming ; New York: Crossroad, 1975] 245; see also 321-25 ), "In faet, history does not b elongto us; we belong to it."


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78 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71 ,20 09out the narrative only as an unidentified narrator. The one figure in the SecondGospel who , indisputably, is self-dependen t, self-determining , and self-justifyingis God , who privately, albeit infrequently, acclaims Jesus as his Son (1:11; 9:7).^'The vital point of intersection between God and Jesus is the subject matter of Jes us 'preaching: the kingdom of God (1:14-15), already irrupting into everyday life (4:1-34). Now here in M ark does Jesus act as an autonom ous agent: "D oing the will ofGod" is the only consequential criterion, for Jesus or for others (3:35; 14:36); hisanswer to questions is based on an intuitive penetration of Scripture's underlyingintent (7:6-23; 10:2-9, 17-22; 12:18-37); "the Son of man goes as it is written ofhim" (14:21), toward rejection and vindication divinely ordained (8:21; 9:31;10:33-34; 14:41-42). It is Jesus' refusal of conventional accreditationdue recog-nition of status, biblical literalism, astral signs that repeatedly draws the fangs ofhis coreligionist antagonists (2 :6-9 ,16 -18 ; 3:1 -6 ; 6:1 -6a; 8:11-13; 15:29-32). Withtypical Marcan irony, obsequious entrapment is laced with truth unaccepted andunrecognized: "Teacher, we know that you are honest and don't concem yourselfwith what others think; for you are no respecter of persons but teach God's waywith sincerity" (12:14a).

Here we approach a watershed, cascading to the heart of Mark's testimonyand its historical handling. Never has a disinterested life of Jesus been written.With his announcement in 1:1, Mark lays his cards face-up on the table beforeplayers who prefer to conceal their hands. By declaring his intent as "a beginningof the gospel," Mark calls into question the altemative values of those satisfiedwith der sichere Gang einer Wissenschaft (Collingwood). The distance betweenfirst-century scribes and twenty-first-century historians may be smaller than wesuppose. For it is Mark's insistence that whenever the investigator approachesJesus faithlessly, w ithout trust that Je sus' compass is oriented to the m agnetic northof God's will, then Jesus can never be understood. That is the fundamental pointSchweizer was making in 1964; it remains true today. Ultimately it matters littlewhether we dress Jesus as the Cynic sage (Marcus Borg and Burton L. Mack),^^the peasant revolutionary (differently conjured by S. G. F. Brandon, Richard A.Horsley, and John D ominic Crossan),^^ the frustrated apoca lyptist (A llison, Albert

" One could argue, of course, that the God ofth e Second G ospel is nothing more than a maskfor the autonom ous if invisible evangelist. That is Ludwig F euerb ach's claim: the accusation of bador at best confused faith by no con viction other than that which resides in the autonom ous self (77ieEssence of Christianity [trans. George Eliot; New York: Harper & Row, 1957; Gem an orig., 1855]).

^^ Borg, Jesus. A New Vision, Burton L. Mack, Tiie Lost Gospei: The Booii ofQ and Chris-tian Origins (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 79Schweitzer, and Johannes Weiss), the "pale Galilean" (Emst Renan),^'' the exem-plar of liberal values (Adolf Hamack and, in a feminist key, Elisabeth SchsslerFiorenza),'^ the epitome of God-consciousness (Friedrich Schleiermacher),^* theethical (Immanuel Kant)^' or mythic ideal (David Friedrich Strauss and Campbell),^^the mountebank (Reimarus),' ' the blasphemer (Capernaum's unnamed scribes[Mark 2:7]), Satan's wizard (Jerusalem's scholars [Mark 3:22]), or in tbe costumeof countless other roles in which we may cast him. In every case the rags can beassembled only temporarily before crumbling away, revealing the radical resistanceof God's kingdom to all the wissenschaftlich evidence by which we might try tomeasure it. The deep well into wbich Adolf Hamack was said to bave peered, onlyto see bis own face staring back at bim,^" is the same as that wbicb Schweitzerexposed tbrougbout tbe nineteenth century before gazing into it bimself. It is asold as Narcissus, as recent as yesterday's Jesus book.^' If Collingwood is correct,that well is tbe historical imagination itself. If Mark is right, it is Jesus, tbe agen tof God 's apocalyptic sovereignty, wbo reveals to us wbo we really are and whetberour motives are misguidedly religious (3:4-5), timorous (5:34-36), disbelieving(8:11-13), or self-delusional bluster (14:30-31).^^ It is no accident tbat in Mark the

^'' Ernst Renan, The Life of Jesus (New York: Random House, 1927; French orig., 1863).'^ Adolf Hamack, Wha t Is C hristianity? (trans. Thom as Bailey S aunders; New York: Harper& Row, 1957 [German orig., 1899-1900]); Elisabeth Schssler Fiorenza, Jesus: Miriam's Child.Sophia s Prophet: C ritical Issues in Feminist Theology (New York: Continuum, 1994).

'^ Friedrieh Sehleiermaeher, The Life of Jesus (ed. Jaek D. Verheyden; trans. S. MacLeanGilmou r; Lives of Jesus; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975; Germ an orig. posthumo usly pub lished, 1864).

^' Immanuel Kant, Religion w ithin the Limits of Reason Alone (trans. Theod ore M . Greene andHoyt H. Hudson; New York: Harper & Row, 1960; 2nd German ed., 1794).

^^ David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically E xamined (ed. Peter Hodgson; trans.George Eliot; Lives of Jesus; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972; German orig., 1835); Campbell, Herowith a Thousand Faces." Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments (ed. Charles H. Talbert; trans. Ralph S. Fraser;Lives of Jesus; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972; German orig., 1778).

''" George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads (London: Lon gmans, Green, 1909) 44.*' Of all the reasons to w rite a book on the Jesu s of history, the least persuasive is that it will

offer a more historically reliable substitute than the account presented by Mark. Such a claim,whether exp licit or tacit, follows from positivist assumptions of nineteenth-century historicism that,although yet to be verified, autom atically discount w ays of interpreting Jes us in alignm ent with tra-ditional Christianity. As Robert Morgan argues ("The Historical Jesus and the Theology of theNew Testament," in Glory of Christ in the New Testament [ed. Hurst and Wright], 187-206, here197), "Purely historical constructions of Jesus are theologically at best defective and probably mis-leading."

* One might protest that I insist only on eom pliant reade rs of the Gospel, that I accord a p riv-


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80 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71 ,20 09only qualification for "getting Jesus right"which for the evangelist amounts toentrance into God's kingdomis not more information but self-renunciation(10:17-31; also 8:34-9:1). The problem is not that we don't know enough aboutJesus. The problem lies in the self of the historian, who may know all that is impor-tant but refuse to

V. An Apo calypt ic Co nclus ionIf we are going to stick to this damn quantum-jutnping, then 1 regret that 1 ever hadanything to do with quantum theory.^In spite of creative attempts to tackle the problem,*^ for Jesus' historicalinquirers the resurrection remains no-man's-land, the frontier once occupied by

miracle stories. The latterembraced so ingeniously by rationalists like HeinrichEberhard Gottlob Paulus, whose explanations Strauss demolished with palpablerelish**seem no longer an occasion for academic apoplexy. That is due in largecolleaguea fully equal partner in con versa tion and debate with our own subjective biases ashistoriansthen Mark's Tendenz has a right to be heard and grappled with even if finally repudi-ated, as ihe evangelist himseif concedes (thus 3:6; 6:3b; 8:17-18; 12:18; 16:7-8). Mark does notobligate any reader to accept his presentation of Jesus; neither do I. That is not the question. Atissue, rather, is our respectful invitation to hear the evangelist out before accepting or rejecting hishistorical assessment.

' Similarly, Lea nder E. Keck (Who Is Jesus? Histoiy in Perfect Tense [Studies on Personal-ities ofthe New Testament; Colum bia: Un iversity of South Carolina Press, 2000] 147) observes: "theprimary opponent to be overcome [by Jesus' follower] is not an external enemy, as in messianism,but a power intemal to the self" 1 regard Keek's contribution as one of the few "success stories"within recent Questliteratur, precisely because it sidesteps that project's deep flaws and insteadoffers nuanced rumination on Jesus as presented by the NT. In many ways Keek's book is a histor-ically sophisticated, M'\e.s'c/(a/?/;c/!-conversant exercise in contemporary christology, based onexegesis of Mark by way of Paul (the earliest recorded interpreter of Jesus) and the other Synopticevangelists (the earliest commentaries on Mark).

^ Erwin Schrdinger, quoted in J. C. Polkinghome, The Quantum World (London: Longman,1985)53 .

^' Recently, note Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A ComprehensiveGuide (M inneapolis: Fortress, 1998) 474-511. For Ernst Troeltsch, "On the analogy of events knownto us we seek by conjecture and sympathetic understanding to explain and reconstruct the past"("Historiography," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics [ed. James Hastings; New York: Scrib-ner, 1922] 716-23, here 718). Theissen and Merz reformulate Troeltsch's analogical axiom to leaveopen, without possibility of historieal confirmation, the possibility of Jesus' resurrection by com-parison with another m ystery wh ose reality no one do ubts: death. I doubt how far that refinementcan carry the historian, who on such terms is no more able to corroborate the veracity of Easter


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MARK AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 81mea sure to their historical contextualization by G za Vermes, among others, posi-tioning Jesus alongside other Jewish wonder-workers.^^ In Mark's Gospel, how-ever, Jesus' mighty works are ofa piece with his teaching (1:25-27), which includesthe Son of Man's death and resurrection (8:31 ; 9:9) but comes repeatedly into focuson the kingdom of God (1:13-15; 9:1). The big question is not how the historiandeals with the resurrection, which in Mark is but the climax of a larger apocalyp-tic scenario (see 13:3-37). The crucial issue is how w e shall address a claim for theirruption of G od's kingdom in hum an history. To date, responses to x] aoiXeia TOeo have been understandably guarded, removed by at least one degree from thephenom enon itself and practically identical to those surrounding resurrection. Thescholarly drill is familiar: Document from the pseudepigrapha that some ancientJews accepted such a thing in various ways, then halt because historical recon-struction cannot cope with the validity or spuriousness of religious claims.

Let us entertain a thought experiment. If a historian w ere bold enough, or suf-ficiently foolhardy, to attempt even provisional description ofthe kingdom's inter-section with hum an history, what sort of image m ight em erge?It would have to be an ambiguous, even paradoxical picture; at the momentit acquired adequate definition for discursive analysis, the game w ould be up . Suchan image could never be verified as a cluster of activities expressive of God. In the-ory it could only be falsified as a hum an fabrication of what mortals think a divinekingdom ought to look like: namely, human goods of an exponential scale beyondreckoning. If it were God's kingdom with which the historian were dealing, thenit would of necessity be temporally non sequitur (continuous with the past whiledisrupting it; now but not yet), circumstantially contradictory of normal experi-ence, and im possible to characterize in positive terms that were not absurd.It would, I suspect, look rather like the depiction of God's kingdom in Mark'sGospel.Grant a historian permission even to address transcendence as it may impingeon history, and Mark's achievement appears formidable indeed. In every majoraspect of this GospelJesus' teaching, couched in riddles (4:1-34; 12:1-12); hiswo rks, at once blatant yet secreted, unsatisfying, and inexplicable (3:7-12; 4:35-41; 5:1-20; 6:45-56; 7 :31-37; 8:11-21; 11:13-20); a messiahship crowned by con-temptuous execution and God's silence (15:22-39); a vindication announcedthough never witnessed and immediately hushed (15:38; 16:1-8)ambivalenttraces of God's intervention are acknowledged without rational explanation or anyverification w hatever. At day's end Markproves nothing . It is as though the authorrealized, as both theologian and historian, that such a kingdom as Jesus presented


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82 THE CATHOLIC BIBLICAL QUARTERLY | 71,2 009is intrinsically impatient of proof, even or especially for sympathetic readers.***The evangelist toils in the same tw ilight zone as Calvin Trillin in his quest for theBuffalo chicken wing. To chronicle the history of Jesus as agent of God's reign,Mark must bend Ranke's famous dictum: Wie es ist und w ird werden, das ist wiees eigentlich gewesen , "How it is and is coming to be is essentially how it was."By intuitive understanding, the historian of God's kingdom attempts to convey theinner being of the future as it has pushed its way into the past.

Such an approach, or any so theologically attuned, the classically trained his-torian will be tempted to dismiss out of hand. Before doing so, let her rememberthat, whether consciously or not, she already proceeds from a theological basis:namely, the deistic assumption of a closed system of commonplace cause andeffect, subject to the autonomous investigator's analysis and adjudication. Herposition is not unlike that ofthe classical physicist, whose deterministic view ofmechanical reality, obedient to Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell's laws,were overtumed by Emest Rutherford and Werner Heisenberg's demonstration ofthe unpredictable instability of a nuclear atom. It was to this now-famous uncer-tainty principle that Erwin Schrdinger objected in conversations w ith Niels Bohrin 1926. Even more viscerally repulsed was Albert Einstein: In 1924 he claimedthat, if theories renouncing strict atomic causality were upheld, he would "ratherbe a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming-house, than a physicist."*^ Althoughhe never quit the laboratory for boot- or bookmaking, at length Einstein gave uphis numerous attempts to undermine the uncertainty principle, which has becomebasic in quantum theory. As Kuhn would say, a paradigm, dominant for centuries,has shifted with revolutionary impact.

My last suggestions are offered sans defensiveness or apologetic intent. Adop-tion of either would betray the Gospel I mean to interpret. By all means let the his-torian continue to probe ancient Galilee and Jerusalem, Jewish practice and beliefin the early centuries of our Common Era, and the dynamics of imperial Romewith its conquered parties. Time-honored studies in those fields invite ongoing

* For this reason the present essay offers no sue eor to conservative apo logetics, which occa-sionally plies syllogisms demanding that, if God can perform "supernatural" miracles (N.B. thedeist-inspired lang uage), then anything interpretable as intervention in a closed universe m ust be justthat. For help in refming this elarification I am indebted to Markus Boc km uehl.

*' Letter to Max and Hedwig Bom, April 29, 1924; quoted in Jrgen Neffe, Einstein: A Biog-raphy (trans. Shelley Frisch; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) 335.

'" It should g o without saying that I cite this shift in the study of physics for illustrative pu r-pose only. A universe characterized by the radieal indeterminacy of quantum mechanics is no more


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MARK. AS HISTORIAN OF GO D'S KINGDOM 83refinement and occasional reconsideration. When carefully executed, they con-tribute important knowledge that is interesting on its own terms and needs no otherjustification. If, however, an investigative shift of quantum magnitude is to occur,the publication of yet another life of Jesus will never m ake it happen. If after morethan two cen turies of trial and error we have not yet learned this, then either we arecockeyed optimists or we haven 't been paying attention. A quantum jump will takeplace when som e historians summ on the requisite intellectual and intestinal forti-tude to question their hermeneutical assumptions and, as a consequence, reckonhumbly with a divine eschatology that explodes modem historiography." As ever,historians will need assistance from experts in other fields: not only archaeolo-gists, epigraphers, and numismatists, but also philosophers, theologians, and per-haps even poets.^^ Mark, evangelist and historian, stands ready to assist, for hewas the first to make such an attempt. The results, impossible to predict, will surelysurprise.

" For provocative reflections in this vein, see Paul S. Minear, The Bible and the Historian:Breaking the Silence about God in Biblical Studies (Nashville: Abingdon, 20 02) 25-84.'^ See, among others, Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of The-


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C. C. Black, Mark as Historian of God's Kingdom

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