1: Authority and Background
The authority of a text is determined by whether or not it is credible, that is whether or not we can believe what it says. To a great extent this question can only be solved by your making a religious judgment about its truth or otherwise, by answering the questions, "Does the gospel speak to me about God", "Is it meaningful for me.", and "does it help me to understand the meaning of Jesus Christ." However, the process of making such judgements can be helped by the possession of certain information about the how the gospel came to be written. This information is contained in this section.
1.1: Who wrote it?
Tradition says that it was written by Mark, who worked as St Peter’s interpreter at Rome. This tradition says that Mark wanted to put down Peter’s preaching in writing before he died. There was an urgent need for this, as the apostles were beginning to die off, and the Christian community needed to have a written record of their preaching. Some scholars believe that evidence that this gospel is based on an eyewitness account can be found in the little details which this gospel preserves, details which can only have been known by an eyewitness. Others say that the gospel was not written by Mark, but by an anonymous Christian of the second generation of the church. This tells us nothing, as the word anonymous merely signals that we do not know the name of the author. Furthermore, as three or four different generations co-exist alongside each other, that a gospel was written in the second generation of the Church’s history does not tell us whether its author was an elderly Christian, such as Mark was by then, or a younger one.
Task Mk 1
Compare Mark 5, 21-43 with Matthew 9, 18-26. What details do you find in Mark’s account that are not found in Matthew’s?
Peter’s preaching was considered important because he was one of the three apostles very close to Christ. These were Peter, James and John. James, however, was executed by Herod Agrippa the First in the year 44, leaving only Peter and John. Peter was also the first to recognise Jesus as the Christ. He was seen as someone who understood Jesus’ mission, and his teaching was, therefore, considered to have special weight.
1.2: Where and why was it written?
Peter had travelled to Rome, where he preached the gospel along with Paul. In the year 64 a vicious persecution of Christians was launched by the emperor Nero, who wanted to shake off the blame for a disastrous fire in the city which was being wrongly attributed to him. The Christians, regarded by everyone as a very strange group of people, were a useful scapegoat, and many Christians were put to death. Peter, it is believed, was finally executed in 67, and the gospel finally written in the year 70. In the meantime his preaching had been recorded. The evangelist, the writer of the gospel, is thought to have written the text in such a manner as to encourage the persecuted Christian church to stand firm. A third of the gospel is the passion and resurrection account, and three prophecies of the passion are found at important points in the text, (8,31-33; 9,30-32; 10,32-34). After the first prophecy there is a teaching that Christians must be prepared to carry their cross as Christ did, (8,34-38). Again, in the parable of the sower we are shown how some people fail because they give up under persecution (4,13-20). This is a warning to stand firm under persecution.
Why was Peter’s preaching felt to have such importance?
Study Mark 8, 34-38 and say how this passage might have been important in a Christian community suffering persecution.
The question is what authority can we give to the gospel. That the early Church, that is the early Christian community, regarded it as authoritative, is evidenced by the fact that the writers of the gospels of Matthew and Luke both included most of Mark’s Gospel in their accounts. They would not have done this has Mark’s Gospel not been considered a document of prime importance, implying that the Christians considered it a reliable account of the preaching of an apostle very close to Jesus. That the church accepted this gospel supports claims to its being an authentic account of Peter’s preaching.
Nevertheless, we must be clear what claims the gospel can make upon Christian believers. Christians believe that Scripture is the Word of God. But this poses a few problems. Human memory is notoriously unreliable, so it is highly likely that we do not have the exact words of Jesus. Some people have claimed that the whole story has been so adapted by the preaching of the church that we have no reliable account of Jesus’ life and preaching. Most Christian scholars are aware of the weakness of human memory and the ways in which stories become adapted in the telling. They are aware that the events of the gospel are not given in the exact order in which they happened. Nevertheless, they believe that the church is unlikely to have concocted the whole story, and that the church’s preaching would not effect a total transformation of the story of Christ.
One useful way to understand the authority of Mark’s Gospel is that it communicates to us the personality of Christ. The exact words of Christ would be valuable, but it is his personality that really counts. Here is where Peter’s testimony was valuable. The personality of Jesus had had a great impact upon him, and thus he wanted to pass this on in preaching. For Christians, who believe that Christ is with them working for the good, an account which reveals the personality of Jesus helps them to make sense of God’s activity and influence in their lives.
- Speaker 1: I believe that the gospel is literally true.
- Speaker 2:No, it’s all made up. It’s just a fairy story.
- Speaker 3: I believe that it is an honest attempt to communicate the meaning of Jesus to the world.
- Discuss the above quotations and say what conclusion you come to.
That the gospel is intended to communicate the meaning of Jesus Christ might seem strange, but this is what it implies in the first sentence, which is, "The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God." The Greek word for Good News is evangelion, from which we derive the word evangelist. Note that the Good News is not that brought by Jesus Christ, but is rather the good news about Jesus Christ. In this case the messenger is the message. What this means is that God’s promise was not that there would be a new teaching, but that there would come a person who would fulfil the hopes and aspirations of his people. This person was called in Hebrew the messiah, or in Greek the Christ. The Good News is that the long-promised person has come in Jesus Christ. This is the reason for the quotation from prophecy immediately after the first sentence. It reminds the Reader that Jesus is the fulfilment of the promise made by God through the prophets. Quotations from the prophets were important, as the Jews regarded the prophets as people who transmitted God’s message, and they believed that in the prophets’ works were clues as to the coming messianic age. If you wanted Jews to believe in Jesus you would have to justify your claims with reference to the prophets’ teachings.
Note that Jesus is described as the Son of God. As you will see in the following section, this title is ambiguous, it can be understood in various ways. The question which Readers of the gospel have to answer is what exactly does Son of God mean.
Of course, that the gospel is about the meaning of Jesus Christ does not mean that its teaching is not important. Clearly, Jesus said some new things and made an impact by his teaching. Clearly Christians value both the messenger and the message. However, the status of the messenger influences how we take the message. Unitarians accept Jesus not as divine but as an inspired man, and although they value his teachings they are as critical of them as they are of any wise person. On the other hand, if we see Jesus as divine, then his teachings have all the authority of God behind them, and although we interpret them to meet the challenges of our lives and times, we regard them as having the absolute authority that cannot be possessed by the teaching of a mere human, however wise.
Many Christians would say that God’s promise, which involves establishing his kingdom, the world as God would like it to be, cannot be fulfilled by a mere human, so Jesus must have been more than human. What do you think?
Why do you think the Christians called their preaching the Good News?
The prophecy at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel refers not to Christ but to John the Baptist. How then did the Christians see it as a support for their claims that Jesus was the messiah?
Why was it so important for the evangelist to quote prophecy?
- Essay
- a: How and why did Mark’s Gospel come to be written? (10 marks)
- b: What contribution does it make to the religious life of Christians? (10 marks)
- c: How would you respond to someone who claimed that a book written 1900 years ago is no longer relevant today? (5 marks)
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