Mark (2)—
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Christian Beginnings
| … the early Christians, and by that I mean the Christians
of the second and third Centuries A.D., who most certainly did not think about time
in th[e] modern way, probably knew a good deal more about the meaning of the gospel
texts than do the present–day inheritors of German nineteenth–Century Higher Criticism.
—Edmund Leach, “Against Genres” |
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Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is one who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death (Myer 1992, 31). |
For Mark, Christ’s cures achieve their most vivid form through
casting out devils from the diseased, an extension of His wilderness struggle with
“the satan,” where His temptation serves as foreshadowing of later temptations (8.11,
10.2, 12.15) and His warning against temptation (14.38) (see Myers 130). Becoming
another motif for later variation is a clause that may be translated literally, “the
Spirit threw him out [ekballei]” (Mark 1.12). The word for casting out devils
is one form or another of ekballei as in Mark 1.34, 1.39, 3.15, 3.23, 6.13,
16.17. (Thus, Mark’s supernatural imagery characteristically involves some self–divisive
form of being out of place, the root idea of ekstasis—cf. “far–from equilibrium”).
For instance, immediately after Jesus withdraws to initiate disciples then returns
to the world, his kin apply to him the verb (exest–e ) from which “ecstasy”
(ekstasis) comes (Mark 3.21–22). The meaning of exest–e is best understood
in terms of its comparable use in 2 Cor. 5.13: “For whether we be beside ourselves
[exest–emen] , it is to God: or whether we be sober [s–ofronoumen],
it is for your cause.” Paul contrasts his ministerial moderation and sobriety with
the ecstasy or divine intoxication he enters for God. The assumption is that, if
he used the latter state publicly, he might appear mad, but since the ecstasy is
to or for God, Paul apparently approves of it. Similarly, Mark 3.21–22 can be read
as an ironic situation where Jesus’ kin consider him insane, but he is actually ecstatic.
(One verbal clue to this ambiguity is that when Greek writers employ exist–e mi
in the sense of insane they usually add the explanatory phrase tou fronein
or t–o n fren–o n. Mark omits that phrase.)
Forms of the same term characterize those who witness Jesus’s miracles
(e.g 2.12, 5.42, 6.51, 16.8)—not a surprising connection since ecstasy in mystery
religions stemmed from encountering the divine. As to ecstatic public response to
miracles, consider Acts 8.11 where the people are exestakenai (beside themselves,
in ecstasy, amazed) by Simon’s magic, seeing it as the power of God. Asuming that
later Christian categories are applicable, standard lexicons, e.g., Walter Bauer’s,
try to distinguish sharply between the senses of exist–e mi as madness or
amazement and religious ecstasy, but in one of the prime sources for understanding
the mysteries, Euripides’ Bacchanals , these ideas overlap, with the god–sent
“ecstasy” bringing, insanity and wisdom, while the spectators experience astonishment
(See Holm 1982, 201-210.
Depending on context, pneuma means either the in–dwelling Holy Spirit or the
devils being cast out (e.g., Mark 1.26). The most disparate characters are subtly
associated with one another, as if they were all part of a single mind in a psychomachy.
Metaphors of Wholeness and Division
The genre of the psychomachy (dramatization of a division within the mind) already
existed in Egyptian literature. Psychologically, it underlay the mysteries, if initiation
consisted of identifying with some divine figure within the mind and rejecting others.
It is also implicit in Gnosticism, which emphasized self–knowledge: “For he who has
not known himself has known nothing, but he who has known himself has at the same
time already achieved knowledge about the depth of the all” (Robinson 201). These
words from “The Book of Thomas the Contender” are allegedly those of Jesus to his
“true companion” and “twin brother” Judas Thomas, i.e., Christ and Doppelgänger,
two sides of one mind. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip describes a mysterylike internal
transformation:
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… You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ. You saw [the Father, you] shall become Father.… you see yourself, and what you see you shall [become] (in Robinson 137). |
The act of literary composition furthers introspection, opening many moods, including
a sense of unity (withdrawal from the divisiveness of the world). This is what the
Gnostics sought when they identified with a sacred reality presumed to be within
them. Robert J. Miller goes so far as to see this introversion as almost exclusively
Gnostic: “ By contrast [withthe canonical gospels], the Gnostic influence in the
Sayings Gospels makes for an understanding of the kingdom as an interior, spiritual
reality” (24).
Introspection, however, may also reveal internal turmoil and bifurcation. Admittedly, sense of a divided self probably long predates writing. “In 1981, archaeologists discovered at a site named El Juyo near Santander, Spain, a 14,000–year–old Paleolithic shrine with a face split down the middle—one side a great cat, the other human” (Whitlark 1988, 206). Introversion, nonetheless, must be intense before a genre devoted exclusively to it becomes popular. Thus, among classical authors and early patristic fathers, description of internal conflict surfaces only in occasional metaphors, as in chapter 29 of Tertullian’s De Spectaculis, where he imagines a battle between virtues and vices within the soul (Clemens 23). Not until the fourth century C.E. did there arise that classic of the genre, Prudentius’ Psychomachie, one of the most popular books of the middle ages, because it so perfectly suited the spiritual struggles of sedentary, literate monastics.
In Mark, the motif of a divided self is not quite that developed—but almost. Jesus says that evil comes from within a person (7.23). Unity can be achieved if something is cast out, cut away, sacrificed—metaphorically, an “eye,” a “hand,” a “foot” (9.43–47)— preparatory to later rebirth. Because of its privacy, the original battle with “the satan” has been imagined by some readers as being within Jesus Himself. So also, in metaphor, is His feud with disciples. It culminates in the betrayal immediately after the first Eucharist, when Judas (along with the others) has become part of Christ’s Body and Blood.
Further enhancing the atmosphere of introversion and private torment,
Jesus seeks isolation. He bids even the demons whom he exorcises to keep the secret:
And [because the fiend had revealed who Jesus was,] Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Hold
thy peace, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit had torn him [sparaxan],
and cried with a loud voice, he came out of him. (1.25–26 KJV)
This healing, the first after the heavens were torn open, diabolically parodies the
supernatural rending and the voice’s proclaiming Christ’s identity. The vague pronouns
blur together Jesus, the possessed man, and the demon, as if all three were interchangeable,
parts of a single internal dialogue.
Consonant with mental conflict, the weapons of the struggle are
not physical objects, but language. Demons are expelled with a word.
And these signs will accompany those who believe; in my name they will cast out demons;
they will speak with new tongues … (Mark 16.17).
Enmity divides Holy Word and Devil:
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when they hear, Satan immediately comes , and takes away the word which is sown in them (Mark 4.15) |
This idea (sacred language versus demon) developed within Christian tradition as
with a monk who asserted: “For every word of the Lord written by the scribe is a
wound inflicted on Satan” (Casiodorus, 1, xxx, 1). At first, this assertion sounds
very different from the gospel where scribes are villains. But the gospel only comes
to readers from the work of still other scribes—invisible tellers of the critique
of literati, so their writing becomes psychomachylike in another way: their aiding
an attack on their own professional class.
Actually, the Pharisaic, scribal clique was the faction of Judaism closest to Christianity
on such issues as resurrection and the afterlife. Because of His doctrines, contemporaries
would have thought Jesus part of it; their antagonism came from being competitive
subdivisions (Harris 455). In contrast to the tensions within Christian literacy,
Egyptian paganism adopted the scribal point of view so thoroughly that it sometimes
sounds divorced from the external world:
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Not perishing forever is in this papyrus roll, so that I am rendered eternal because of it. One who has copied it for himself say[s]: “…. [I] who have copied it am at peace, my heart being with me (Allen 16). |
Ptuas
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I have come as a spitting scribe, that I may give the God control of his feet.…My mouth vomits up truth.… —The Book of the Dead |
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A large number of miscellaneous papyrus documents from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt—something like 1,500 of them have been printed—mention explicitly that one or more of the principals was illiterate (Harris 10) |
In addition to their specialty, written charms, scribes also healed with spittle.
Although the image is not a favorite among most modern preachers, so did Mark’s Jesus:
And taking him aside from the multitutde privately, he [Jesus] put his fingers into
his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue; (Mark 7.33)
And he [Jesus] took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village; and
when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him, he asked him, “Do you see
anything.” (Mark 8.23)
That the two such healings should be of a blind man and of a deaf and dumb one is fitting. Set amidst parables of hearing and beholding the Truth, these cures are variations on the theme of evangelizing those who must be taught to see and listen, as in the Gnostic tractate “Authoritative Teaching”: ): “he applied the word to her eyes as a medicine to make her see with her mind….”( Robinson 305). Like water in baptism, some physical substance in Mark 7-8 gives the initiatory experience a stronger hold on imaginations.
Why, though, is that substance spittle? Egyptian readers might have connected this with their myths (ultimately relevant even to their attitude toward language itself). In Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Budge devotes an entire chapter to “Spitting as a Religious Act.” For instance, “[i]n the XVIIth Chapter of the Book of the Dead, we read that the Eye of R–a , i.e., the Sun, was seriously injured by a violent assault made upon it by Set, but Thôth [the god of scribes] came forward, and, having spit upon the Eye, the trouble disappeared, and the Eye soon recovered (1911, II, 203).” The sun god used spittle as part of his cosmic act of creation. Don Cupit comments that what he spat forth “had been only a metaphor for the true creator, which is speech” (3). In the above–quoted epigraph, being a “spitting scribe” is associated with “vomit[ing] up truth.” Thus, in Christ’s healing, an Egyptian might have considered spittle the shadow of that other product of the mouth: language.
Mark’s Greek noun ptuas and related verb emptu–o not only mean spit, but are onomatopoeic, imitating the very sound of expectoration. Thus, they are vivid. Since they hover in the memory, the reader will recall the two healings, contrasted with several very different references to saliva that follow them:
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… and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and shall kill him; and the third day he will rise again. (Mark 10.34) And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to buffet him, and to say unto him, Prophesy: and the servants did strike him with the palms of their hands. (Mark 14.65) And they struck his head with a reed, and spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. (Mark 15.19) |
Quite as obsessed with writing as were the Egyptians, the Christian scribe Cassiodorus remarks, “The fast–travelling reed–pen writes down the holy words and thus avenges the malice of the Wicked One, who caused a reed to be used to smite the head of the Lord during his Passion” (18).
As part of the motif of secrecy/privacy, Jesus took the two patients
aside, perhaps also so that the spitting upon them would not be for them a public
embarrassment. But the spitting upon Jesus is public, part of deadly mockery. In
these instances (and , indeed, throughout much of Mark), public is evil, private
good—an atmosphere as introverted as any hyper–literate, mystery–loving Egyptian
might like.
Secret Orders
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… thirty–four centuries ago a portion of the Book of the Dead was [already] regarded as extremely ancient, mysterious, and difficult of comprehension. —Brian Brown, The Wisdom of the Egyptians |
The little section (Mark 1.23–35) itself becomes a pattern for the subsequent one. Christ’s next described miracle is making a leper “clean” (katharisai), a word that occurs four times in five verses to make it conspicuous. The previous healing was an exorcism of an “unclean [akatharton] spirit.” Calling both maladies “unclean” loosely associates the two incidents. This is especially true since the uncleanness of the spirit is all–the–more noticeable by being contrasted with its acting in the purity of a synagogue. Inverting the imagery, Jesus tells the Leper to visit a synagogue. Both demon and leper reveal Christ’s glory; each time, He forbids them to do so. After each healing, Jesus goes into the wilderness.
How reliable is this organization? According to Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis (circa 130 A.D.), Mark—whose organization diverges significantly from that of John— never arranged “the Lord’s sayings” in the historical order (Eusebius, History 3:39). Despite Mark’s writing that each event happened “straightway” after one another, there are not very many occurrences: “It has been calculated that three or four weeks would suffice for everything related in Mark, except 1.13; as B. H. Streeter remarked: ‘the total number of incidents recorded is so small that the gaps in the story must be the more considerable part of it’ ….” (in Nineham 35). Of the similar use of “Suddenly” as a transition in ancient Greek romances, Bakhtin writes, such “time usually has its origin and comes into its own in just those places where the normal, pragmatic and premeditated course of events is interrupted—and provides an opening for sheer chance, which has its own specific logic” (2).
In Mark, that logic is relatively random variation on its motifs, sometimes so strange as to approach parody. Thus, the next revelation of Christ’s glory (2.3–5) brings not a ripping apart of the heavens and a descending dove but a roof torn from a house and a palsy victim being lowered. The descending one does not call Jesus Son, but Jesus calls him son. Instead of the event leading to a struggle with Satan, Christ quarrels with the scribes, before, as usual, leaving for the wilderness.
The next healings, arguments over them with the scribes, and explanatory/mystifying parables occur during Christ’s revelation of himself as the new wine bursting the old cask. Thus again, revelation is an epiphany violently tearing open the old order. After the usual transition in the wilderness, the Gerasene demoniac appears, supernaturally rending the chains with which he is bound. Driving out multitudes of demons, this cure is the most dramatic healing of a divided self.
Perhaps an even–more puzzling incident of rending and departure is the denuding of the escaping young man torn from his linen robe:
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And a young man followed him, with nothng but a linen cloth about his body; and the young men laid hold on him: and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked. (Mark 14.51–52) |
Is this part of the above pattern? In terms of Egyptian experience,
the costume connotes priests and initiation ceremonies. (Egyptian initiates wore
linen, a custom so famous that Ovid considers the single word “linigera” sufficient
to evoke the mysteries of Isis; Metamorphoses; 1. 747). The so–called “Secret
Mark” (preserved in Clement’s letter) has a young man thus clothed—this one raised
from the dead. He undergoes an initiation ceremony, probably a baptism like that
of Christ, and is brought thereby into “the mystery of the kingdom.” Helmut Koester
remarks:
Secret Mark has arranged the original text of Mark in such a way that chapters
8-10 would have presented two stories of the raising of a dead person by Jesus, each
placed after a prediction of the passion (Koester and Patterson 302).
So the initiations become associated with death and rebirth—a common symbolism as in the initiation described in Apuleius’ Golden Ass: “for the old life has run its course; but the goddess calls the one who is worthy and discreet back from the threshold of the underworld and transplants him into a new life of soteria. … [Consequently, he is] as it were, born again.” (Apuleius in Reitzenstein 39). The ceremony in “Secret Mark” occurs by night: “Just as one of a baby’s first responses to the world is the discovery of light through the opening of the eyes, so the initiate, sometimes described as one reborn, also saw the light. Nocturnal initiatory ceremonies, with flickering torches accentuating the contrast between light and darkness, made the primal experience of enlightenment that much more vivid to the eyes and the emotions” (Meyer 1987, 4).
Edmund Leach even finds in Mark’s story of the feeding of the 5000 the tripartite organization of a rite of passage: (1) the initiate’s separation from the world; (2) condition of being withdrawn from society or social norms; (3) and return to the world (103). Leach singles out that example, but the feeding of the 4000 is almost identical to the other. As already mentioned, imagery recalling Christ’s baptismal initiation occurs over and over throughout the gospel, as if life were a sequence of such mystical beginnings (the self–similarity characteristically found in dynamic systems).
In these initiationlike episodes, there are far more repetitions
than simply Leach’s initiation pattern. Consider, for instance, the two feedings:
Feeding of 5000 (6.30–44) Feeding 4000 (8.1–9)
Crossing the lake (6.45-56) Crossing the lake (8.10)
Dispute with Pharisees (7.1-23) Dispute with Pharisees (8.11-13)
Request for “bread” (7.24–30) Request for “bread” (8.14–21)
Healing the deaf man at Bethsaida (7.31–37) Healing the blind man at Bethsaida (8.22–26)
Various scriptural allusions (of the sort new gentile Christians might miss) have been found in the above. Such allusions, however, do not account for most of the parallels between Mark 6.30–7.37 and 8.1–26, which, as Nineham notes, include many of the same words as well as details of plot (1963, 205). Perhaps, as many scholars assume, the two sequences could be variants of a single one. This, however, does not explain why significant changes (e.g., deaf to blind) occurred while the long arrangement of events remained the same. At any rate, fractal–like parallelism emerged at some point. Mark 8.14–21 (where Jesus mentions together the feedings) is strong evidence that both stories come from the tradition, but not necessarily that the whole sequence was in its present form.
Mark’s arrangement of these episodes is very artistic, fitting within an overarching structure: (1) John’s introduction of Jesus; (2) the first part of the Galilean Ministry (1.14–6.13) organized by an initiation motif repeated over and over; (3) reference to John again, this time as popularly thought to be reincarnated in Jesus; (4) the parallel, sequences that Leach calls “initiatory”(6.30–8.26). This ABAB structure then interlocks with what follows for the idea of Jesus as John returned from the dead foreshadows the Resurrection as the feedings of thousands prefigures the Eucharist. The massive parallelism throughout the gospel creates an atmosphere of clandestine order further enhanced by Christ’s attitude toward secrecy, comparable to that in the mysteries or analogous movements in Judaism:
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[In rabbinical tradition, we] have stories of rabbis who gave obscure answers and then explained the true ones in private to their disciples. Exactly similar stories are told of Jesus (Mk. 4.1ff; 76.1ff; 10.10ff; 13.3ff) (Smith 84). |
Thus, in Mark, “parable” (parabol–e ) means “mystery” (musterion) (Kee
94). Surprisingly, in 4.11 this secrecy is “lest they should turn again, and be forgiven.”
Optimistically, Howard Kee presumes that Christians may penetrate the secret: “When
the final violent acts of the evil powers (13.14) take place just prior to the end
(13.13), it is only the divinely enlightened “reader” who will be able to “understand”
(13.14)” (67). In contrast, Kelber sees the work as at least sometimes so inconsistent
to be impenetrable:
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In the confirmation part [of the healing of the deaf mute [Mark 7.24-30] the tension between secrecy and propagation has been forced to the point of open contradiction, a probable Marcan emphasis.... (Kelber 48). |
Not only outsiders, but even disciples fail to penetrate secrets. Indeed, Jesus Himself
says that He does not know all:
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But of that day and that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. (13.32) |
Again in 14.36 He is unsure, this time about whether the “cup” of His death will
pass by or if He will be made to drink therefrom (14.36). The enigmas are vast, appropriate
to Isaiah’s God as hiding Himself (45.15), or any number of other ancient traditions,
e.g., Heraclitus’ Fragment 123, where Reality is described as hiding itself
(Radhakrishnan 302).
The permutations of the initiatory motif show as much diversity
and formal beauty as the structures of music; their fractal morality is as complex
as aesthetics. They have an effect that, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,
Milan Kundera ascribes to the theme–variation form itself:
Variations also constitute a journey, but not through the external world. You recall
Pascal’s pensée about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely
large and the infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to the second
infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things (164).
Being recited to an audience, ancient texts anticipated performance
as does sheet music. Writing (like musical notation) facilitates the articulation
of developed, elaborate configurations. Grounded in the initiation pattern, Mark’s
constituent parts would, in a sense, be familiar to the Alexandrians, but the freedom
with which he varies would have been then as now a challenge, a stretching conventions
in the establishment of a new genre, the gospel.
Continue to Mark (3)
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