Reading Mark's Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

Sandra Huebenthal

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Grand Rapids, Michigan

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 4035 Park East Court SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546 www.eerdmans.com © 2020 Sandra Huebenthal All rights reserved Published 2020 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ISBN 978-0-8028-7540-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Huebenthal, Sandra, 1975– author.

Title: Reading Mark’s gospel as a text from collective memory / Sandra Huebenthal.

Description: Grand Rapids, Michigan : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Demonstrates that Mark’s gospel is a text evolving from collective narrative memory based on recollections of Jesus’s life and teachings. The author investigates what the community remembers and how this memory is structured and presented, examining which image of Jesus, as well as which self-image, this memory text designs”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019047901 | ISBN 9780802875402 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Mark—Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Memory—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BS2585.52 .H834 2020 | DDC 226.3/06—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047901

Contents

Foreword by Werner H. Kelber

vii

Abbreviations

xxi

1. Exegetical Kaleidoscope: Images of the Genesis and Interpretation of Mark’s Gospel Starting Point: Farewell to Traditional Ideas

1 7

Of Episodes and Frames: Formgeschichte

11

From Tradent to Theologian: Redaction History

19

Evolutionary Synoptic Growth? Orality, Scribality, and the Memory Approach

27

Look into the Text, Not behind the Text: Narrative Criticism

44

History or Stories?

52

The Return of the Eyewitnesses

66

Interpreted Experience: Gospels as Collective Memories

75

The Goal of This Study

81

Mark’s Gospel and Social Memory Theory 2. Social Recollection: The Construction of Memory Texts in Collective Memories

85

The Constructive Character of Recollection and Memory

89

Narration as the Basic Structure of Memory Texts

109

Forms of Social Recollection and Memory

142

3. Mark’s Gospel as a Memory Text

179 v

Contents Mark’s Gospel as a Memory Text—a Model for Reading

179

Observations Gained from the Whole Text of Mark’s Gospel

189

Jesus Memories and Identity Formation in Mark 6:7–8:26 4. Structure of the Text and Its Orientation toward Available Patterns The Structure of the Text

267

Orientation toward Available Patterns

283

5. Guiding Perspective

347

Narrative Formation

347

Preliminary Remarks on Hermeneutics and Method

353

Perspectives and Worlds in Mark 6:7–8:26

368

Intermediary Result

396

6. Transparency for the Community of Narration and Invitation to Engagement

398

Preliminary Remarks on Hermeneutics and Method

398

Individual Aspects

417

Invitation to Engagement

503

7. Prospects Epilogue

vi

265

510 523

Hermeneutical and Methodological Reconsiderations

524

Mark’s Gospel

528

Memory Approaches: A Changed Landscape

529

Further Questions and Ideas

544

Bibliography

547

Index of Authors

605

Index of Subjects

614

Index of Scripture Citations

626

Index of Other Ancient Sources

637

Foreword

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, act 1, scene 3

Reflecting on the state of memory research, Sandra Huebenthal has observed that “in the last twenty years, a flood of publications about social recollection and memory have appeared, not only in both the humanities and the social sciences, but also in the natural sciences” (page 142). In these areas, memory discourse has become a recurring theme, and it almost seems as if memory is about to rise to paradigmatic significance. But as Huebenthal points out, this is a recent development that has found little response in studies of the Bible.

In post-­Enlightenment history, the category of memory was of little account in the interpretation of the Bible, has often played no role at all, or was a topos held in disdain. Huebenthal is therefore also correct in pointing out that “memory-­theoretic approaches have up to now not gained currency in Markan scholarship” (page 4). In point of fact, the historical and literary interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, and of the Gospels generally, has taken almost no notice of collective memory, the principal topic of this volume. For this reason alone the author’s launching of the memorial phenomenon in gospel studies merits our attention. No less noteworthy is the uncommon interest Huebenthal is devoting to the oral medium. In this case, she is rehabilitating an aspect that the typographically mediated discipline has either textually misconstrued or given the silent treatment. Media and media shifts from oral to scribal, she insists, have to be taken seriously, and the latter are poorly understood as an inconsequential, “smooth transition from one to the other” (pages 35–36).

What therefore bestows a special quality on this book is the extensive and nuanced elaboration of the two closely related themes that were abandoned or misunderstood in the modern study of the Bible, despite their having been vii

Foreword of vital significance to the communications culture of antiquity. Huebenthal’s (re)introduction of memory and orality rewards readers with a host of fresh insights into the history of gospel studies, the Gospel of Mark, and the gospel’s social environment and formation, and it invites them to raise entirely new questions.1 A third feature worth noting concerns the author’s deliberate consideration of the narrative structure of the gospel. While narrative criticism has for some time now been absorbed into the interpretation of the gospels, the modern scholarship of the New Testament has for the longest part of its history been unable to acknowledge, let alone appreciate, the significance of the narrative craft of the gospels. Both the logic and the aesthetic of narrative poetics have remained inaccessible to the discipline’s historical, theological, and exegetical approaches. Strange as it may seem today, it has taken the modern study of the gospels until the late 1970s2 and the early 1980s3 before it turned its attention to what appears to be the most obvious characteristic of this genre: its narrative form. It seems as if scholars did not see the forest for the trees. On her part, Huebenthal identifies and interprets all narrative data intratextually on the synchronic level of the narrative. Everything, in her estimation, has first and foremost to do with what she calls “the pragmatics of the text” (Textpragmatik). In the end, however, her narrative work does not rest content with a strictly formalist model. Notwithstanding “the primacy of synchrony” (page 3), it does not rule out the diachronic perspective. In her view, narrative is like the surface of a painting, but its significance does not end at the edge of the canvas. In addition to paying close attention to the innate properties of narrative logic and formalities, she has adopted decisive impulses from receptionist hermeneutics. Far from viewing the narrative wholly as a stand-­alone object, she chooses to treat it as a libretto destined for deliverance and reception. Directly influenced by reader-­response criticism, she views the narrative gospel in the last analysis not formalistically as an inherently closed oeuvre but interactively as a narrative world that is open to and in contact with the real world of hearers

1. In 2005 I wrote, “Biblical scholarship no doubt can benefit not merely from orality/ literacy studies and recent memory work, but from a constructive linking of the two.” See “The Works of Memory: Christian Origins as Mnemohistory—a Response,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, ed. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, SemSt 52 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 227. Huebenthal has taken a decisive first step in the linking of media sensibilities with memory work.

2. Werner H. Kelber, Mark’s Story of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979).

3. David Rhoads, “Narrative Criticism and the Gospel of Mark,” JAAR 50 (1982): 411–34.

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Foreword and readers.4 The result is an uncommon alliance between intratextual causalities and intertextual referentiality.

It is further noteworthy that Huebenthal’s approach is guided by the so-­ called cultural turn.5 As a consequence of its cultural orientation, her writing by and large abstains from conventional theological language (Christology, eschatology, etc.). The designation of culture is here understood, not in the elitist sense of featuring the highly refined specimens of music, architecture, literature, and the arts, but in a vastly expanded and democratized sense of connoting the social formation of actuality. It is precisely the constructivist theme, the notion that reality is closely bound up with social contexts and conditioned by social forces, that forms a central premise of this book. Tradition and the past, identity and narrative, for example, the constructivist premise suggests, are accessible to us not as immediately lived experiences but as they exist and are attainable only in their constructed mediation. Foremost among the phenomena that are subject to constructivist forces is Mnemosyne herself.

Insofar as “construction appears to be a basic characteristic of recollection and mnemonic processes” (page 122), memory and her constructive activities constitute the central thesis of Huebenthal’s book. The re-­presentation of the past—which is the main objective of memory—“is created in accordance with the needs of the present” (page 147). Hence, the work of memory is to be understood not as a reiteration but rather as a reconstruction of the past.

At this point, the author links up the memory discourse with the cognitive, neurological sciences. Very much in accord with the operations of the human brain that are regulated by selective, productive mechanisms, memory is likewise driven by constructive dynamics, functioning selectively in relation to present realities. Thus, the basic functions of memory match the processes of brain work. In a move rarely, if ever, encountered in New Testament studies, allowance is being made for the coexistence of both the social and the cognitive processes of memory.

To adequately assess the book’s specific focus on collective memory, it is appropriate to raise awareness both of the centrality of memory in antiquity and the Middle Ages and of her decline in modernity and the historical-­critical 4. Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-­Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-­structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Robert M. Fowler, Let the Readers Understand: Reader-­Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).

5. Fernando F. Segovia, “Cultural Studies and Contemporary Bible Criticism: Ideological Criticism as a Mode of Discourse,” in Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in Global Perspective, vol. 2 of Reading from This Place, ed. Segovia F. Tolbert and Mary Ann Tolbert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 1–17; Aleida Assmann, Einführung in die Kulturwissenschaft: Grundbegriffe, Themen, Fragestellungen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2006).

ix

Foreword scholarship of the Bible. In ancient history, Mnemosyne/Memoria was variously honored as mother of the nine Muses, goddess of remembrance and imagination, one of the five canons of rhetoric that Augustine counted as one of the three powers of the soul (along with will and understanding), treasure-­ house of eloquence, esteemed custodian of rhetoric, and deep space of the human mind. Operating under a tightly textual and text-­bound hermeneutic, historical scholarship needs reminding that in ancient and medieval communications culture, memory—not scribal activity, textual exegesis, or methodology—was perceived to be the central, civilizing agency. The wide-­ranging and commanding influence that memory discourse exerted throughout ancient and medieval civilization, extending up to and across the threshold of modernity, has been documented above all by Frances A. Yates and Mary Carruthers.

In her classic study The Art of Memory,6 Yates emphasizes memory’s retentive and iterative faculties, which rely on internalized images (imagines) located at certain sites (loci), so-­called memory-­places, while Carruthers in The Book of Memory7 additionally develops the constructive, deliberative force of memory, which exercises powers to break up and form new images, to rearrange interior data, and to compose new ones. Notwithstanding a growing chirographic dominance, ancient and medieval history represented a memorial culture, to the same degree that the last five hundred years of Western intellectual history can be defined as a textual, typographic culture. But the important thing to realize is that all along, the status of memory, including all memorial theories and practices, was subject to continuing changes, chief among them memory’s dissociation from her rhetorical, oral base and her reassignment to dialectic, ethics, and the metaphysics of knowing.

As far as the diminution and demise of memory is concerned, it was under the impact of Renaissance humanism and Ramism,8 also in the wake of rising Protestantism, that memory, along with rhetoric, was steadily losing ground.

Her decline is most noticeable in the post-­Gutenberg era. Perhaps more than any other factor, it was the printing press that conveyed the impression that printed books were exclusively the products of mechanical processes. The new 6. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

7. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

8. For an exhaustive analysis of Ramism, the sixteenth-­century French philosophical and pedagogical system that initiated a separation from Aristotelian-­Thomistic medievalism and fostered a drive toward the spatialization of knowledge and a quantified, diagrammatic approach to reality and to the mind itself, see Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958).

x

Foreword typographic medium appeared to demonstrate ever more conclusively that oral faculties and memorial senses were forfeiting their importance and rapidly becoming obsolete. In other words, under the impact of the new, artificial means of producing books (ars artificialiter scribendi), the very senses that had played an eminently retentive and constructive role in ancient and medieval communications culture were slowly but surely losing their raison d’être. It was the high tech of the fifteenth century, along with Renaissance humanism, Ramism, and Protestantism, that was preparing the cultural, intellectual ground on which the philological, documentary, and historical scholarship of the Bible, the print Bible, was to take root and flourish.

It is against this historical background that memory’s conspicuous absence from gospel studies in the post-­Gutenberg era has to be comprehended. Remarkably, neither the word nor the subject matter of memory made an appearance in Bultmann’s History of the Synoptic Tradition. Mnemosyne’s elimination from the very book that proved foundational to the historical-­critical study of the Synoptic tradition, the quest of the historical Jesus, and gospel research was symptomatic of a general inattention to memory as an analytic category in New Testament scholarship.9 The only time memory entered the discussions surrounding the quest, she did so in an individualistic and preservative sense, denoting the human capacity to store knowledge and archive information.

Under the aegis of form criticism, memory as a retaining force was commonly employed in connection with historical interests and pressed into the service of the historical quest for Jesus’s ipsissima verba. Conservative tendencies were merged with historical ones in the interest of securing the “original” words of Jesus transmitted via passive traditionists and their memorially stored data. But this use of memory as an auxiliary instrument for the historical quest will have to be viewed as a modern project, unlike memory’s retentive, iterative function in the past. For in the culture of ancient and medieval communications, memory’s conservative ambitions served cognitive, pedagogical, ethical, and theological purposes, and not singularly historical ones.

The year 1925 marked the foundational date for the modern discussion of orality and memory, launching two discourses that have left deep marks on the 9. On the disappearance of memory in New Testament research, see Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, “Jesus Tradition as Social Memory,” in Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, SemSt 52 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 25–42. A significant exception was Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity, repr. with foreword by Jacob Neusner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Whereas form criticism operated to disregard or rupture the ancient bond between memory and tradition, Gerhardsson worked exactly in the opposite direction, exploring the intricate relations between memory and tradition.

xi

Foreword work of Huebenthal. In that year, Marcel Jousse, French anthropologist and specialist in Semitic languages, published Le Style oral, rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les Verbo-­moteurs,10 a book of uncommon originality. The author’s thesis stated that, in terms of rhetorical style, compositional technique, and cognitive structures, the oral medium and discourse had to be viewed as a linguistic phenomenon sui generis and treated distinctly from chirographic communication. Le Style oral consisted of a vast repertoire of forms and formulas of communication, recitational techniques, and mimetic practices collected by numerous authors and representing countless ethnic communities. In Jousse’s view, the evidence pointed to the existence of universally applicable laws of oral style and diction. At the center of this oral-­style communications culture, he argued, stood memory. Convinced that memory was a clue to nearly everything, he wove anthropology, history, and tradition into a phenomenology of memorial psychodynamics. According to his global vision, anthropos was memoria, and human history was a memorially empowered history.11 In every important respect, Jousse was restoring oral, memorial dynamics and sensibilities that had long been reduced to an afterthought, marginalized and suppressed in Western academia. Mnemosyne/Memoria in particular—for centuries conspicuous by her absence from the historical scholarship of the Bible—was dramatically rehabilitated.12 Via his writings and above all his lectures, Jousse commanded the attention of a substantial following among the academic community in Paris for a brief moment in French intellectual history.

In the same year, 1925, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs published Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire,13 a book that thematized the social (over against the individual) mechanisms of memory. Five interrelated features define his strikingly innovative thesis, which was to have a profound impact on the subsequent memory discourse and on Huebenthal’s work in particular.

First, Halbwachs proceeded from the premise that the re-­presentation of the past was far from being a one-­to-­one equivalent relationship. What was re10. Marcel Jousse, Le Style oral, rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les Verbo-­moteurs (Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1925), trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker, foreword by John Miles Foley, The Oral Style (New York: Routledge, 1990).

11. Jousse did not employ mnemohistory, the term used in the current memory discourse, but his whole work amounts to a description of this very phenomenon.

12. For Jousse’s own discussion of his memory theory, see Memory, Memorization, and Memorizers in Ancient Palestine: Marcel Jousse on the Aramean Oral-­Style Tradition and Its Traditionists, ed. and trans. Edgard Sienaert (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).

13. Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Libraire Félix Alcan, 1925); the major part of the English translation is included in On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

xii

Foreword ceding into an ever more distant past and sinking into oblivion could not be retrieved in a direct, unmediated fashion. His understanding was that memory does not allow the mind to recollect the past simply as past. Second, for the past to be rescued into the present, a mechanism was required that employed so-­called cadres sociaux, or frames of reference (Bezugsrahmen), that is, interpretive patterns (Deutungs- oder Verstehensmuster) that were taken from the present social environment (Umfeld). Third, what was remembered, therefore, was not the past as such but select memories couched in social frames of reference. Fourth, the work of memory was not fed primarily by the need for preservation of the past in its authentic, historical state but by the desire to make the past serviceable to the community so as to solidify present group identity. Finally, it was Halbwachs’s significant intellectual achievement to have discovered the past as a remembered and socially constructed past.

For the longest part of the twentieth century, the work of Jousse and Halb­ wachs was not discussed by, let alone integrated into, the scholarship of the Bible. Modern biblical scholarship has produced a vast body of work that has treated memory only obliquely or not at all. Huebenthal, keenly aware of the dilemma, repeatedly refers to “the long shadows” of form criticism, redaction criticism, and historical criticism generally, those very disciplines that had proven inadequate to come to terms with the narrative integrity of the gospels, had mostly operated without a concept of memory, and had found it difficult to understand oral style as anything but a deviation from literary style. It seems fair to say that, had the wealth of insights provided by the two French scholars been taken seriously, much in the interpretive work of the gospels, of the quest of the historical Jesus, and of our concept of the Synoptic tradition would have moved in a different direction.

The ideas of Halbwachs lay dormant for approximately sixty years until they were reclaimed by a group of scholars who represented diverse academic disciplines and pursued broadly comparative, cultural interests. Despite a considerable intellectual spread between them, they were at least initially united in the objective to revive the legacy of Halbwachs with a focus on what they called cultural memory. Out of the renewed interest in the subject of memory, eventually two publications emerged that supplied scholars across disciplines with analytic tools for cultural studies and became benchmarks for the subsequent memory discourse: Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis14 and Aleida 14. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992); Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

xiii

Foreword Assmann’s Erinnerungsräume.15 As formulated by Jan Assmann, the rationale of the developing memory project was to provide “the basis for a new paradigm of cultural studies.”16 Both Assmanns were fascinated with the phenomenon of cultures sustaining their identity across the vicissitudes of history by constructing an image of themselves through varying representations of their past. Entirely in the spirit of Halbwachs, they both explored how processes of remembering were tied to community and in support of communal identity.17 Both demonstrated uncommon sensibilities with regard to the role of media and their implication in the work of memory. Jan introduced the concept of rupture in the tradition (Traditionsbruch), suggesting that writing was not in itself a guarantor of continuity: “On the contrary . . . it may often break the continuity that is integral to oral tradition.”18 Aleida, rather than constructing a single unified theory, explored a sprawling terrain and kaleidoscopic range of memorial configurations, including stabilizers and strategies of memory, print and picture as memorial media, archives as institutionalized memory, memorial topographies of terror, landscapes of remembering and forgetfulness, rubbish as a metaphor of the transience, loss and oblivion of all life, and many more. The two volumes were “planned as a common enterprise”19— Jan’s studies covering ancient Egypt, Israel, and Greece, and Aleida carrying the memory discourse into modernity and postmodernism—and in German-­ language culture they have risen to near-­canonical status.

It was at a very particular point in postwar German history that the discourse about memory was taken up and actively carried forward by a rapidly growing number of intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and artists. This reactivation of the memory theme, moreover, aroused public consciousness to a degree not imaginable in the Anglo-­American world. The reasons for this 15. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999); Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

16. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, vii–viii.

17. See, for example, Jan Assmann: “The past is not a natural growth but a cultural creation” (Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 33), “Vergangenheit steht nicht urwüchsig an, sie ist eine kulturelle Schöpfung” (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, 48); and Aleida Assmann: “Remembering is basically a reconstructive process; it always commences in the present, and thus inevitably a veering, transformation, distortion, transvaluation, renewal of that which is to be remembered occurs at the moment of its recall” (Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 19), “Das Erinnern verfährt grundsätzlich rekonstruktiv; es geht stets von der Gegenwart aus, und damit kommt es unweigerlich zu einer Verschiebung, Verformung, Entstellung, Umwertung, Erneuerung des Erinnerten zum Zeitpunkt seiner Rückrufung” (Erinnerungsräume, 29).

18. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 85.

19. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, xii.

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Foreword circumstance are not far to seek. As Jan Assmann has observed, the rise of the public memory discussion was itself confirmation of one of the basic insights of the phenomenology of memory. The discussion was set into motion by a speech delivered before the German parliament by then-­president Richard von Weizsäcker commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II.20 In terms of mnemohistory, the forty-­year threshold observes a critical stage signifying the passing of the first generation of witnesses of and participants in the events surrounding the war and the virtual destruction of European Jewry. As the events were receding into an ever more distant past, remembrance was faced with a crisis. If the work of memory was to be kept alive and current, all of its operating mechanisms had to be reorganized. For this reason in Germany of the late 1980s we see memory entering a new phase: new media, new traditionists, and a new venue are engaged to carry on the onerous task of the present coping with the past.

Credit for having initiated the introduction of the current memory model to the discipline of New Testament studies goes to Jens Schröter. In Erinnerung an Jesu Worte,21 a study of massive scope and analytic acumen, he explained Q, Mark, and the Gospel of Thomas as separate paths of reception (Rezeptionswege) that were, each in its own way, remembering Jesus and the events surrounding him from a different perspective. Rather than viewing these texts as products of antecedent traditions designed to preserve the past as past, Schröter explained them as products constructed from a deliberately selective angle with the aim of imbuing the present with a new quality. Explicitly, his project replaces the concept of tradition with that of remembering (Erinnerung). Additionally, the author has considered the issue of media, exploring how texts were produced and operational in the culture of ancient communications. Undoubtedly, Schröter has taken a very important first step, and his volume has opened a window to new perspectives in gospel studies. To state that his intellectual stance remains that of historian and theologian whose questions asked and issues raised are framed by the legacy of historical criticism is not to challenge his work. But it is to suggest that the full transition to memory studies was yet to occur.

20. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 36–37.

21. Jens Schröter, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte: Studien zur Rezeption der Logienüberlieferung in Markus, Q und Tomas, WMANT 76 (Neukirchen-­Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1997). I regret that my efforts to arrange for a translation into English have failed. Among numerous issues, Schröter’s cogent criticism of the Koester-­Robinson trajectory (Entwicklungslinien) approach—a thesis that enjoys great popularity in Anglo-­American scholarship—merits serious attention. For all intents and purposes, Erinnerung an Jesu Worte has been instrumental in developing an alternative to a model dominated by form criticism.

xv

Foreword With Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher’s 2005 publication of Memory, Tradition, and Text,22 a full-­scale implementation of modern memory discourse arrived in biblical scholarship. Memory in this volume is identified not as an appendage of historical criticism or an auxiliary instrument for the quest but as a phenomenological project in its own right. The two editors and nine additional contributors are united in the undertaking to reconstruct the distinct mechanisms and dynamics of memory processes, to reconsider the interface of social memory and oral tradition, and to initiate a comprehensive research agenda of memory studies. Memoria, the fourteen essays demonstrate, is deeply implicated in language and tradition, history and politics, ethics and national identity, and above all in communal and social identity. Furthermore, she is emerging as an integrating force cutting across and unifying the many issues named above. The principal discovery of the Kirk-­Thatcher volume may thus well be that it has conceptualized memory, remembering, and commemoration as an analytic category sui generis.

How is Huebenthal’s book, Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory, to be located in the cultural and academic history of remembering, and how is its significance to be assessed in the context of the memory discourse? First and foremost, the author makes her case as a skilled theoretician and exegetical practitioner of memory discourse. The readers will encounter a rigorous diagnosis and application of the work and logic of memory that is still exceptional in biblical studies. But over and above her focus on memory, what imparts a special note to this study is the integration of memory work with numerous other intellectual fields. The author traverses varied hermeneutical landscapes and accomplishes a synthesis across disparate fields. Hermeneutically, she constructs and works with an oral-­narratological-­receptionist-­cognitive-­cultural interface, at the center of which stands Mnemosyne pursuing her principal objective of reenacting the past for the benefit of the present. Moreover, Huebenthal demonstrates a singular intellectual breadth in encompassing both the German and the Anglo-­ American academic traditions, and in mastering the two scholarly orbits with remarkable fluency.

22. Alan Kirk and Tom Thatcher, eds., Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity, SemSt 52 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). Huebenthal singles out Kirk, who in his essay “Social and Cultural Memory” (in the Kirk and Thatcher volume, 1–24) may have been “one of the first (perhaps the first) to systematically summarize ideas and social approaches [regarding social memory] in and for New Testament Studies” (see page 38).

For a recent collection of twelve of Kirk’s articles that aim to replace the form-­critical paradigm with a new, memory-­based model of the early Jesus tradition, see Alan Kirk, Memory and the Jesus Tradition (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018).

xvi

Foreword If the preceding deliberations show anything, it is that Huebenthal’s work links up in a twofold manner both with the ancient communications culture and with modern sensibilities. It bears emphasizing that to pay focused attention to rhetoric and the oral medium, to the retentive and constructive powers of memory, and to the concomitant interests of performance and reception revives a legacy of the ancient and medieval past. There is a sense in which some of the book’s guiding themes register a remembrance of what has all too often been forgotten. In Freudian terms, one may suggest that the author’s focus on oral and memorial discernment marks a return of what had been repressed in the modern scholarly consciousness. One may therefore view Huebenthal’s monograph not merely as a study of memory and remembering but as a work of memory itself. At the same time, a trajectory can be traced from Halbwachs to the Assmanns and directly on to Huebenthal’s volume. Living in a culture for which remembering the past is an onerous and deadly serious matter, and inextricably tied to national identity, she has discovered the hermeneutical, and indeed ethical, potential residing in the Halbwachs-­Assmann model, and she has applied it full force to the gospel text.

Huebenthal’s definition of Mark as a collective memory text is best illustrated in relation to her tripartite model of memory texts, that is, a schematization of tradition conceived as memorial history (pages 192–93). It differentiates three stages in the development of mnemohistory. The first stage represents social memory. It is predominantly operative in the oral medium, covers the recent past, is carried by contemporary witnesses, and stands for multiple perspectives and interest groups. The second stage, typified by Mark’s Gospel, enacts collective memory. It initiates the transition toward script (Verschriftlichung), operates selectively, and arranges units of oral and scribal tradition into a macronarrative that is unified by a single perspective. Under the auspices of collective memory, the reconstruction of the past takes on foundational significance (eine identitätskonstitutiven Gründungserzählung). The third stage, cultural memory, remembers the past in a form of canon. It is constituted and carried by specialists and is distinguished by a high degree of formality and normativity. With this form of memory, a concept of the absolute past, distanced from the present, emerges. Memory loses much of its living flexibility, is deprived of rejuvenation through rewriting, and remains susceptible to change solely through processes of interpretation. Huebenthal is at pains to remind her readers that the tripartite model is an ideal-­typical schematization. In actuality, “the different forms of social memory are usually close to each other and very often even blend into each other” (page 171). Still, the model carries significant explanatory value because it provides readers with a cogent illustration of the dynamics of mnemohistory and sets the stage for a comprehensive agenda of memory studies. xvii

Foreword First and foremost, the tripartite model illustrates that Memoria, far from being a stable entity, securely fixed in meaning and language, is a socially rooted, variable force, subject to the shifting fortunes of history and deeply implicated in the swift passage of time. Entangled in changing circumstances, Memoria has to adapt and convert her modi operandi if she is to sustain her mission over the course of time. External forces and crisis points in history may require new forms of remembering the past. A particularly noticeable feature of historical crises is the interfacing mechanism of memory and media.

“The time of crisis is indeed to be understood as a challenge that in most cases leads to a reassessment and code conversion and, in this context, very often also to a change of media” (page 172). Huebenthal suspects that the memory-­ media issue is relevant to the gospel formation and specifically applies to the emergence of collective memory in the form of Mark’s written narrative.

The more seriously one takes pre-­Markan oral tradition on one hand and the written gospel text on the other, the less can the transit to the Markan script be taken lightly. Complications can be assumed, and it cannot be ruled out that something of a memory crisis announces itself in the change of media.

Precisely in what sense can Mark’s Gospel be perceived as a model of collective memory? Two major observations converge in justifying the gospel’s memorial identification. In the exegetical section of her book, Huebenthal identifies a plethora of motifs, patterns of interpretation, and scriptural echoes—in short, “a thick intertextual carpet” lodged in the narrative that appears to have been readily accessible in the Jewish and to some extent also in the Gentile environment. In part, the gospel composition came into existence by way of a return to the past and a selection of those memorial units that seemed appropriate for the narrative project. From this perspective, the achievement of the narrative was to disengage the memory data from their own contexts and to reactivate them in the narrative context via the new scribal medium. The result was not a recapitulation but a reconstruction of the past.

The second feature Huebenthal frequently explicates is the narrative’s receptionist orientation toward present and future. Throughout, she observes the narrative’s potential for engagement (Familiarisierungspotential) and the use of directives aimed at hearers/readers (Leserlenkung). These rhetorical strategies may be direct summons aimed at hearers/readers, a more vaguely narrated transparency toward the gospel’s recipients, or a narrative open-­endedness that leaves interpretation to the latter. With Jan Assmann one can see in these two narrative strategies—the regressive gesture toward the past and the prospective gesture toward present and future—the confirmation of Mark’s identity as collective memory: “Thus collective memory operates simultaneously

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Foreword in two directions: backward and forward. It not only reconstructs the past but it also organizes the experience of the present and the future.”23 On these terms, Huebenthal’s study of Mark represents a classic example of collective memory. What ultimately matters about the gospel is not tradition, not pregospel stages (be they historical, oral, or scribal), not the narrative itself, and not the theological content or authority of the text. Mark, she demonstrates, recaptured Jesus traditions and Jesus himself as a viable figure of remembrance (Erinnerungsfigur) or a narrative figure (Erzählfigur) or a figure of identification (Identifikationsfigur) for the benefit of the reorientation and solidification of the present community (Erinnerungs- und Erzählgemeinschaft). In typical memorial fashion, Mark draws on the past, but not for the purpose of reproducing the past. In reconstructing Jesus’s past in the interest of the community of followers, the gospel operates as an artifact of collective memory and proves itself to be the venue of commemorating activities.

Werner H. Kelber

23. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 28.

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Abbreviations

Abbreviations in this English translation follow those in the SBL Handbook of Style, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014), supplemented by Siegfried M. Schwertner, Internationales Abkürzungsverzeichnis für Theologie und Grenzgebiete, 3rd ed. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).

AB ABR AGJU

Anchor Bible Australian Biblical Review Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums AnBib Analecta Biblica ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt ATANT Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments AUSS Andrews University Seminary Studies BBR Bulletin for Biblical Research BETL Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium BEvT Beiträge zur evangelischen Theologie Bib Biblica BibInt Biblical Interpretation BibInt Biblical Interpretation Series BiHe Bibel heute BK Bibel und Kirche BL Bibel und Liturgie BN Biblische Notizen BNTC Black’s New Testament Commentary BT The Bible Translator BTB Biblical Theology Bulletin BThSt Biblisch-­theologische Studien xxi

Abbreviations BTS BTZ BWANT BZ BZNW

Biblical Tools and Studies Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Biblische Zeitschrift Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CBRA Collectanea Biblica et religiosa antiqua Colloq Colloquium ConBNT Coniectanea Biblica: New Testament Series Conc(D) Concilium (Deutsch) CurBR Currents in Biblical Research CurBS Currents in Research: Biblical Studies CV Communio Viatorum EC Early Christianity EKKNT Evangelisch-­katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament ESt Eichstätter Studien ETL Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses ETS Erfurter theologische Studien EvQ Evangelical Quarterly EvT Evangelische Theologie ExpTim Expository Times FC Fontes Christiani FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments GSLNT Geistliche Schriftlesung: Erläuterungen zum Neuen Testament für die Geistliche Lesung GuL Geist und Leben HBS Herders Biblische Studien HeyJ Heythrop Journal HNT Handbuch zum Neuen Testament HThKNT Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament HTR Harvard Theological Review HTS Hervormde theologiese studies / Theological Studies IBS Irish Biblical Studies IKZ Internationale kirchliche Zeitschrift Int Interpretation JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion JBTh Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society xxii

Abbreviations JJS JR JSHJ JSHRZ JSNT JSNTSup

Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-­römischer Zeit Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series JSPSup Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series JTS Journal of Theological Studies Klio Klio: Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte LB Linguistica Biblica LNTS Library of New Testament Studies LTJ Lutheran Theological Journal MTZ Münchener theologische Zeitschrift NEchtB Neue Echter Bibel Neot Neotestamentica NICNT New International Commentary on the New Testament NIGTC New International Greek Testament Commentary NovT Novum Testamentum NovTSup Supplements to Novum Testamentum NRSV New Revised Standard Version NTD Das Neue Testament Deutsch NTDSup Das Neue Testament Deutsch Supplement Series NTOA Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus NTS New Testament Studies NTTS New Testament Tools and Studies OHJSA Oral History Journal of South Africa ÖTK Ökumenischer Taschenbuch-­Kommentar PSB Princeton Seminary Bulletin PTS Patristische Texte und Studien PTSDSSP Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project PVTG Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece PzB Protokolle zur Bibel QD Quaestiones Disputatae R&T Religion & Theology RB Revue biblique RBL Review of Biblical Literature RBS Resources for Biblical Study RelArts Religion and the Arts xxiii

Abbreviations ResQ RevExp RGG

Restoration Quarterly Review and Expositor Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Edited by Hans Dieter Betz. 4th ed. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007 RNT Regensburger Neues Testament SBAB Stuttgarter biblische Aufsatzbände SBB Stuttgarter biblische Beiträge SBLSBS Society of Biblical Literature Sources for Biblical Study SBLSP Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien SC Sources chrétiennes SEÅ Svensk exegetisk årsbok SémBib Sémiotique et Bible SemSt Semeia Studies SKKNT Stuttgarter kleiner Kommentar, Neues Testament SNT Studien zum Neuen Testament SNTS Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas SNTSU Studium zum Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt SP Sacra pagina STRev Sewanee Theological Review SUNT Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments SVTP Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigraphica T&K Texte & Kontexte TANZ Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter TB Theologische Bücherei: Neudrucke und Berichte aus dem 20. Jahrhundert TBei Theologische Beiträge TBT The Bible Today Them Themelios THKNT Theologische Handkommentar zum Neuen Testament ThZ Theologische Zeitschrift TP Theologie und Philosophie TQ Theologische Quartalschrift TRE Theologische Realenzyklopädie TRev Theologische Revue TRu Theologische Rundschau TTZ Trierer theologische Zeitschrift TU Texte und Untersuchungen TVZ Theologische Verlag Zurich TynBul Tyndale Bulletin xxiv

Abbreviations VapS VF VJTR VTSup VWGTh WBC WdF WMANT WUNT WVT ZDPV ZKT ZNT ZNW ZTK

Verlautbarungen des Apostolischen Stuhls Verkündigung und Forschung Vidyajyoti Journal of Theological Research Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie Word Biblical Commentary Wege der Forschung Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-­Vereins Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie Zeitschrift für Neues Testament Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche

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1 Exegetical Kaleidoscope:

Images of the Genesis and Interpretation of Mark’s Gospel

A kaleidoscope is an optical device for producing beautiful forms. It is not a scientific tool that can be used to explain the exact nature of things. Its operation is simple: small pieces of colored glass or similar objects are loosely inserted between two clear pieces of plastic and are reflected by mirrors that are longitudinally incorporated in a tube. Light enters through one end of the tube, making colored symmetrical patterns visible; in addition, every twist of the kaleidoscope changes the position of the glass pieces, creating new, beautiful patterns. The attraction of the kaleidoscope lies not in the depiction of the individual elements but in the patterns that are created when the relative location of the objects is changed by a twist of the tube.

Gospel scholarship sometimes resembles the kaleidoscope. The scholarly approach to the complex process of the origin and textualization of Jesus memories and Jesus traditions considers different elements and arranges them in ever-­new ways. This method allows for impressions as to what was remembered and passed on, when and in what form the items were collected, up to the moment when the familiar canonical form of Mark’s Gospel came into existence. Retracing this process, however, is nearly impossible. Not only is it determined by a variety of possible factors, but it is also governed by each scholar’s selection of hermeneutical principles, for each turn of the exegetical kaleidoscope leads to different solutions to the research question.

When it comes to Markan scholarship, the status quaestionis is almost a genre in itself, or at the least a distinct research field. There are a great number of surveys on particular topics and areas of interest. There are also general surveys on Markan scholarship, for example, the Literaturberichte of Andreas Lindemann—rich in material and very helpful—each report covering a decade of research on Mark.1 This great tradition has recently been continued by Cil1. Andreas Lindemann. “Literatur zu den Synoptischen Evangelien, 1984–1991 (II),” TRev

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Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory liers Breytenbach.2 We also have surveys about particular questions such as the identity of Jesus,3 genre (Gattung), and its feasibility in a particular sociohistorical situation (Kontextplausibilität).4 William R. Telford has even published a whole compendium for working with Mark’s Gospel.5 He reviews publications and summarizes research trends since 1980 in his Guide to Advanced Biblical Research, which offers an annotated bibliography in minisurveys that cut helpful paths through the jungle of Markan research. In this way he empowers novices in Markan research to undertake their first autonomous steps—at least to follow the paths of Markan scholarship beyond “Wrede Way” (Wredestraße)6 and “Schmidt Street” (Schmidtweg).7 The importance and helpfulness of these contributions can be gauged from the statement of specialists on Mark that are commonly not published, like the open confession of one of the grand dames of American Markan scholarship during the Mark Session of the 2012 SBL Annual Meeting in Chicago. She frankly admitted that she had not read all the commentaries published in the last two decades—because there are simply too many of them!8 In light of this state of research it might be wise to follow Breytenbach and ask “not only what was published, but rather what questions have not 59 (1994): 41–100, 113–85, 252–84; “Literatur zu den Synoptischen Evangelien, 1992–2000 (III): Das Markusevangelium,” TRev 69 (2004): 369–423; “Literaturbericht zu den synoptischen Evangelien,” TRev 49 (1984): 223–76, 311–71.

2. Cilliers Breytenbach, “Current Research on the Gospel according to Mark: A Report on Monographs Published from 2000–2009,” in Mark and Matthew I: Comparative Readings; Understanding the Earliest Gospels in Their First-­Century Settings, ed. Eve-­Marie Becker and Anders Runesson, WUNT 271 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 13–32.

3. Jacob Chacko Naluparayil, “Jesus of the Gospel of Mark,” CurBS 8 (2000): 191–226; Daniel Johansson, “The Identity of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: Past and Present Proposals,” CurBR 9 (2011): 364–93.

4. Detlev Dormeyer, “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Forschung zum Markus-­Evangelium und die Frage nach der historischen und gegenwärtigen Kontext-­Plausibilität,” in The New Testament Interpreted, ed. Cilliers Breytenbach and John C. Thom, NovTSup 124 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 309–23.

5. William R. Telford, Writing on the Gospel of Mark: A Guide to Advanced Biblical Research, Blandford Forum (Dorset: Deo, 2009). Detlev Dormeyer, Das Markusevangelium (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005), provides a good overview of the main strands of Markan scholarship since the Enlightenment.

6. Norman Perrin, “The Wredestrasse Becomes the Hauptstrasse: Reflections on the Reprinting of the Dodd Festschrift,” JR 46 (1966): 296–300.

7. Norman S. Petersen, “The Composition of Mark 4:1–8:16,” HTR 73 (1980): 191.

8. See also Joanna Dewey, “The Historical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark,” in The Historical Jesus, vol. 3 of Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1,845: “There has been an absolute explosion of commentaries on Mark in recent years.”

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Exegetical Kaleidoscope been addressed.”9 The fact that research areas such as Mark as history, Mark as literature, Mark as story, and Mark as theology are eagerly discussed in the international discourse leads to the justifiable conclusion that new methods and new hermeneutics are habitually put to the test with this particular text.10 It is remarkable, however, that the whole discourse on memory and questions of cultural-­scientific readings of the Bible are mostly absent from recent research surveys and commentaries.11 The search for monographs (Einzelstudien) addressing these topics is similarly frustrating and fruitless. It seems that this particular approach appears in Jesus research only when it is occasionally used to answer questions like what is remembered, who remembers, and how this recollection takes place or what implications these recollections might have for Early Christian identity formation processes.

As regards the developments in the field of hermeneutics and methodology, Fernando F. Segovia has defined three stages: (1) historical critical, (2) literary criticism/(socio)cultural criticism, and (3) cultural studies/ideological criticism.12 Segovia locates the greater paradigm changes in biblical scholarship at the transitions between the stages, namely the narrative turn in the 1970s and the cultural turn in the 1990s. Cultural studies is not only relatively new but also a relatively broad area of research; a large share of the contributions to the field occur in the greater area of reception history and the history of effects.13 Narrative criticism is still the preferred method in the international research discourse on Mark,14 but there is also activity in other synchronic and diachronic research areas, which contributes to questions regarding both the origin and the interpretation of the text. There is an overall consensus emerging that the primacy of synchrony (Primat der Synchronie) cannot be bypassed 9. Breytenbach, “Current Research,” 13.

10. Breytenbach, “Current Research,” 13–16; Telford, Writing on the Gospel of Mark, 344–46.

11. See the remarks of Lukas Bormann, “Kulturwissenschaft und Exegese: Gegenwärtige Geschichtsdiskurse und die biblische Geschichtskonzeption,” EvT 69 (2009): 166–85, and Christian Strecker, “‘Turn! Turn! Turn! To Everything There Is a Season’: Die Herausforderung des cultural turn für die neutestamentliche Exegese,” in Religion und Kultur: Aufbruch in eine neue Beziehung, ed. Wolfgang Stegemann (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003), 9–42.

12. Segovia, “Cultural Studies,” 2–3; see also Strecker, “Turn!,” 27–32.

13. See the remarks of Abraham Smith, “Cultural Studies,” in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 181–209; and David Brakke, “Cultural Studies: Ein neues Paradigma US-­amerikanischer Exegese,” Zeitschrift für neues Testament 2 (1998): 69–77.

14. See Breytenbach, “Current Research,” 20.

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Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory when it comes to questions of what lies behind the text.15 It remains a problem, however, that the research insights of the different hermeneutical and methodological approaches usually remain separate and unrelated fields: Whereas Jesus researchers approach the Gospels as source materials to be excavated and sifted for valuable evidence, narrative critics approach the Gospels as creations in themselves to be explored and appreciated holistically, including their gaps and tensions. Thus one finds in key English-­language scholars of the quest for the historical Jesus little interest in or use of the results of narrative criticism. Narrative criticism and historical Jesus research, at least in the United States and England, seem to have begun and remained as parallel tracks rather than as intersecting approaches.16

This judgment applies not only to English-­speaking scholarship but also to the German research context. As hinted already, the separate ways of Jesus research and Markan research might be one reason why memory-­theoretic approaches have up to now not gained currency in Markan scholarship.17 In the wake of narrative criticism and reader-­response criticism, the spectrum of different approaches to texts was extended, embracing, for example, cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, which could be described as “first cousins of reader-­response criticism.”18 Since the turn of the millennium, aural/oral criticism and performance criticism also joined the club.19 In most cases, 15. Breytenbach, “Current Research,” 31. The expression “Primat der Synchronie” was coined by Michael Theobald in his contribution “Der Primat der Synchronie vor der Diachronie als Grundaxiom der Literarkritik: Methodische Erwägungen an Hand von Mk 2,13– 17//Mt 9,9–13,” BZ 22 (1978): 161–68.

16. Malbon, Mark’s Jesus: Characterization as Narrative Christology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 244–45.

17. Eric Eve, Behind the Gospels: Understanding the Oral Tradition (London: SPCK, 2013), offers a very good survey of the whole discussion. Eve’s monograph, which was published shortly before this contribution was going to press, is organized similarly to the kaleidoscope presented here. His evaluation of the results, however, is aimed instead to contribute to historical-­Jesus research, source criticism, and the Synoptic question.

18. Robert M. Fowler, “Reader-­Response Criticism: Figuring Mark’s Reader,” in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore. 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 61. See also Segovia, “Cultural Studies”; Christian Strecker, “Kulturwissenschaften und Neues Testament,” VF 55 (2010): 9–15.

19. See Breytenbach, “Current Research,” 14–16. For an introduction to performance criticism of the Gospel of Mark, see Thomas E. Boomershine, “Audience Address and Purpose in the Performance of Mark,” in Mark as Story: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Kelly R. Iverson and Christopher W. Skinner, SBLSBS 65 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2011) 115–42. See also the contributions in Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, ed., Between Author and Audience in

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Exegetical Kaleidoscope Mark’s Gospel was chosen as the preferred test case for the new approach.20 Seen against this background, it comes as no surprise that the secondary literature on Mark has grown into an unmanageable glut; there is no end to the writing of books! Accordingly, remarks in the introductions of doctoral theses can at times be quite ironic: “It may seem that another book on Mark is the last thing we need in the field of biblical studies.”21 Taking up the image of the kaleidoscope, the following pages will neither chronologically retrace the history of gospel origins in its different stages nor provide a survey of the research history on Mark’s Gospel. In fact, the aim is to show—similarly to a gaze through a kaleidoscope—which patterns emerge if the elements involved are aligned in a particular way and what new kinds of images occur when a new turn challenges the usual perceptions. Such an approach to the phenomenon of gospel origins is tied to a particular perspective and cannot be exhaustive. It is nevertheless helpful to show the tentativeness of these explanatory images, which will be enriched in this monograph by another tentative explanation. This latest turn is the cultural-­scientific/memory-­ theoretic approach in the wake of the cultural turn.22 As the quest for the origins and textualization of the gospels is one of the core questions not only for New Testament scholarship but for theological research per se, this field has been developed in particular depth. To use a familiar image, each stone has been lifted and turned around several times to be analyzed with the help of varying methods and research questions. Research literature on the question of gospel origins (Evangelienentstehung) is accordingly quite extensive and includes contributions about Gattung, historical investigation (Historische Rückfrage), and theological purpose(s).

Ernst Käsemann once said in a response to his teacher Rudolf Bultman that “science progresses antithetically” (“Wissenschaft bewegt sich ja in Antithesen Mark: Narration, Characterization, Interpretation, New Testament Monographs 23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009). A theoretical foundation and application of performance criticism to Mark 2:1–3:6 has been presented by Yoon-­Man Park, Mark’s Memory Resources and the Controversy Stories (Mark 2,1–3,6): An Application of the Frame Theory of Cognitive Science to the Markan Oral-­Aural Narrative, Linguistic Biblical Studies 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

20. See Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, eds., Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), ix.

21. Scott S. Elliot, Reconfiguring Mark’s Jesus: Narrative Criticism after Poststructuralism (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011), 3.

22. For the reception of the cultural turn in New Testament scholarship, see Strecker, “Turn!,” and Strecker, Kulturwissenschaften; see also Lukas Bormann, “Kulturwissenschaft und Exegese: Gegenwärtige Geschichtsdiskurse und die biblische Geschichtskonzeption,” EvT 69 (2009): 166–85.

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Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory vorwärts”).23 Research on the origins of the gospels and the understanding of the Gospel of Mark well illustrate the deeper truth of this axiom. This area shows—maybe much better than other possible examples—that every thesis is sooner or later replaced by its antithesis.24 In the course of research history, many of these tensions remained unresolved and present continual challenges and paradoxes. This status applies, for example, to the following binaries in the contested field “gospel origins”: • memory of an individual (applicable to an eyewitness) vs. memory of a group (social memory) • apostolic or original community (Urgemeinde) vs. community of commemoration • history or biographical historical narrative (Biographische Geschichtserzählung) vs. kerygma • historicity vs. fictionality • evangelists as collectors vs. evangelists as theologians • evangelists as conservative redactors vs. evangelists as formative theologians • textualization in layers vs. textualization in one shot • interpretation in segments (such as stages of origins [Wachstumsstufen]) vs. interpretation in flux (text-­based or based on the final form of the text) • interests of a hierarchical position or position of power vs. interests of a community • authority (of the original community or an apostle) defended vs. authority or normativity created • creation of the text for a community vs. creation of the text within a community • missionary text (ad extra) vs. realized memory (ad intra).

These antitheses form the basis for the particular patterns of understanding that can occur when the glass pieces in the kaleidoscope are turned. In the remainder of this chapter, I briefly introduce some of these images, locating them briefly in a cultural-­scientific/memory-­theoretic perspective. The aim is to provide a first impression of the complexity of the area of research and 23. Ernst Käsemann, “Das Problem des historischen Jesus,” ZTK 51 (1954): 126. The quote continues with the words “and Bultmann’s radicalness absolutely calls for a response” (“und Bultmanns Radikalität fordert eine Reaktion geradezu heraus”).

24. See also Elizabeth Struthers Malbon, “Narrative Criticism: How Does the Story Mean?,” in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, ed. Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 36.

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Exegetical Kaleidoscope to gain an initial sense of the nature of a cultural-­scientific/memory-­theoretic approach.

Starting Point: Farewell to Traditional Ideas Tradition has long assumed that the gospels were direct reports of the events with and around Jesus. This idea lasted for several centuries and was shattered only in the course of the Enlightenment, before it was finally abandoned.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the consensus that the gospels, including Mark and Q, are not direct reports and that the texts do not present a reliable bridge to the history of Jesus began to gain currency.25 In the wording of the time, one could say that the insight became established that the offense of the resurrection (the so-­called Easter ditch, or Ostergraben) cannot be bypassed by the gospels, and the way back to those events cannot be retraced.

It became increasingly clear that the gospels present not so much records of Jesus’s life and teachings as “the proclamation of the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”26 It also became clear that the agents behind the written gospels who carried the memory of Jesus have a certain impact on the formation and transmission of the material and inform these traditions: Thus the community’s Easter faith gains an independent methodological significance as a phenomenon mediating between the Jesus of history and the Synoptic sources. In addition, the question whether the Synoptic sources claim to be authentic reports is added to the question whether they do indeed report authentically.27 25. See the pointed conclusion drawn by Knut Backhaus and Gerd Häfner, “Zwischen Konstruktion und Kontrolle: Exegese als historische Gratwanderung,” in Historiographie und fiktionales Erzählen: Zur Konstruktivität in Geschichtstheorie und Exegese, ed. Knut Backhaus and Gerd Häfner, 2nd ed., BThSt 86 (Neukirchen-­Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2009), 136: “The writings of the New Testament were not written in order to inform later generations about historical circumstances. Later generations did not receive the memo for about fifteen hundred years.” (“Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments wurden nicht geschrieben, um die Nachwelt über historische Sachverhalte zu informieren. Der Nachwelt ist dies anderthalb Jahrtausende nicht aufgefallen”).

26. Johannes Weis, Earliest Christianity, trans. Frederick C. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1959), 691 (emphasis original); Weis, Das Urchristentum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1917), 540: “Verkündigung von der Person Jesu Christi, des Sohnes Gottes.”

27. Schmithals, “Evangelien, synoptische,” TRE 10 (1982): 600 (emphasis original): “Damit erhält der österliche Glaube der Gemeinde als ein zwischen dem Jesus der Geschichte und den synoptischen Quellen vermittelndes Phänomen eine selbständige methodische Be-

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Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory The question as to how kerygma and report might be related is not addressed here but is further carried along like flotsam to reemerge in the discourse much later. From a hermeneutical point of view, we are dealing with two different categories: proclamation (Verkündigung) claims to be authentic, while a report seeks to be objective. There are different criteria for both categories. Martin Kähler pointed in that direction already in 1892, when he understood gospels to be proclamation and thus not suitable for historical inquiries: We do not possess any sources for a “Life of Jesus” which a historian can accept as reliable and adequate. I repeat: we have no sources for a biography of Jesus of Nazareth which measure up to the standards of contemporary historical science. A trustworthy picture of the Savior for believers is a very different thing.28

The difference between both is virtually understood to be material. Today, scholars would rather speak of a formal difference: For historical facts which first have to be established by science cannot as such become experiences of faith. Therefore, Christian faith and a history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water as soon as the magic spell of an enthusiastic and enrapturing description loses its power.29

What is left in the end is the concept of memory, which was already connected with the gospel in antiquity. Justin thought of the gospels as “memoirs of the apostles” (ἀπομνημονεύματα τῶν ἀποστόλων),30 Papias refers to Mark deutung und neben die Frage, wieweit die synoptischen Quellen authentisch berichten, tritt die andere, wie weit sie authentisch berichten wollen.”

28. Martin Kähler, The So-­Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, trans.

Carl E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964); 48; Kähler, Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus (Leipzig: Deichert, 1892), 21: “Wir besitzen keine Quellen für ein Leben Jesu, welche ein Geschichtsforscher als zuverlässige und ausreichende gelten lassen kann. Ich betone: für eine Biographie Jesu von Nazareth von dem Maßstabe heutiger geschichtlicher Wissenschaft. Ein glaubwürdiges Bild des Heilandes für Gläubige ist ein sehr anderes Ding.”

29. Kähler, The So-­Called Historical Jesus, 74 (emphasis original); Kähler, Der sogenannte historische Jesus, 51: “Denn die geschichtlichen Tatsachen, welche die Wissenschaft erst klar zu stellen hat, können als solche nicht Glaubenserlebnisse werden; und darum fließen Geschichte Jesu und christlicher Glaube wie Öl und Wasser auseinander, sobald der Zauber begeisterter und begeisternder Schilderung seine Kraft verliert.”

30. Justin, 1 Apol. 63.7; 66.3; Dial. 100.4; 101.3; 102.5; 103.6, 8; 104.1; 105.1, 5–6; 106.1, 3–4; 107.1.

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Exegetical Kaleidoscope also in terms of his memory (“what things he remembered” [ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν]) and notes that Mark wrote down Peter’s “teaching” (διδασκαλία) at least partly the way he remembered it (“as he recalled” [ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν]).31 Eusebius, who quotes Papias, also picks up the idea of a “written memory of the oral teaching handed on to those who remained” (γραφῆς ὑπόμνημα τῆς διὰ λόγου παραδοθείσης αὐτοῖς καταλείψοι διδασκαλίας) at a different point.32 Other than the Gospels of Matthew and John, which he understands to be “memories of the Lord’s teachings” (τῶν τοῦ κυρίου διατριβῶν ὑπομνήματα),33 he receives Mark’s Gospel also as memory, but only as secondhand memory.

His idea is that Mark wrote down his memory of Peter’s teaching. The reason Eusebius mentions for this textualization is most interesting for our topic: The audience asked Peter to leave them a written copy of his words because they did not deem it enough to listen to them only once.34 The text bypasses the apostle’s absence and preserves his words in a different medium so that they can be voiced over and over again. In this case the text replaces the spoken word. In Eusebius’s reading this account goes without a loss of authority as the process had been revealed to Peter in the Spirit, and he authorized the text for readings in churches.

Leaving aside the fourth-­century ecclesiastical structures visible in the text, it is interesting to see what significance the concept of memory gains in this context and how it is applied. Papias acted on the assumption of authentic testimony, but he did not think of objective reports. He hints, rather, at the notion of a demand-­oriented and thus audience-­oriented teaching activity of Peter. Likewise, Papias was not interested in a structured overall survey of Jesus’s words and deeds in their chronological and causal-­logical order, but Peter gave testimony of his own memory in individual and unsorted episodes and from his own perspective. The same idea can be found with Eusebius, who was also not concerned with an accurate account of Jesus’s life down to every detail. For him, rather, Mark’s Gospel presented the memory of Peter’s teaching. There’s no mention of historiography, but there is of the unwritten teaching of the divine proclamation (τῇ ἀγράφῳ τοῦ θείου κηρύγματος διδασκαλίᾳ), which in its written form should also be proclamation, as he (i.e., Peter) authorized the writing for the purpose of study in the churches (τὴν γραφήν εἰς ἔντευξιν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις).35 31. Papias, Frag. 5 (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15).

32. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.15.1.

33. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.24.5.

34. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.15.

35. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.15.2.

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Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory In the end, the concept of memory—or a certain notion of it—could have become a leading category in the wake of the ancient testimonies, but it never got there. In the course of history, both the pragmatics of the texts as proclamation and their authority, which rested on eyewitness testimony or a chain of tradition, were accentuated more strongly, with the authority of the witnesses and the assumed objectivity of the testimony becoming ever more conflated. But even this notion had to be dismissed at some point. In his reflections Kähler rejected both a naive theory of inspiration and a positivist presentation. For him, the gospels are not objective documents but memories from a particular perspective.36 Seen from a cultural-­scientific/ memory-­theoretic point of view, this could be understood to be processes of social memory,37 and the pleas of Peter’s audience for a written text could be seen as the wish to secure his ephemeral testimony and put an end to its temporal limitations.

Tradition criticism (Traditionskritik) was largely concerned with the question of how to distinguish, on the one hand, Jesus’s life and proclamation from early Christian kerygma and, on the other hand, authentic material from later additions. The dichotomy between the original Jesus material on the one hand and the historically rather unreliable community tradition and proclamation on the other was rarely questioned. To state the problem in a very rough and simplified manner, this led in the end to the notion that redaction-­critical division (redaktionskritische Scheidung) could be a bridge to the authentic Jesus material, the ipsissima vox. In this regard, the question of oral tradition becomes the focus of attention. If the gospels are not of one piece, there must have been prior stages, and those prior stages could have been written as well as oral. Orality was rather alien to the research of those times, so the majority of the traditional approaches are biased by their thinking in terms of scribality/textuality. They got it right, however, in maintaining that even in oral cultures, tradition is not passed on without a certain form. Accordingly, the traditions that gave rise to the gospels are likewise not imaginable without particular shape and form. This insight forms the basis of the older form history (Formgeschichte) approach that was concerned to distill authentic Jesus material through the identification and analysis of smaller units from the texts.

36. See Kähler, Der sogenannte historische Jesus, 103.

37. The German version reads “soziales Gedächtnis” here, denoting the category used by Halbwachs, not the English generic term, which in German would be “soziale Erinnerung.”

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