vrijdag 14 december 2012

JETS review van Adele Yarbro Collins - Mark - Hermeneia


JETS 52/1 (March 2009)

Mark: A Commentary. By Adela Yarbro Collins. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007, xlvi + 894 pp., $80.00.

Adela Yarbro Collins, Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation at the Yale University Divinity School, has written a notable commentary on Mark’s Gospel that is characterized by depth of thought and extensive research. The 125-page introduction covers a number of significant topics: authorship, place of writing, date, genre, Mark’s interpretation of Jesus, the Synoptic problem, the audience and purpose for Mark’s Gospel, the history of interpretation, and the text of Mark. With regard to authorship, Yarbro Collins takes seriously the title “The Gospel according to Mark” as part of the early evidence. Even if the author did not give the work a title, whoever originally copied and circulated it to other communities likely gave it one that mentioned Mark (p. 2). Yarbro Collins is open to the testimony of 1 Peter and Papias concerning an association between Peter and Mark (pp. 3–4, 101). She is also willing to accept the possibility that Paul’s letter to Philemon and the letter to the Colossians serve as witnesses to a relationship between Paul and a Christian Jew named Mark. He may be the same Mark mentioned in Acts and the same person who wrote the second Gospel (pp. 5–6). On the basis of evidence from Mark 13, Yarbro Collins regards the date for the writing of Mark to be before ad 70, although likely in the late 60s, after certain leaders in the Jewish revolt against Rome took on messianic pretensions (p. 14; cf. p. 603). Although she notes that external evidence points to Rome as the place of writing, Yarbro Collins argues that much of the internal evidence points to somewhere in one of the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. She leans toward Antioch as a possible location for the writing of Mark’s Gospel, but she recognizes that the evidence is not sufficient to make a definite decision (pp. 7–10, 101–2). Mark, no doubt, had more than one purpose in mind when he wrote his Gospel. Yarbro Collins mentions two. First, Mark intended to reassert and redefine the messiahship of Jesus in light of the presence of messianic pretenders in the Jewish war that began in ad 66. Second, Mark wanted to present the suffering of persecution as a crucial aspect of discipleship in imitation of  Christ (pp. 101–2).

Yarbro Collins’s discussion of the circumstances surrounding the writing of Mark’s Gospel stands somewhat awkwardly next to her comparison of Mark’s Gospel to the books of Moses at the beginning of her commentary. Yarbro Collins states, “Like the books of Moses, Mark is the product of a long process of tradition involving many authors and editors” (p. 1). This statement reads more like an affirmation of a basic principle behind form criticism than as a serious comparison between Mark and the books of Moses. I have my doubts that Yarbro Collins intends to communicate that the Pentateuch was written 35–40 years after the death of Moses by an associate of Joshua (cf. her summary of the Deuteronomistic history on p. 38). Yet if the Pentateuch were written under such circumstances, would it be fair to characterize it as the product of a long process of tradition involving many authors and editors? The same type of question arises when Yarbro Collins describes the relationship between Mark’s Gospel and the history of early Christian tradition (p. 94). According to this description, after Jesus’ death some of his followers experienced him as risen from the dead. Out of these experiences arose a Jewish messianic movement that grew into the early Christian church. Those who proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah shaped the traditions about him, created new stories, and updated old traditions in light of their ever-changing circumstances. Mark then apparently received these traditions after an extensive process and shaped them into a continuous story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Yet in light of Mark’s early involvement in the Christian movement and his possible association with the first leaders of that movement (not to mention Mark’s own role and skill as a writer), is it realistic to portray Mark as a passive recipient and channel of a long process of uncontrolled tradition?

Yarbro Collins’s section on the genre of Mark’s Gospel is a significant scholarly contribution (pp. 15–43). The question of genre is important, as Yarbro Collins points out, because any interpretation of Mark’s Gospel relies to some extent on an “understanding of what kind of text it is and thus what its purpose is” (p. 17). Yarbro Collins explores the basic options for the genre of Mark: Mark as a “gospel” (that is, a new and unique genre), Mark as “biography,” and Mark as “history.” Although she recognizes the insights of others who take Mark as a unique genre or as a biography, she leans decidedly in the direction of Mark as history. For Yarbro Collins, Mark is an eschatological historical monograph (pp. 18, 42–43). “The author of Mark’s Gospel has taken the model of biblical sacred history and transformed it” (p. 1). The transformation comes in part through the influence of an eschatological and apocalyptic perspective in Mark’s view of history, with its tendency toward periodization and its notion of a fixed divine plan. Another part of the transformation comes from the influence of Hellenistic historiographical and biographical traditions, including the emphasis on memorable deeds and the increasing focus on individuals, sometimes on a single person.

The main objection against viewing Mark as history has been that a work of history should be concerned with an accurate account of historical information but Mark was concerned with proclamation and his Gospel is full of miraculous events. Yarbro Collins responds by urging caution against the attempt to force modern ideals of historiography on ancient writers and readers. Ancient historical writing could include miraculous events, both direct interventions by deities in human affairs and a more implicit role for divine agency in determining the outcome of earthly events. Ancient history writing did not limit itself only to empirically verifiable data and also found it necessary to use

a certain degree of invention to fill in the gaps of the narrative. Therefore the presence of miracles should not disqualify the Gospel of Mark as a work of history (p. 41). Indeed, Yarbro Collins expresses a fair amount of scepticism in her commentary toward the historicity of Mark’s account, but that perspective does not keep her from understanding

Mark’s Gospel as a work of history.

Regarding Mark’s own attitude toward the miraculous, Yarbro Collins hesitates. According to Yarbro Collins, Mark may have believed that the mighty deeds of Jesus were actual historical events, or he may have viewed them as figurative expressions of are somehow detachable from Mark’s core message about Jesus’ role and power. Yet Mark’s Gospel is so thoroughly miraculous, from the initial statement on the fulfillment of prophecy to the final resurrection scene, that removing the miracles significantly distorts Mark’s presentation of Jesus, both with regard to his messianic role and his

Spirit-empowered life. In another place, Yarbro Collins is on more stable ground when she states that the story of Mark’s Gospel is told by “one who believes it and in order to persuade others” (p. 1).

The actual commentary on Mark’s Gospel fills up nearly 700 oversized pages. Each section of the commentary begins with a translation of the passage along with extensive text-critical notes, often followed by an explanation of the literary context of the passage and its place within the narrative unit. Yarbro Collins normally moves on to a description of the form and tradition history of the passage before working through the text verse by verse. The most distinctive contribution of the commentary is the extent to which Yarbro Collins identifies and quotes literary parallels to Mark’s text from other ancient writings. She draws on a wide range of contemporary Jewish, Greek, and Roman works in order to shed light on Mark’s Gospel. A few examples may help to convey the breadth of Yarbro Collins’s research. According to Mark 1:5, those who were baptized by John were confessing their sins. In her comments on the verse, Yarbro Collins offers an overview of material on the subject of confession, pointing out ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite, and Egyptian practices, inscriptions from Lydia and Phrygia, a quote from Menander about confession among the worshipers of Isis, inscriptions related to the cult of Aklepios, and texts from Quman (pp. 142–45). Jesus’ parable concerning the sowing of seeds (Mark 4:1–9) draws out comparisons to texts from Aristotle, 4 Ezra, Hosea, the Similitudes of Enoch, one of the Thanksgiving Hymns from Qumran, Plato, Seneca, The Law (a work attributed to Hippocrates), Diogenes Laertius in a statement concerning the Stoics, 1 Clement, Irenaeus, and the book of Colossians (pp. 242–46).

The passage concerning the rich man (Mark 10:17–31) is illustrated through references and quotations from Psalms of Solomon, 1 Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, Philo, the Berakot tractate of the Mishnah, the Damascus Document, OT texts such as Lev 6:1–7 and Mal 3:5, Sirach, Epictetus, Diogenes Laertuis, and 4 Ezra (pp. 475–83). Not every passage in Mark calls for such extensive literary parallels, but it would be difficult to find a passage for which Yarbro Collins does not provide some quotations from ancient sources. In an isolated quotation from a modern source, even the Rolling Stones make an unexpected appearance to lend their support to Jesus’ teaching on faith (p. 535)!

Yarbro Collins does not typically argue that the collected parallels had a direct influence on Mark’s thinking or on the way in which his work was received by the original audience. More often, the collection of material serves as a general background to Mark’s Gospel, with Yarbro Collins noting similarities and differences as a way of sorting out the most likely meaning of Mark’s text. However, there are exceptions to this general observation, since at times Yarbro Collins proposes some influence from parallel ideas on either Mark or his audience. Some of the more notable of these exceptions appear in Yarbro Collins’s discussions of Jesus’ miracle of walking on the water (see esp. pp. 332– 30), Jesus’ teaching about his death as a ransom in place of the many (see esp. pp. 502, 504), the centurion’s confession of Jesus as God’s son (see esp. pp. 767–68), and, at least tentatively, Mark’s account of the resurrection and empty tomb (see esp. pp. 791–94).

Different commentaries on Mark’s Gospel have different strengths. The main strength of Yarbro Collins’s commentary is clearly in its extensive description of the general literary background to Mark’s Gospel. My initial concern with Yarbro Collins’s approach was that the noise of so many parallel voices would drown out the distinctive  message of Mark. However, Yarbro Collins manages to look carefully not only at other ancient documents but also at the text of Mark itself. In the end, my concern was replaced with an appreciation for the years of research that must have gone into this work. Yarbro Collins’s commentary will remain an important resource for studying parallels to Mark’s Gospel from ancient Jewish, Greek, and Roman literature for years to come.

Joel F. Williams

Columbia International University, Columbia, SC
 

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