It is not given to many to revise a book first written twenty-five years ago, and I thank the Inter-Varsity Press for the opportunity. The question is: would the same sort of commentary have been written today? Would there have been any major changes of approach? Those who compare this edition with the first will find the answers, as far as the present author at least is concerned, from the fact that the major changes are in the Introduction, which has been completely rewritten, rather than in the main body of the commentary, although many additions and references to the views of other writers have been included there. It is to be hoped that this will show that, even if the author has not changed his basic position, it is not through ignorance of those who think otherwise, and that their views have been carefully taken into account throughout. Nor is it a claim that the exegesis could not be improved, but merely the view that, given the necessary limits and given the public in view, it still seems on the whole to be rightly directed. The basic approach, of the wisdom of which the author is more and more convinced, is to let the text in its present form speak for itself, and to read it in its own light. To some this may seem simplistic; but perhaps the whole approach of Mark’s Gospel was simplistic too, compared with other later gospels, especially if it represents either a compilation of Petrine testimony (which not many scholars would hold in this form today) or a record of general early Christian tradition (which seems more tenable) or a combination of both. This ‘simplicity’ of Mark’s Gospel was widely held by earlier commentators like Turner, Bartlett and Taylor; as we shall see, it has been widely challenged by later commentators influenced by some aspects of the ‘redaction criticism’ school. To them, this gospel is highly theological, sophisticated, controversial and even tendentious; but the evidence for any of these characteristics is very doubtful and the present commentator cannot share their views.
If we do not share these views then it means that we should try to see Mark’s Gospel, not through traditional eyes, not even through the eyes of the other evangelists, but as it is in itself, and assess its evidence accordingly. This is a plea very strongly made by Belo, not from a conservative position but for ‘structuralist’ reasons, and by many of the ‘new literary criticism’ school for other reasons. As neither of these two groups is concerned with the historicity of the account, however, they are doubtful allies to claim in a commentary written from a conservative viewpoint.
If the text of the Commentary itself has remained basically the same (although minor additions have been made on every page and irrelevancies removed), with the Introduction it is quite another matter. It has been totally rewritten, not because the basic material available for study, whether manuscript or otherwise, has altered or increased significantly, but because the approach of biblical scholarship and, in particular, of New Testament criticism, continually changes, as can easily be seen by consulting Hunter, Neill, Marshall and most recently Telford, for a good summary of recent views. Indeed, Telford well speaks of the ‘literary explosion’ of the last thirty years, when literally hundreds of books and articles on Mark have been written, as opposed to the paucity of treatments in earlier years. It is not the approach of scholarship alone which has changed: it is also the interests of scholars which have altered. Different questions are asked, so that it is natural that different answers are obtained.
So three typical modern scholars and their approaches have been selected and studied in some detail, against the background of a brief mini-history of earlier gospel criticism. Of these, two are well known and would be regarded by any commentator as significant. The third is not so well known (certainly not to traditional western scholars), but is chosen as typical of one school of modern exegesis, widespread both in the third world in general and behind the ‘Iron’ or ‘Bamboo’ Curtains in particular, where not inconsiderable numbers of Christians are to be found.
The basic questions of Christianity are always the same: Who is Jesus? What is salvation? What is the good news? Why should we preach it? Perhaps, if we look carefully at Mark, we shall find the answers to some of these questions given all the more clearly because presented without the later, though perfectly valid, theological explanations to be found in the other gospels. So we shall consider those points, along with several new questions that are burning issues today. We shall also look squarely at the so-called ‘deficiencies’ of Mark’s Gospel and try to see the reasons for them. We shall see that, rightly considered, these very ‘deficiencies’ are the surest guarantee of reliable early evidence. Indeed, the very simplicity and directness of Mark is a great theological safeguard; if we laboriously reconstruct some complex theory of Messiahship, let us say, that does not find support in Mark, we are clearly on the wrong road. This is undoubtedly what the earliest Christians believed; none can deny that, not even those scholars who see the Gospel more as a record of early Christian belief than of the teaching of Jesus himself. Whether Mark’s Gospel is Peter’s preaching, or a record of general early tradition, or Mark’s own compilation based on the two, the result is the same – it is still an invaluable testimony to the beliefs of the earliest Christians about Jesus Christ; and, naturally, they believed these things because they held them to be true and factual.
The most urgent of all these questions racking the church today is: What is the good news? We are not talking here of the literary form of the gospel, or its origins, but its determinative content. Here we shall try to see what the good news meant to Mark and his first readers.
On the one hand, evangelicals have increasingly and rightly seen over the past few decades that the fruits and effects of the gospel cannot be restricted to a purely spiritual area. Here ‘left wing’ commentators like Belo would heartily agree. Luke, of all the evangelists, has shown us this particularly clearly, but it is equally clear in Mark, says Belo, if we take Mark at his face value without artificial ‘spiritualizing’. A gospel that does not affect every aspect of the Christian’s life is a shallow faith, if not a dead orthodoxy.
On the other hand, to make salvation entirely physical, to see the kingdom of God as entirely this-worldly, and to see it as produced entirely by human efforts, is foreign to the whole message of the New Testament, and especially foreign to the Gospel of Mark, in spite of all his obvious ‘earthiness’. Here is where we must part company with commentators like Belo and his group. Privatizing, individualizing, and spiritualizing of the gospel (to use modern terminology), may well be dangers; but so are materializing and politicizing the gospel, and they are far greater dangers for us today because they agree with the spirit of our times.
Perhaps, however, the greatest danger of all that we face is a false polarization of two aspects of the gospel (rather like a polarization of faith and works) instead of seeing both aspects as integrally and necessarily related. There is a tendency today in some quarters, perhaps especially in North America and parts of East Asia, to associate the blessings of the kingdom with material wealth and ‘capitalist’ prosperity; we rightly reject this as shallow and humanistic. But equally shallow and mistaken is another modern tendency to associate the kingdom of God with some kind of utopian socialist world state. The Bible is very even-handed: sin is regarded as a universal human phenomenon, and every type of political system, whether of the ‘left’ or of the ‘right’, is therefore regarded as carrying within itself the seeds of its own decay and being subject to God’s judgment. The Christian cannot give total unquestioning allegiance to any one political system, for the Christian hope is not placed in political systems. Mark’s Gospel certainly makes plain the special concern that Jesus has for the poor and the sick and the afflicted, although it never goes so far as to say, with some modern scholars, that God ‘has a bias to the poor’. It is impossible, in spite of all Belo’s attempts, to prove that Jesus, in Mark, attacks the rich, and encourages ‘class struggle’. True, in Mark’s Gospel the dangers of wealth, influence and power are pointed out very clearly, and the divergence between the values of the kingdom and the values of this world is stressed; but that is not the same thing. In other words, Mark’s Gospel was written to show us a way of salvation which is fundamentally spiritual, not to give us an economic or political blueprint for a new social order. To that extent, the ‘good news’ as outlined in Mark may fairly be described as ‘apolitical’. But it does contain great principles which must be embodied in any socio-political order, and so it is not ‘neutral’ in this area. ‘Liberation theologians’ sometimes turn (rightly or wrongly) to Luke for inspiration, but rarely to Mark. If Mark’s Gospel is the earliest, this is highly significant, for in Mark we see how the earliest Christians viewed the gospel. Jesus is no zealot: even Belo admits that Christ rejected violence as a means to achieve his goals, though Belo maintains that Jesus strove for the same goals as the zealots by what he calls ‘quiet subversion’.
Further, we must never lose sight of the clear eschatology of Mark, that is to say his doctrine of the ‘last things’. It is not human struggle but God himself (sometimes, in Mark, through his ‘agent’, the Son of man) who will finally introduce his kingdom with power at the last day. This does not mean that the Christian must not strive to obey Christ in every way in the present age, to make real those aspects of the kingdom that we can, in this material world. ‘The coming kingdom’, it has been well said, ‘casts its shadow before it’. Once the good seed has been sown, there is a steady, unseen growth, until the harvest (4:29): both aspects are equally stressed in this gospel. But ultimately our final hope and triumph (if we follow Mark) is not within this world but beyond it. That is precisely why we have courage to work for God’s kingdom in the here and now; even if we seem at times to fail here, we cannot ultimately be defeated, because God will finally win the victory (1 Cor. 15:57–58). This type of eschatology we may think of as typically Pauline, but it is just as distinctively Marcan. There is incidentally no need to assume that Mark derived this eschatology directly from Paul rather than from Christ himself, whether the knowledge came through Peter or through the common Christian tradition, as Johnson shows to be more likely.
Finally, the good news in Mark is never seen as some process of self-understanding, self-development, and self-fulfilment. These concepts, so congenial to what is often called the ‘me age’, are utterly alien to the gospel of Jesus as recorded in Mark: if there is a self-fulfilment (10:30), it is only on the other side of a death to self (8:35). This, in Mark, is the path that Jesus trod and is equally clearly laid down as the path for his followers (10:39). We are told to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength (12:30): we are never told anywhere in Mark to love ourselves, although he does not go as far as Luke does (14:26) in recording Jesus as saying that we should hate ourselves (where the word must of course be understood in the Semitic sense of a strong contrast to ‘love’). He assumes, with the law of Moses, that, like all humanity, we will ‘love ourselves’ in the Semitic sense of caring activity, not emotion, and tells us to care for our neighbour in the same way (12:31). Blunt Mark will never encourage us to wallow in emotion, although, in his matter of fact way, he will record, without comment, very human emotions, displayed and expressed by Jesus (e.g. 8:12; 9:19; 10:14; 14:33). To him, love is shown in action and sacrifice (14:3), as indeed it was to be in the case of Christ himself (10:45). These may be hard sayings, but they are refreshingly clear and challenging: this is the voice of the martyr-church of the first century speaking to the martyr-churches of the twentieth century.
R. A. C.