Domesticating Mark: Matthew and Luke-Acts

I often imagine Matthew and Luke separately clinging to their manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel and wondering just what on earth they were going to do with such an apocalyptically urgent Gospel. It is a humorous scene in my mind’s eye, considering that apocalyptic movements have a short shelf life. How long can a preacher and/or teacher keep saying that deliverance is just around the corner? Thus I imagine Matthew and Luke questioning the validity of Mark’s Gospel and how their Christian movements should proceed. In the wake of the delayed Parousia, with its delayed fulfillment of prophecy, do they quit the movement? Weren’t the words of imminence placed on the very lips of Jesus himself (see esp. Mark 9:1; 13:30)? Perhaps they should bring about their own apocalypse, as subsequent Christian groups have done throughout the Christian era? Surely even slight provocation of Roman might accomplish that end. Or what if they took Mark’s expected imminent Parousia and moved it into the distant future (by what scholars call “reserved eschatology”)? If, as I contend here, this last was the option they chose, what were they to do with the rest of Mark, and even more acutely, what were they to do in the interim before the deferred Parousia?

These are fascinating questions that require some parsing. Note, first, that almost 90 percent of the Gospel of Mark is absorbed into Matthew’s account. But how could one domesticate so apocalyptic a Gospel while absorbing so much of the original? Perhaps the best approach to this question is to assess how Matthew employed his sources. Arguably, the Gospel of Matthew can be reduced to three source-rich divisions. Chapters 1‒2 are composed of material known as special M, biblical material unique to Matthew. This special source includes the (Matthean) birth narrative, the visitation of the magi, and the holy family’s escape to Egypt in the wake of Herod’s execution of Jewish male infants. This material accomplishes various purposes for Matthew, but most importantly for my point here, it expands the story of Jesus’ life by almost three decades. Recall that the Gospel of Mark begins at Jesus’ baptism, approximately one year before his death in his early thirties. Thus Matthew expands narrative time.

Matthew also proceeds in a much less rushed manner. The next section of the Gospel is made up primarily of materials gleaned from the sayings source Q. (See the essay on Jesus and the Gospels.) Embedded in this layer is a collection of words and teachings of Jesus apart from his deeds. In this material, we find the Sermon on the Mount, which takes up three chapters of Matthew’s Gospel (chapters 5‒7), and includes the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. This saturation of Jesus’ teachings in the middle of Matthew shifts the focus from Mark’s apocalyptic Jesus to a more refined, rabbinic Jesus, one who certainly has much more time to teach and instruct his disciples on how to interact with the world in the interim before the Parousia.

We are finally introduced to the bulk of the Markan material as it is embedded in Matthew 12‒28 (esp. after ch. 16). However, we have already been lulled into a more tranquil state of consciousness by the birth narrative and teaching discourse, so already the apocalyptic materials appear much more distant and future. The apocalyptic predictions imported from chapter 13 of the “Markan apocalypse” (Matthew 24) will come to pass (i.e., the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, wars and rumors of wars, persecution of the faithful, the desolating sacrilege, the appearance of false prophets, astronomical chaos, and the return of the son of man), but without the imminent tones of Mark’s composition. This is also the case in the Lukan parallel to Mark 13 (Luke 21).

Even more brilliantly, Matthew incorporates ascension materials (28:16–20) to place Jesus back in heaven in the interim, thus overcoming what is, to Matthew, the more than slightly problematic lack of any indication where Jesus is during the interim according to the original ending of Mark (Mark 16:8, which, in my estimation, is a perfect ending for an apocalyptic Gospel). By conjoining it to the “Great Commission” in 28:18–20, Matthew has reframed Mark’s apocalypticism into a template for a fledgling church movement that has much to accomplish before Christ’s return. It is a brilliant piece of editorial work that simultaneously honors the primacy of Mark, by using so much of it as a source, and shifts Mark’s emphasis from crisis and end-time speculation to an expanded story of the life of Jesus, with an emphasis on Jesus as aphoristic teacher and founder of a church. However, the point must not be overlooked that Matthew also felt the need for a complete eschatological overhaul of the Gospel of Mark, one that would privilege an emerging church. In my view, this was perhaps the most compelling reason for Matthew’s privileged position in the New Testament canon. To place Mark at the beginning of the canon—noting its primacy among the Gospels—would have created an apocalyptic inclusio for the New Testament that would begin with Mark and end with the book of Revelation! The rhetorical brilliance of the canon as it now stands, however, is that the apocalypticism of the book of Revelation is now viewed as a futuristic culmination of the age of Matthew’s developing and spreading church.

Luke, like his Synoptic cousin Matthew, had to make a tough decision regarding what to do with Mark’s Gospel. I have always found it fascinating that both Luke and Matthew chose to retain and employ material from the Gospel of Mark. Surely, one avenue each author could have taken was to ignore the Gospel of Mark altogether and start from scratch. But neither did. Luke, as did Matthew, also employed special materials unique to his own Gospel, identified today as special L, and employed the 235 sayings of Jesus from Q. Unlike Matthew, however, the author of the Gospel of Luke used approximately one-half of the Gospel of Mark in the composition of his own Gospel (a large percentage even in relation to Matthew). Like Matthew, Luke also expanded the narrative time frame by introducing narratives of Jesus’ birth and ascension. However, unlike any of his Gospel counterparts, Luke wrote a second contribution that would find its way into the New Testament canon, the Acts of the Apostles, which maps out the earliest years of the post-Easter church and the spread of the gospel from the Jewish world (foregrounding the apostleship of Peter) to the worldwide spread of the gospel to the gentiles (foregrounding the apostleship of Paul). In Lukan terms, this was the interim age of the Holy Spirit. The Parousia was delayed and Luke was prepared to encounter the delay, not as an unfulfilled prophecy, but as an opportunity to spread the gospel to the world. As in Matthew, the Gospel of Mark is relegated to the apocalyptic drama that would occur in the eschaton in the indeterminate future (again, reserved eschatology). Luke even hinted at an eschatology that we find most pronounced in the Gospel of John (that is, realized eschatology) when he hints at the benefits of the Parousia being accessible already, in the present, in Luke 17:20–21.

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

It is evident from this brief analysis of both Matthew and Luke that both Gospel writers thought enough of the tradition of Mark to incorporate it into their literary productions while simultaneously toning down Mark’s apocalyptic sensibilities to make it more palatable for Christians living in the 80s or later. Both spent much intellectual energy doing so. Matthew and Luke found themselves at least a decade removed from Mark’s imminent apocalyptic prediction. The apocalyptic rhetoric had to shift because you cannot be an imminent apocalyptic preacher or sustain an apocalyptic community year after year after year.

Thus the Gospels present us with this curious combination of competing eschatologies. Because it has been a Christian interpretive practice to conflate our readings of the Gospels, emphasizing their presumed unity, the apocalypticism of Mark has been absorbed into the grander “gospel story.” It is lost, or ignored, or projected into the undetermined future. The Markan legacy is a painful one, to be sure, because embedded within it is an unfulfilled prophecy of the imminent second coming of Christ, and so we can understand the energy that wants to avoid or defer it. But the presence of Mark among the Gospels means that even if we sequester the book of Revelation as some sort of apocalyptic anomaly, the intellectual fodder for subsequent apocalyptic movements and imaginings remains. Apocalypticism is embedded in our Gospel tradition itself, right in front of us, even if we choose not to acknowledge it. We may suppress it—and then act entirely surprised when apocalyptic inklings manifest themselves in us, like any other neurosis or psychosis would, given the right circumstances.