Purpose
Purpose
Mark’s purpose is much harder to determine. Interest in this question has been high because of its importance in redaction criticism, the most popular contemporary method of interpreting the Gospels. Redaction criticism of Mark is hampered by our inability to isolate the sources Mark has used, but this has not stood in the way of the quest for Mark’s purpose. Redaction critics typically stress theological purposes in the writing of the Gospels, and this has certainly been the case with respect to Mark. The large number of specific proposals forbids our giving anything close to a complete survey. We mention here three representative intepretations, the first focusing on eschatology, the second on Christology, and the third on apologetics.
Willi Marxsen, who initiated the modern redactional study of Mark, thought that Mark wanted to prepare Christians for Jesus’ imminent parousia in Galilee.40He argued that Mark focuses on Galilee, as the place where Jesus meets with his disciples, at the expense of Jerusalem, where Jesus is rejected and killed. Jesus’ command to his disciples to meet him in Galilee (Mark 14:28; cf. 16:7) was taken by Marxsen as a prediction to Mark’s community of Jesus’ glorious return to them. But the meeting with Jesus to which these verses refer is clearly a postresurrection meeting, not the parousia. 41Moreover, the geographic contrast that Marxsen (and some before him) discerns is much better explained as a reflection of the actual course of Jesus’ ministry than as a theologically motivated invention of Mark’s.
Theodore Weeden found in Mark a polemic against a "divine man” (theios aner, θειος άνήρ) Christology, a way of viewing Jesus that saw him as a wonder-working hero but denied or neglected his suffering and death.42To counter this tendency, Mark wrote a gospel that emphasized the humanity and suffering of Jesus. Weeden is correct to see in Mark a focus on Jesus’ suffering, but he goes too far in identifying Mark’s opponents as people who held to a divine-man Christology. For one thing, evidence for a polemical stance in Mark is not at all clear—he probably does not have any opponents in view at all. 43For another, the very existence of a Hellenistic divine-man concept as a category into which early Christians would have put Jesus is open to question. 44
A specific kind of apologetic was discerned in Mark by S. G. F. Brandon. He thought that Mark had attempted to mask the political implications of Jesus’ life and, especially, his death. According to Brandon, Jesus was a sympathizer with the Jewish revolutionaries, the Zealots. For this reason he was crucified by the Romans, a method of execution generally reserved for political criminals. By branding Jesus as a rebel against Rome, his crucifixion made it very difficult for Christians to win a hearing from the Roman public—particularly in the aftermath of the Jewish revolt in Palestine, when, according to Brandon, Mark wrote his gospel. To overcome this difficulty, Mark transferred as much of the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews as he could, a process revealed by the many manifestly unhistorical features in the Sanhedrin and Roman trials. 45But there is no need to follow Brandon in finding these trials to contain unhistorical fabrications. 46In general, Brandon’s theory can be sustained only by arguing, without any evidence, that Mark (and all other writers who have come after him) have eliminated the political element from Jesus’ teaching and ministry.
These three specific suggestions about Mark’s purpose represent only a sampling of recent proposals, but they share with many others the fault of being overly specific and based on only a selection of the data. Any attempt to determine Mark’s purpose must take into account the gospel as a whole and refrain from arguing beyond the evidence.
Certain features of Mark’s gospel are especially relevant to an investigation into its purpose: its focus on the activity of Jesus, especially his working of miracles; its interest in the passion of Jesus (Mark, claimed Martin Kahler in a famous aphorism, is "a passion narrative with an extended introduction”); its repeated correlation of Jesus’ predicted sufferings and the "cost of discipleship” in Mark 8:26-10:52. As Ralph Martin has shown, two general concerns emerge from these characteristics: Christology and discipleship. 47Mark presents a balanced Christology in which Jesus’ miracle-working power (the focus in 1:16-8:26) is set beside his suffering and death (the focus in 8:2716:8). The one who is identified as the Son of God in the opening verse of the gospel 48is confessed to be the Son of God by the Roman centurion as Jesus dies, humiliated and in agony, on the cross (15:39). Mark wants his readers to understand that Jesus is the Son of God, but especially the suffering Son of God. Moreover, believers are to be followers of Jesus. Mark also shows that Christians must walk the same road as Jesus—the way of humility, of suffering, and even, should it be necessary, of death. Mark wants to impress on his readers the famous words of the Lord: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (8:34).
Mark thus wants to help his readers understand who Jesus is and what real discipleship involves. But we must recognize that Mark has many other things to say that cannot easily be placed into these categories. Recent study has stressed the theological purposes behind the writing of the Gospels, and we may agree that the evangelists were writing with some specific points to make to the Christian communities in their day. But we should not ignore two other, more general purposes, that were probably at work in the production of Mark: historical interest, and evangelism. In addition to encouraging certain beliefs and actions in his Christian readers, Mark was providing them with a record of Jesus’ deeds and words. This was becoming a great need in Mark’s day, as the original eyewitnesses, such as Peter, were beginning to pass from the scene. While it is unlikely that Mark was written for non-Christians directly, the focus in the gospel on Jesus’ actions, the similarity between the gospel’s structure and the early Christian evangelistic preaching, and Mark’s announced intention to write a book about "the gospel” (1:1) all suggest that Mark wanted to arm his Christian readers with a knowledge of the "good news of salvation.” 49