RECENT STUDY
RECENT STUDY
For many centuries, little attention was paid to Mark’s gospel. 59The early church quickly saw Matthew come to pride of place among the Gospels, with Mark considered to be a rather inferior and inconsequential extract from Matthew. It was only in the nineteenth century that Mark came into a position of prominence. The liberal school of interpretation, pioneered by scholars such as H. J. Holtzmann, found in Mark’s simplicity of style and relative paucity of theological embellishment evidence of an earlier and more factual account of the life of Jesus than was presented in the other gospels. This isolation of Mark was destroyed by the work of W. Wrede. Specifically, Wrede argued that Mark had imposed on the tradition the notion of the messianic secret. Jesus’ many commands for silence about his status in the gospel, argued Wrede, were invented by Mark in order to explain how it was that Jesus was not recognized to be the Messiah during his lifetime. 60Today few hold to this notion of the messianic secret. 61The motif itself is more likely to reflect the actual situation in the life of Jesus than it does a later invention. 62But at the time, Wrede’s work was taken to indicate that Mark wrote with just as much theological interest and bias as did the other evangelists.
The dominance of the form-critical approach during most of the first half of the twentieth century resulted in little interest in Mark as a gospel as such—attention was focused on the tradition before Mark. With the advent of redaction criticism in the 1950s, this changed, and the last three decades have witnessed an avalanche of studies on Mark’s theology, purposes, and community. The contributions of Willi Marxsen, Theodore Weeden, S. G. F. Brandon, and Ralph Martin have been described above. To these could be added numerous other studies, devoted either to the gospel as a whole or to specific themes within the gospel. Two themes that receive considerable attention in recent studies are Mark’s Christology 63and his portrait of the disciples. 64
The methodology of interpreting the Gospels, and Mark in particular, has also been the subject of debate. Some scholars are attempting to refine the technique of redaction criticism as it may be applied to Mark, 65while at least one recent study questions the fruitfulness of the whole approach for the study of Mark. 66In this respect, we might mention two other methods that are being used in recent study of Mark. The first is sociological analysis, exhibited in Howard Clark Kee’s Community of the New Age.
67Kee analyzes Mark’s community, suggesting that it was molded by an apocalyptic perspective and that Mark was seeking to redefine and encourage the community in light of God’s purposes in history. Another direction is determined by the recent interest in the application of modern literary techniques to the Gospels. These studies focus on the way in which Mark, as a narrative, is put together and how it may be understood by the contemporary reader. 68Mark’s significance is then often seen to lie not in what he actually says but in the deeper structures created by his "narrative world.” Older questions and methods continue to crop up in the recent literature as well. Notable in this respect is the series of articles by Martin Hengel, which show that Mark must be taken seriously as a historian of early Christianity and that his obvious theological interests do not force us to abandon his material as historically worthless. 69