The Gospel According to Mark

For the next two Sundays, April 10 and 17, our worship services at Pocatello First United Methodist church will be devoted to a two-part performance of the Gospel According to Mark. When I was in seminary, one of my professors, Dr. Wayne Rood, had adapted the gospel of Mark into a scripted form for two narrators and about 5 or more actors. I performed the part of Jesus in that performance, which we took to a local church and performed during worship.

It has been years since that performance, and I have always wanted to reprise that performance for a church that I serve. April 10 and 17 will be my opportunity to offer this experience to our church.

Scholars are virtually unanimous in saying that in all probability the Gospel of Mark first circulated in oral form. L. Michael White, in an interview for a program on Frontline, “From Jesus to Christ: Importance of the Oral Tradition,” says this about the earliest oral forms of the Gospels:

Story telling was at the center of the beginnings of the Jesus movement. And I think we're right to call it the Jesus movement here because if we think of it as Christianity, that is, from the perspective of the kind of movement and institutional religion that it would become a few hundred years later, we will miss the flavor of those earliest years of the kind of crude and rough beginnings, the small enclaves trying to keep the memory alive, and more than that, trying to understand what this Jesus meant for them. That's really the function of the story telling...it's a way for them to articulate their understanding of Jesus. And in the process of story telling, when we recognize it as a living part of the development of the tradition, we're watching them define Jesus for themselves. At that moment we have caught an authentic and maybe one of the most historically significant parts of the development of Christianity.

We have to remember that Jesus died around 30. For 40 years, there's no written gospel of his life, until after the revolt. During that time, we have very little in the way of written records within Christianity. Our first writer in the New Testament is Paul, and his first letter is dated around 50 to 52, still a good 20 years after Jesus, himself. But it appears that in between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first gospel, Mark, that they clearly are telling stories. They're passing on the tradition of what happened to Jesus, what he stood for and what he did, orally, by telling it and retelling it....

The fact that we're dealing in oral medium of story telling is very important to the development of the tradition itself because stories tend to be told in some units that can be passed along easily, easily remembered. Sometimes they may even be put in different order or you may only tell certain parts of the story. They're indications that we may have collections of miracle stories that circulated independently and maybe collections of teachings, as well. But, probably the core of all the oral tradition is the summary of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the Passion tradition.

Some scholars have even advanced the argument that the stories in Mark were presented by trained storytellers who itinerated between the various nascent Christian communities throughout the Roman Empire. At this time not many people were literate, so passing along the stories about Jesus usually occurred orally. Skilled storytellers were quite common throughout the world. Entire storytelling methodologies were developed in order to memorize the stories, and to remember the order in which long stories were set in sequence. At some later point, the stories would be written down, which worked to fix the story into a final and definitive form.

One thing that is interesting about the Gospel of Mark that distinguishes it from the other Gospels is that the verb tense in Mark of the original Koine Greek is often in what is called a historical (or narrative) present, rather than the past tense. What this does is to give it a more robust storytelling quality: “And as Jesus is going to Jerusalem, a leper comes up to him and falls on his knees,” etc.

Mark also contains fewer of Jesus’ teachings and parables than the other Gospels. In fact, many scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel to circulate as a Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke adopted the basic outline of Mark as their plotline, adding more sayings and teachings, as well as their own particular infancy stories.  Because Mark has fewer teachings, it moves more quickly as a narrative, another feature important for storytelling.

So it is very appropriate to present Mark in a dramatized form. If you are able to join us for these two Sundays, be prepared to enter into this ancient and completely contemporary story. It will be almost as good as being there at the first.

(Image sources: Wayne Rood from http://www2.talbot.edu/ce20/educators/view.cfm?n=wayne_rood;  African storyteller from https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfet1wGXuj6E0p0JXWdsj6Qx1dMkbRzgSi8cjESsmaUp1Jns7pDD63e0eU2xmWMHrMLwN1_Uj41tdN7GxpDiU7wnrKNDR5-he9kMNmmlJrTyD3PojHlsumaEdmNrhC-F8ajZRELqE4LKk/s200/AfricanStoryteller.jpg;