Cutting Jesus Down to Size by George Wells

Author:George Wells [Wells, George]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698671
Publisher: Open Court

ii. Mark and Community Tradition: K.L. Schmidt and Form-Criticism

In 1919 K.L. Schmidt gave Markan studies a new direction with his book on the ‘Framework’ of the story of Jesus, where he raised the question of the stages through which traditions about Jesus had passed before their inclusion in the gospels. He showed that Mark’s account of the Galilean ministry is merely a series of separate, short single stories (pericopes); and he argued that each of these had been transmitted, originally orally, in the preaching and teaching of early Christian communities. Each story was designed to represent a point of doctrinal interest to these early Christians, the miracle stories, for instance, showing how great Jesus’s powers were. The stories seldom indicated where or when he spoke or acted as he did, as that was not doctrinally important. He adds that, as Christianity originated as a cult, these stories must be understood in the light of their setting within the cult, in the practices of public worship (1919, p. vi). In other words, the main purpose of the anecdotes was not to preserve the history of Jesus, but to strengthen the life of the church. Nineham, who is greatly indebted to Schmidt and his successors, explains more fully what was involved. The people passing on the stories were “preachers and teachers, speaking at meetings for public worship or addressing groups of catechumens and the like”. They would tailor what they said to the particular needs of a given audience: if a lesson in good-neighbourliness was required, the parable of the good Samaritan could be recited; if there was some doubt whether to pay taxes to the Romans, what we now have at Mk. 12:13–17 would be suitable. “Consequently, the order in which the incidents were recounted would vary from church to church, in accordance with local needs; and there would be no compelling motive for preserving, or even remembering, the order in which they actually occurred during Our Lord’s lifetime” (1963, p. 22).

Schmidt (pp. 63ff) takes the story of the healing of the leper as typical of a Markan pericope: “And there cometh to him a leper, beseeching him” (1:40). There is no indication of time or place. Of the cured leper, it is said that he “went out” (verse 45)—from what (a synagogue or a house?) is not indicated. The story is quite independent of the anecdotes that precede and follow it. My quotation of its initial words shows that it is linked to what precedes it only by the simplest of all links—the word ‘and’, quite often the only linkage between Markan pericopes. Links elsewhere are almost as simple; for example ‘and’ combined with ‘again’ (“and he went forth again”; “and he entered again into the synagogue”; “and again he began to teach”); or “immediately”, rendered “straightway” in the RV (“and straightway he entered into the synagogue . . . And straightway there was in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit”). The feeding of the four thousand is introduced with the quite unspecific “in those days” (8:1).

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