Interpretation and the Claims of the Text by Whitlark Jason A.;Longenecker Bruce W.;Novakovic Lidija;Parsons Mikeal C.;

Author:Whitlark, Jason A.;Longenecker, Bruce W.;Novakovic, Lidija;Parsons, Mikeal C.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baylor University Press

CHAPTER 13

THE LIVING RESOURCES OF EARLY CHRISTOLOGY

Papias and the Gospel of Mark

David P. Moessner

Charles Talbert’s ability to relate New Testament texts to the forms and literary patterns of Greco-Roman cultural “texts” is unparalleled. Because of his contribution in illuminating ways first-century audiences would respond to shared motifs, values, and cultural “scripts” of Greco-Roman antiquity, he has opened up our contemporary eyes and ears to see and hear messages from the New Testament writers that we would otherwise miss.1 It is an honor to dedicate this small work on the “living voice” of the Papias tradition to the “enduring voice” of Talbert’s living legacy.

Professor Talbert has more recently consolidated his earlier work on the development of Christology, including his reassessment of Greco-Roman mythic models that were readily at hand and through which early church communities could configure their more precise understandings of the divine-human encounters of Jesus of Nazareth.2 Talbert’s four models from both Jewish and non-Jewish texts provide indispensable cultural “registers” for disclosing prevailing relationships and expected dynamics for a wide variety of divine-human interactions.3

In addition to Talbert’s models and the many rhetorical literary patterns that he has identified as pre-scriptive for the Greco-Roman period, my reading of the Papias material in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (Hist. eccl. III.39.1-4, 15-16), identifies yet another type of resource for formulating human-divine encounters, namely the narrative “remembering” or “recounting” into an ordered “arrangement” or plotting. This cultural register may comprehend the unusual, often unexpected human behaviors and interactions of the divine in eye- and ear-witness experience that lives on in oral and written traditions through discrete, even sui generis narrative construals of those encounters. Though certain motifs of the mythic models may be clearly discernible within the plotted narrative, the role of a thematic commonplace within the story does not necessarily induce or require the presence of the other elements of the model in their patterned relationships. This more flexible remembering is particularly striking in the oral tradition of a John “the elder” reputedly passed on to and written down by Papias concerning Mark’s Gospel, which Eusebius, in turn, passes on in his “ecclesiastical history” (I.14). We shall see that, though Eusebius presents Mark’s account as “inferior” by Hellenistic standards, he defends it, nevertheless, as a vital resource, a substratum of early christological reckoning that establishes it as indispensable to early Christian witness to the divine-human scenario in Jesus of Nazareth.

Mark’s Paradoxical Hellenistic “Gospel”: Deficient “Arrangement” by Narrative-Poetics Standards, “Living” Authority by Narrative-Rhetorical Standards

Eusebius’ citing of Papias’ defense of Mark’s Gospel has long remained enigmatic. The bishop of Caesarea (ca. 260–339 C.E.) summons the traditions concerning the bishop of Hierapolis who, sometime probably in the early decades of the second century, relays words of criticism from a certain “John the elder” (ὁ πρεσβύτερος Ἰωάννης; III.39.4) against Mark’s Gospel that were current at that time.5 Two statements, in particular, of this “presbyter” or “elder” John are rather odd:

(1)Mark did nothing wrong (οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Μάρκος) in this manner by writing down some single units (ἔνια) as he remembered them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.