In my series on the reception of Mark’s Gospel and the traditions about the Evangelist Mark, I neglected to mention Candida Moss’s important article “Fashioning Mark: Early Christian Discussions about the Scribe and Status of the Second Gospel” New Testament Studies 67.2 (2021): 181-204. I especially appreciated that Moss interacted with my work and let me see a pre-publication version of her article (I am using the pagination from her pre-publication work). She starts by noting a seventh-century ivory relief in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which depicts Peter dictating to Mark and Mark recording his words (1-2). Her contention is that the Patristic tradition “would place Mark among the thousands of largely anonymous servile literary workers that made Roman literary and documentary culture possible by transcribing, taking dictation, writing on behalf of, polishing, correcting and proofreading the textual output of those designated as authors” (4, cf. 7-9, 11-15, 17-18). She makes a strong case that the description of Mark as Peter’s “interpreter” means that he was Peter’s translator, translating the apostle’s Aramaic speech into Greek (6-7, 10). It is plausible that Papias (cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15) was envisioning Peter dictating his memories about Jesus’s sayings and deeds to Mark who wrote what he said down (11), whereas Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria imagine Mark writing at a later point after Peter’s death (cf. Irenaeus) or while Peter was alive yet without his knowledge (cf. Clement) (18-20), but I wonder if Papias too thought that Mark wrote his text at a later point in time from when he acted as Peter’s translator and was working with his own memories of what the apostle had spoken but could not arrange these anecdotes in their proper “order.” Moss builds on Matthew Larsen’s view that Papias compared Mark’s text to hypomnemata (“notes”) that accurately preserved Peter’s words without literary refinement and adds that “[b]y positioning Mark as a servile worker he is able to explain why it is that the text lacks order (it is the unrefined text of a secretarius or notarius) while simultaneously using this lowly status to defend the integrity of the content” (17-18). She also has a fascinating discussion about how Mark’s nickname “stump-finger” could have been understood in light of the depictions of other servile workers (21-22). I look forward to reading Moss’s forthcoming book God’s Ghostwriters that will further highlight the overlooked role of the enslaved contributors to the Bible and wrestle with the theological implications of this.

I hope that those attending the SBL conference in San Antonio will attend the session on the reception of Mark’s Gospel, but I wanted to add some notes from a chapter that I recently read on this subject. In a series that I wrote on this topic, I had reviewed a few publications that dealt with the question of what Matthew and Luke may have thought about Mark’s text as their primary source here. This question is also addressed in Robert A Derrenbacker, “‘Unfinished’ Mark ‘Replaced’ By Matthew and Luke? Some Recent Studies and Their Implications for the Synoptic Problem” in The Synoptic Problem 2022: Proceedings of the Loyola University Conference (eds. Olegs Andrejevs, Simon J. Joseph, Edmondo Lupieri, and Joseph Verheyden; BTS 44; Leuven: Peeters, 2023), 179-194.

Derrenbacker begins by noting the assessments of Mark’s Gospel as “rougher,” “less-polished,” or “more unfinished” in comparison to the other New Testament Gospels, from Papias of Hierapolis’s comment about its lack of “order” and the early scribal attempts to supply a new ending to it to the modern commentaries on Mark’s “simple and popular” style (179). He then introduces the discussions about how Mark’s text may have been issued in various recensions, though he considers theories about an “Ur-Mark” difficult to demonstrate, and Matthew D. C. Larsen’s recent argument that Mark’s text fits the category of unfinished hypomnēmata or notes (180-81). What follows is a review of the contributions of J. Andrew Doole, Larsen, and Chris Keith to the debate over what the later evangelists thought about their Markan source (182-89). He also recognizes that Mark’s text was the “least favourite” Gospel in its later reception based on its manuscript attestation and the “canonical sequencing of the four Gospels in uncial manuscripts” (190). Despite their disagreements, he observes that each of the scholars listed above accepts to some degree that the later Gospel writings were “usurping” or “replacing” their principal source (190).

What are the implications of these questions about whether Mark’s Gospel was seen to be “unfinished” for the Synoptic Problem? If what Two Source theorists refer to as “Q” was another “unfinished, unpolished, rough draft-like written collection of sayings of Jesus (plus a few narrative stories),” Derrenbacker judges that its disappearance after its content was absorbed in the latter two Synoptic Gospels could be accounted for (190). He disagrees with Larsen’s view that the Synoptic texts should not be regarded as separate “books,” even if he allows that Mark’s text was a rather unfinished book (191; cf. his review of Keith’s argument on this point on p. 188), and asks “why preserve Mark at all if Mark were hypomnēmata?” (191). He adds that Mark’s text does not completely look like a loose collection of notes as it sometimes has more details than its Synoptic counterparts and exhibits some literary sophistication such as its intercalation technique (e.g. Derrenbacker notes how Matt 9:18-26 greatly reduces Mark’s account in Mark 5:21-43) (191). He concludes with a few brief thoughts about the textual medium in which Matthew and Luke accessed their sources (192-93) and questions whether the Farrer hypothesis adequately accounts for Luke’s treatment of Matthew’s text given that it is “clearly not an example of an ‘unfinished’ text (let alone hypomnēmata), as it is polished and sophisticatedly structured, looking more like a ‘book’ (and perhaps even an ancient biographical book)” (193). The advocates of the Matthean Posterity hypothesis will be pleased to know that he considers Matthew’s use of the texts of Luke and Mark to make better sense if one were to reject the Two Source hypothesis which he holds (193).

I will leave aside the debate over the existence of Q, which depends on the prior hypothesis that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written independently of each other, and whether Luke’s use of Matthew’s Gospel or Matthew’s use of Luke’s Gospel makes better sense of how ancient writers used their sources. I will also leave aside the question about whether Larsen or Keith is right about the categorization of Mark’s genre. The key point is that the earliest readers of Mark’s Gospel likely perceived it to be unfinished and objected to Mark’s arrangement of some of the content, thus necessitating the production of further narrative lives of Jesus to compensate for these alleged defects. Of course, redaction and literary critics have countered that there is evidence of literary arrangement in Mark’s Gospel, whether one looks at Mark’s “sandwiches” where one story is included in another or Mark’s interconnected Passion Narrative, but it is also possible that the oral or written traditions that Mark inherited had already been arranged in these ways. I suspect that Mark’s text was initially preserved and circulated to reach the other evangelists because it presented a compelling retelling of the story of Jesus for oral performance, but that its popularity quickly waned once the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were published. I also suspect that, in the long run, it was the Elder John’s and Papias’s efforts to link Mark’s text to the apostle Peter that ultimately assured its long-term preservation and inclusion in a scriptural canon alongside the other Synoptic Gospels.

Since I had mentioned that I was initially planning to present on the reception of Mark’s Gospel at the Society of Biblical Literature before I had to withdraw the paper due to personal circumstances, I want to call attention to this excellent blogpost by Peter Head entitled “Clement of Alexandria and the (Canonical) Gospel of Mark (A Pedantic Post)” (see also the informed discussion in the comments section). When I did my PhD on this subject, I was indebted to Peter Head’s research in “The Early Text of Mark” in The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger; Oxford: OUP, 2012), 108-120 as well as his replies to some of my text critical questions by email correspondence.