In teaching the Bible as Literature, I find that few students – of any age – have read the texts as adults. Their acquaintance is shallow or secondhand, based on childhood lessons or heard in short fragments in liturgies. Hardly anyone has read the brief Gospel of Mark (or any gospel) in its entirety start to finish. And even though, in the course, students have been reading large portions of other Biblical texts “as literature,” there remains resistance to the idea of reading the Gospel in a literary way, as “story” or as “drama” – not as “fiction,” mind you, but as a carefully crafted narrative with artful literary features. For some, their sense of “inspiration” is offended to regard the human author as having such artful freedom in selecting and sequencing the historical material (and his own first-hand experience) toward a purpose – even though we have studied other Biblical texts all semester that way, ie, “as literature.”
I have found some ways to overcome such resistance. One way is to apply Aristotle’s “Poetics” toward understanding the drama of the gospel story. This lifts the discussion entirely out of a “Biblical” context and moves students to think about it in the same way they have considered other literature. It allows students to use a familiar language of literary criticism they have learned before, particularly in high school English or Drama class, when they read Oedipus or Antigone.
There are two other strategies that lead up to this.
One is to require that students read the entire Gospel of Mark – the shortest, oldest, and most compelling of the gospels in its simplicity and force – and to read it all in one sitting. Its unity as a story becomes quickly apparent – a concept important to Aristotle.
The second way is to ask students to look for literary structures and strategies we have noted in other narrative portions of the Bible. So, for example, students find (and I point out) the following literary features:
1. repetition. Students especially notice patterns of threes (a useful structural device for arrangement and memory, nothing mystical about it): Jesus predicts his passion and death three times; he teaches the 12 about true discipleship 3 times; he makes 3 Temple visits; he has conflicts there with 3 groups of religious leaders – the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the lawyers; he prays three times in Gethsemane and finds the 3 closest followers asleep each time; Peter denies him 3 times, Pilate asks the crowd 3 questions, Golgotha has 3 crosses, the crucifixion section has three 3-hour intervals at 9, 12, and 3 o’clock, and so on.
2. framing: this literary device increases suspense and makes for interesting comparisons, whereby one incident provides commentary for another. Sometimes it is called ‘sandwiching.’
For example, the 3 passion predictions are framed (or “bookended”) by two stories of blind men being healed – the first is healed gradually, in stages, and the second instantly. It is only gradually that we are able to “see” the true identity and mission of Jesus, as he describes it in the 3 intervening passion predictions. In addition, the first healing of the blind man is placed adjacent to Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Christ, though he only “sees” this partially, since his understanding of the Anointed One is limited and partial: he expects that “The Christ” will be a powerful royal figure, but not a suffering servant.
Later, the story of Peter’s denial is framed by the narrative of Jesus’ trial, suggesting by the juxtaposition that there are two “trials” going on.
The incident of Jesus’ trashing and disqualification of the Temple is framed by a two-part incident where a fig tree with leaf but no fruit is cursed by him on the way to the Temple, and then afterwards seen to be withered as a way to comment on the Temple and what it represents: lots of outward show (leaf) but no genuine spiritual life (fruit).
The story of King Herod being tricked by his wife and stepdaughter at his birthday party to execute John the Baptist and serve his head on a platter is framed by Jesus sending out the 12 and then their return, whereupon we have the contrasting feeding of the 5,000 – a different kind of banquet indeed from Herod’s, served by a different kind of king.
There are others: the stories of Jairus’ dying daughter and the woman with the bleeding, for example.
Another literary strategy Mark employs is something called ‘chiastic structures,’ a step up-step down sequence that I’ll describe next time. Eventually, we’ll get to our own story-writing and what we can learn from the way Mark adapted Aristotle’s theory of storytelling.
