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Excursus: Community and
Geography in the Gospel of Mark
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"Mark
could have been written anywhere in the Roman Empire where a writer
could have received a grade school education in Greek (almost
anywhere)." -- R.M. Fowler.
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"Throughout the
Gospel Mark is far more interested in articulating geo-social "space"
in terms of narrative symbolics than actual place names." -- Ched Myers
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Back in 2001, Ted Weeden, one of the world's leading Mark
scholars, joined
the scholarly Mark discussion list with a
post that set out guidelines for locating the community of the writer
of Mark. Let's use the guidelines set out by Weeden to reflect on
the issues of geography and community in the Gospel of Mark.
Weeden proposed 7 guidelines for locating the community in Mark.
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(1) Markan allusions to his
community's location in
all likelihood are to be found where Mark exhibits accurate
representation of
geography, where he employs colloidal mapping, as Chapman argues,
rather than
cosmographical mapping. For it is logical to assume that Mark knows
best the
geography of his home area. He is less likely to err in his
geographical
mapping of the place where he lives than in areas remote from his home
and only
vaguely known by him. |
While on the
surface this makes sense, it is assumptive. It assumes that a place
that the writer knows well is the community where he lives. But of
course this is nonsense. I could write with knowledge about places I
have visited for extended periods, such as Sri Lanka,
though I have never lived there. One could also write with knowledge
simply by asking a local for information.
A second, and
larger, problem is that the writer of Mark rarely presents 'accurate'
information about
geography. The writer of Mark is often vague on locations, and names
places that do not appear to have existed in
both Galilee and Jerusalem. Additionally, the geographical locations in
Mark, such as Galilee or the Mt of Olives, appear to be derived from
the OT rather than from personal knowledge.
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(2) Wherever the
community is located, it must be at significant distance from the
Mediterranean
Sea. It is very unlikely that either Mark or the members of his
community have
any firsthand experience or realistic awareness of the magnitude of the
Mediterranean Sea. If Mark, as Theissen has argued, were aware of the
size of
the Mediterranean Sea, he would not have made the mistake of calling
Lake
Gennesaret a "sea." If there are bodies of water in the region of
Mark's community, they must be of such diminutive size that by
comparison Lake
Gennesaret seemed like a sea to Mark, and likely to his community also.
Therefore we must look for Markan allusions to the site of his
community in
geographical settings whose remoteness from the Mediterranean Sea make
it
unlikely that Mark or members of that community would have any
realistic
knowledge about that body of water. |
This is a
seriously illogical guideline. There are actually three
possibilities:
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1.
The writer of Mark does not live near the sea, nor does he live near
the Sea of Galilee. He doesn't know anything about seas, and thus does
not know that the Lake Gennesaret is really just a piddling little
thing that no one would call a "sea."
2. The writer of Mark lives near a real sea, but has never been to the
Sea of Galilee, and does not know that it is not a real sea. Thus he
imputes sea-like behavior to the Sea of Galilee.
3. The writer of Mark just doesn't give a damn what the Sea of Galilee
is like. He is writing a story in which the Sea is a body of water that
plays a symbolic role and he uses it as he wills, and not as reality
would have it.
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Note that alternatives (1) and (2) also require the writer of Mark to
be not only uninformed about the nature of seas, but also such a
dullard as to never think to ask someone who did know about them.
Judging from the structural and thematic complexity of Mark, however,
the writer is probably not as stupid as Weeden's guidelines would make
him out to be.
Of the three
alternatives, the last is the most likely. This is indicated by the
general
unreality of the Sea of Galilee scenes – they are often
created from the Elijah-Elisha Cycle, and use the Sea of Galilee as the
site of miracles like water walks
and feedings. Additionally, the narrative function of the Sea of
Galilee in the
Gospel of Mark is to act as a border between the Gentiles and the Jews.
The reality is that the writer of Mark simply doesn’t give a damn what
the reality of the Sea of Galilee is.
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(3) Wherever the
community is, it is likely located in a rural village setting.
Therefore, we
must seek the site of the community among the village settings Mark
mentions in
his narrative. |
Although this
appears here as an unsupported assertion, Weeden had explained earlier that "the text's rural/peasant ethos tells
Howard Kee (COMMUNITY OF THE NEW AGE) and Richard Rohrbaugh ("The
Social
Location of Mark's Audience," INT, 1993) that the Markan community is
situated in a rural village."
However, logical
problems remain. The first sentence here is not logically connected to
the second.
Imagine if Weeden had written: “Wherever the community of The Moon
is a
Harsh Mistress is, it is likely located in a Moon setting.
Therefore we
must seek the site of Heinlein’s community among the communities
mentioned on the Moon.” Second, the
fact that
the writer of Mark has Jesus in villages means nothing about where the
writer
lives. The Roman Empire was largely rural and many individuals had
experience
of both rural and urban settings. Weeden has confused the point of view of the text with the writer himself. His guidelines
assume a too literal reading of Mark.
Another problem
revealed here is that Weeden's use of the word "community" also
equivocates different meanings of the word. Consider myself. I live in
Taiwan. My website
discusses Taiwan
in detail, and it is where I live, but "Taiwan" is not really what I
would consider my community, nor is Tanzi, the town where I actually
reside. That, instead, is a small group of long-term expatriate
foreigners like me who live in Taiwan, some of whom I have never met in
the flesh. Additionally, the website does not anywhere reflect the
concerns of this community, but instead is aimed at individuals I have
never met in a country I have not lived in for years, the US. What is
my "community?" Or take someone like E.M. Forster, who traveled
extensively and whose greatest novel, A
Passage to India,
is about a place he had visited but had never lived in. Was Forster's
community the places he lived in, or the circle of friends, the famous
Bloomsbury circle? Weeden would have us locate Forster's community in
India, were his only surviving novel A
Passage to India.
Weeden has not sorted out the many meanings of "community," all of
which indicate persons with a shared interest, but not all of which
indicate anything about geography.
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(4) It is most likely
that the site of Mark's community is among those narrative places where
Mark
presents Jesus as actively engaged in critical theological issues- in
particular, theological issues that the narrative gives every evidence
of being
of paramount importance to Mark, issues which he appears to be
addressing in
order to provide interpretation or "answers" to existential dilemmas
facing his community. |
This guideline is
useless.
First, “importance” depends on the subjective
judgment of the reader about how Mark should be interpreted. Which is
more important, Mark
8:27-33 or Mark
4:1-20? Second, the “importance” of a location in
Mark may derive from the needs of the narrative and not the importance
of the
location to the writer personally. This guideline thus again errs by
confusing the point of view
of the text with the writer himself, and by a too-literal reading of
the Gospel.
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(5) Wherever the
Markan community is located, it is likely in fairly close proximity to
Galilee,
if not in Galilee itself. I state this for the following reason. It is
clear that
Galilee for Mark is the center of his eschatological universe. It is
the Markan
Mecca. According to the Markan story, it is in Galilee that Jesus first
proclaims the dawn of the kingdom. And it is in Galilee, according to
the
Markan Jesus (14:28; 16:7), where that final eschatological moment will
occur
in which he will be fully vindicated, glorified and empowered
(13:24-26). For
Mark to have such an existential investment in Galilee as the place
where the
triumphant eschatological fulfillment takes place makes it hard to
believe that
his community would be located so far from Galilee that distance would
prevent
Mark and the members of his community from experiencing that
eschatological
moment firsthand. Therefore we must look for Markan allusions to the
site of
his community among villages in his narrative which are within or in
close
proximity to Galilee. |
This is essentially a
special case of guideline (4)
and makes all the errors noted above. There are some additional
problems as well. First, note that Weeden's argument hinges on an
argument from incredulity:
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For
Mark to have such an existential investment in Galilee as the place
where the
triumphant eschatological fulfillment takes place makes it hard to believe
that
his community would be located so far from Galilee that distance would
prevent
Mark and the members of his community from experiencing that
eschatological
moment firsthand. |
"Hard to believe" is not an argument but an appeal to the reader in
hope that the reader will share Weeden's values. If the Gospel of Mark
is fiction, and it gives every appearance of being so, then there is no
reason to locate the writer's community within the areas the writer
shows eschatological interest in. Indeed, other reasons compel our
attention. The presence of Jesus in
Galilee is probably due to the writer’s use of creation off of the OT.
At the detail level “Galilee” depends on Isa 9:1,
while at the structural level the north-south flow of movement in the
Gospel
mirrors the north-south movement of the Elijah-Elisha Cycle, which the
writer
parallels. Further, northern Palestine was the site of activity in
other Jewish literature that the writer of Mark appears to know, such
as 1 Enoch and the Book of Tobit. Nothing in the Gospel of Mark
indicates that “Galilee” cannot be accounted
for by the usual methods of creation from the OT that exegetes,
including Weeden (2001), have identified.
Finally, this argument:
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And it is in Galilee, according
to
the
Markan Jesus (14:28; 16:7), where that final eschatological moment will
occur
in which he will be fully vindicated, glorified and empowered
(13:24-26) |
depends on
accepting that our current ending is the correct one, and Mark 13:24-6
take place in Galilee based on 14:28 and 16:7. But that assumption is
questionable, given that many exegetes interpret those two passages to
say that the Gospel originally had an ending where Jesus shows up in
Galilee. This actually occurs in John 21, which some believe may be the
missing ending of Mark (see the Excursus
on the Missing Ending of Mark).
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(6)The narrative places which
meet the first five
criteria and are not those that the historical Jesus is likely to have
frequented are more likely to be the site of the Markan community. I
posit this
on the following basis.As Rohrbaugh (390) has pointed out with respect
to
Mark's narrative world: "We can be sure that at some points this
narrative
world corresponds with the real world of Jesus, while at others it most
certainly does not."A good example of the Markan narrative diverging
from
Jesus' real world and reflecting more closely the real world of Mark's
own
community is Mark 13. The events of that chapter clearly postdate the
real
world of the historical Jesus. Thus: if, after applying the first five
guidelines to the Markan narrative, some places which emerge as
probable sites
of Mark's community turn out to be places where the historical Jesus,
according
to critical analysis, is unlikely to have conducted his ministry, then
it is in
one of those particular places that the site of the Markan community is
likely
to be found. |
The utter failure of
this guideline is shown by Weeden’s
pointer to Mark 13.
In Mark
13:1-31
Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple. He does so in a
location driven by creative concerns, not community realities. Recall
that in Mark 12 Jesus sat down
opposite the Treasury in the Temple; in the very next pericope, he sits
down
opposite the Temple on the Mount of Olives. This type of parallel
construction is vintage Mark. Further, in Jewish lore the Mount of
Olives
is the location from which the messiah begins his activities, as
predicted in
Zech 14:4, and reflects a larger Jewish belief that sets the Mt. of
Zion opposite the Temple on God's day of Judgment, which in turn is
part of a whole complex of Near Eastern mythology that centers on holy
mountains in eschatological contexts. The passage itself is constructed
almost entirely from the
OT and contains a chiastic structure that is also a composition of the
author. Bruce Malina (2002) has also pointed out that Jesus’ discourse in Mark 13
is an example of a common belief in antiquity, that those about to die
have
heightened sensitivity toward the future. In other words, Jesus’
presence on the Mt
of Olives in this event, along with the event itself, which all
exegetes agree
is an
important part of the Gospel, is driven entirely by concerns
of narrative, the OT, myth, and story convention. Nothing in it points
to
historicity at any level. Therefore, it cannot be used to make a
determination about where the putative historical Jesus might have
conducted his putative ministry.
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(7) Having followed the first
six guidelines and
having thus arrived at a likely geographical site of the Markan
community, as
alluded to by Mark in his narrative, that geographical site should be
in
relatively near proximity of the place of origin or a probable place of
circulation of Mark's sources in order to account for how he would have
gained
access to those sources. The principle underlying this guideline is
that one
can better account for Mark' s access to a source if he is in close
proximity
to its place of origin or circulation than if he is at some remote
distance
from the source's geographical genesis or likely place of circulation.
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Since the first 6
guidelines, as we have seen, either
yield false positives or are hopelessly illogical, piling on number 7
cannot be of any
help. Yet even on its own it is a failure. Mark’s sources include the
OT, Jewish tradition, other Jewish writings, Hellenistic literary convention,
perhaps
the Pauline letters, perhaps Josephus, perhaps Homer, and
so forth. Even if one tosses in the alleged oral tradition, these
sources have nothing to do with any specific location, but instead,
point to a
collection of resources that could have been assembled almost anywhere
in the
Roman Empire. Donahue and Harrington (2002, p40) argue that 10:30,
where Jesus promises his disciples that they will have "houses" a
hundredfold, may well be a reference to house churches, similar to
those found in Paul's letter to the Romans. But even if true, a house
Church could be found anywhere in the Empire. And if the writer found
that concept in Paul, it exists in his source, and not his milieu, and
therefore cannot point to his community.
Weeden then applies his guidelines and concludes that the village of
Caesarea Philippi is the likely setting for the location of the Markan
community. Let's examine a few of his reasons:
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First,
Caesarea
Philippi is within one of the geographical areas which Mark does map
accurately
(first guideline). Second, Caesarea Philippi is far enough inland from
the
Mediterranean Sea for Mark, as a resident of one of its villages, not
to have a
realistic knowledge of what constitutes the size of a "real" sea.
Thus, without such awareness, it is easy to understand why his
experience of
the size of the Lake of Gennesaret would cause him to mistakenly think
it
qualified being called a "sea" (second guideline). Such a mistake in
judgment could well have arisen as a result of Mark's comparison of
Lake
Gennesaret with Lake Huleh, the lake nearest to him. Lake Gennersaret
would
have appeared to him to be of enormous proportions compared to Lake
Huleh. If
Lake Huleh was called a "lake," then the size of Lake Gennesaret by
comparison qualified in Mark's mind in being called a "sea." Third,
the villages of Caesarea Philippi are obviously a part of a village
rural setting
(third guideline).
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The Gospel of Mark does not "map" Caesarea Philippi accurately at all.
It is mentioned once in the
Gospel of Mark, in one of its most important pericopes:
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27:
And Jesus went on with his disciples,
to the villages of Caesare'a Philip'pi; and on the way he asked
his disciples, "Who do men say that I am?"
28: And they told him, "John the Baptist; and
others say, Eli'jah; and others one of the prophets."
29: And he asked them, "But who do you say
that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Christ."
30: And he charged them to tell no one about
him.
31: And he began to teach them that the Son
of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the
chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise
again.
32: And he said this plainly. And Peter took
him, and began to rebuke him.
33: But turning and seeing his disciples, he
rebuked Peter, and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the
side of God, but of men." (RSV)
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The geographical sequence in Mark
8 is illuminating in its inaccuracy.
Mark 8 commences with the second
feeding miracle.
That occurs on the Sea of Galilee, a location which Weeden has argued
is inaccurately portrayed, and which we have seen, reflects Markan
themes and creative habits. In Mark 8:10 the location shifts
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10: And he sent
them away; and immediately he got into the boat with his disciples, and
went to the district of Dalmanu'tha. |
A famous verse whose named location is utterly unknown from history, a
mystery made worse by the textual confusion which describes Dalmanutha
as "mountains" as well as a district. In other words, far from "mapping
accurately," the first two locations in this sequence are clear
fictions.
Jesus and his disciples then cross the Sea of Galilee again in a
pericope, Mark
8:14-21,
that is obviously a Markan fiction. In other words, the fictional
location of Dalmanutha is followed by a fictional crossing of a
fictionalized Sea. The next stop is Bethsaida in v 22, where Jesus
heals a blind man by rubbing spit in his eyes. This
pericope terminates the Bethsaida sequence, which many exegetes see as
interpolated into the Gospel. In the very next pericope we get the sole
mention of Caesarea Philippi in Mark, in 8:27. In essence, Weeden's
"accurate mapping" has turned out to be his assumption
that when the writer of Mark located Bethsaida on the way to Caesarea
Philippi after leaving the Sea of Galilee, he actually knew that
Bethsaida is between Caesarea Philippi and the Sea of Galilee. But nothing in the text indicates that.
The writer of Mark need merely know the name of two places in northern
Palestine. He need not know their real geographical relationship.
Nowhere in the text of Mark does the writer indicate how many days it
took to get from one to the other, nor in which direction Jesus went,
nor the relative locations of the two cities, nor by what road they
traveled. They are simply two stops
on an itinerary. It is as if Weeden had picked up his friend's
bus
tickets, issued by a travel agency in the US for a trip to Kenya, that
ran MERU -- EMBU -- NAIROBI and from that concluded that the issuer of
the bus tickets knows that Embu is between Nairobi and Meru. If
the writer has correctly described the geography of the region
northeast of the Sea of Galilee, it could just as well be due to
coincidence. The bottom line is that Weeden has
committed the common exegete error of imputing to the text information
that it does not actually contain.
Further, Weeden does not give any methodological justification for
accepting this as "accurate." Nothing justifies lifting a three-step
hit out of a series of geographical errors. In other words, the key
criteria -- mapping accuracy -- goes undefined. How much error can
"accurate mapping" tolerate? Bethsaida is almost on the Sea of
Galilee, whilst Caesarea Philippi is relatively distant to the
northeast. There are an enormous number of ways the writer could relate
the cities, yet not violate Weeden's perception that the mapping is
accurate here. Weeden's "accurate mapping" is actually a backhanded
admission
that the geography of the Gospel of Mark is fraught with problems, for
the presentation of three correct places in a row qualifies as
"accuracy," at least in Mark
Never mind that the phrase used in 8:27, "the villages of Caesarea
Philippi" has led some exegetes to conclude that the writer knew
nothing about the area other than the place-name, for Caesarea Philippi
was a city, not a collection of villages. The actual "accuracy" of the
phrase depends on how the exegete interprets it.
But even if the writer did know the correct positions of the two
cities, knowledge of the correct relationship between the Sea of
Galilee, Bethsaida, and Caesarea Philippi it is arguable whether that
constitutes
the level of detail that one would need to aver that things have been
accurately mapped and conclude that the writer's community is located
there.
Further, the second guideline, when applied to Caesarea Philippi, is
highly problematical. It assumes that the writer, though living in
Palestine with easy access to people who knew the Sea of Galilee and
the Mediterranean and their actual behavior, never bothered to ask any
of the thousands of people who might have told him. Surely a writer as
clever as the writer of Mark was not such an idiot as that.
Finally, speaking
from my
own extensive experience of living as an expat among pre-industrial
people, locating oneself abstractly on a map requires some very
powerful conceptual and cognitive habits that exist at best only
imperfectly among pre-industrial peoples. Map illiteracy is common even
among educated individuals in the west; it is practically universal
among peoples not educated to think about themselves in space. Most
people in such cultures navigate by landmarks. In Taiwan, where I live,
people are rarely able to give directions like: head north on Main Street and turn right
on Oak Street. Rather, they navigate in terms of landmarks that
often have personal significance: Go
this way until you get to the 7-11 with the broken sign, then go around
the corner toward the old woman who sells newspapers. On
innumerable occasions I have personally experienced questions from
locals here in Taiwan whose geographical understandings I am unable to
comprehend: for example, the woman who was able to give me perfectly
comprehensible directions from my house to the nearby city of
Fengyuan, but thought that
it was in Changhua county, an error on par with getting directions from
Chicago to Milwaukee from a person who thinks Milwaukee is in Indiana.
If the Gospel of Mark contains geographic accuracy, it may well reflect
some other understanding of the geography, or plain good luck.
This perspective may also help explain why the geography of Mark is so
confusing and difficult to perceive. It was because the writer was
writing a description of a place he had never seen, and thus was having
a great deal of difficulty conceptualizing the unfamiliar geography.
None of his normal congnitive solutions, which depended on personal
knowledge of local landmarks, would have been available to him.
Therefore, he falls back on rapidity and vagueness.
Whatever the case may be, the reality is that the geography in Mark is
heavily fictionalized and
deeply symbolic. Place names frequently appear to have meanings that
relate to the Gospel story. Locations such as the Sea of Galilee and
the Mount of Olives appear in the Gospel due to creation off of the OT
or their importance in Jewish prophetic tradition. Other locations
appear to relate to the writer's narrative goals. For example, the five
miracles of the Bethsaida section all occur in Gentile territory.
Finally, one could argue that Caesarea Philippi appears in the text
because it has some other importance. Robert Price (2000), for example,
has argued that Mark has set the
discussion
of 8:27-30 in Caesarea Philippi in order to "blast what he deemed
inadequate local Christologies of the region."(p109).
Another way to view the importance of Caesarea Philippi is that it is
pretty much as far away from Jerusalem as one can get and still be in
Palestine, and yet it is there that the writer has Peter identify Jesus
as the Messiah. Immediately after that Jesus states that one must take
up the cross to follow him. After that, he is Transfigured on a
mountain. One can catch the obvious set of parallels with the trial,
crucifixion, and resurrection, in which Jesus is identified as Messiah,
a cross is borne by a follower, and then Jesus is transfigured through
death and resurrection. Perhaps the writer of Mark has chosen this
location for some symbolic meaning, rather than from any real-world
relationship to himself.
Another issue to consider is the function of Mark itself. Just as my
Taiwan website is aimed at people whom I have never met and who are not
part of my community, so do many exegetes see the Gospel of Mark. Mark
is most frequently seen as a text about discipleship, or as a text for
initiates. By definition, neither of these could have been in any
community with Mark -- they were potential community members. The
Markan community, alas, may not be found in the Gospel of Mark.
Richard Bauckham (2003) writes:
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"The so-called Matthean,
Markan, Lukan or Johannine community (or for
that matter, Thomas community) may be understood as, not just one
church, but a small group of churches, but in that case it is axiomatic
that this group of churches be homogeneous in composition and
circumstances. The unargued assumption in every case is that each
Gospel addresses a localized community in its own, quite specific
context and character.
Nearly all the literature of the last few decades which
makes this assumption and increasingly builds large and highly
sophisticated arguments upon it seems to regard this assumption as
completely self-evident, as though no alternative could ever have
occurred to anyone." |
The sad fact is that there neither evidence nor methodology that would
permit us
to deduce the presence or parameters of a community in the
Gospel of Mark. |