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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. |
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.
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