To what extent did Mark shape the Gospel that he wrote?

By Julie M. Smith

Regardless of our assumptions about “Mark” the author, we might wonder to what extent the writer simply transmitted the traditions about Jesus that he received (from Peter or from others) or reshaped them. As Joel Marcus phrased the question, was Mark a “conservative redactor [=editor] or creative theologian?”[1]

There is no definitive answer to this question, but given the highly literary quality of the Gospel, something that will be explored at length in the Mark volume of the commentary, it seems likely that Mark carefully shaped the sources he had to work with in order to carefully convey the good news of Jesus Christ. This is not to suggest that Mark invented material, but rather that he shaped the materials to emphasize what was important to him.

Two examples will suffice, one which shows Mark’s shaping hand and another which shows his restraint. Mark 6:56 tells us that, wherever Jesus went, people “besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were made whole.” But that is all the reader learns about these countless people. Contrast Mark 5:25-34, where we hear, in great detail, the story of one such person who touched Jesus and was made whole. Mark told this story in detail, despite knowing of many similar ones, because this particular healing allowed him to explore several other themes as well (including the house of Israel, gender roles, and discipleship), particularly as Mark “sandwiches” this story with the raising of Jairus’ daughter. So we see Mark’s creative hand in writing the Gospel.

But we also have some evidence of Mark’s restraint: in Mark 1:24, a demon calls Jesus “the holy one of God,” a title which is not otherwise used in the Gospel. Had Mark been concocting this story, he likely would have used one of his usual titles for Jesus, such as “Son of God.”[2] Had Mark felt free to tinker with his source material, he likely would have changed “the holy one of God” to a more familiar title. The fact that he does not becomes evidence for his respect for his source material. Both of these examples are open to other interpretations, but they can be read to suggest that Mark exercised some control in the selection and arrangement of stories in the Gospel, but did not either fabricate them out of whole cloth or drastically change the tradition that he received.

In recent years, many scholars have advanced the idea that Mark is closely tied to oral traditions about Jesus and that the Gospel may have existed as an oral performance before it was written down. It does contain many characteristics of oral performances.[3] If this Gospel began as an oral composition, then Mark may have written it down but had only a minimal hand in its creation. As one scholar described it, “Mark was building on, refining, and developing an oral tradition that had already created a continuous, more-or- less coherent narrative.”[4]