BEN: One of the salient points you make early on in your new book, is that genre is not merely a matter of form, or indeed an identity marker unto itself but rather the genre of a work affects how the reality and truth being dealt with in the work is presented. Form affects not only function but content and meaning. Why do you think it is that various previous discussions of the genre of Mark have been satisfied with merely identifying the genre, but not dealing with the way that identification affects the presentation and character of the content of the biography?
HELEN:
I really don’t know, I suppose the debate has always been framed in this way. One of the things that thinking about Mark as a biography has done for me is to give me a strong sense of Mark as an educated, creative, and pastorally sensitive author – as a biographer. It does seem to me that many scholars who are interested in Mark’s literary art tend to gravitate towards narrative readings (where, curiously, discussions of genre are thin on the ground, and what there are tend to assume that Mark is a short story). At the same time, people who like history gravitate towards historical Jesus work (where there’s been a renewed stress lately on oral traditions behind the text rather than attempting to understand the texts as creative receptions of what’s gone before). My work is both literary and historical: like narrative critics I’m interested in Mark’s literary craft, but I want to situate it in an ancient context and ask how it sounded to a first century audience.
I also became increasingly interested in what it would mean to be the first biographer of Jesus. Of course we can’t know that this is the case with Mark, but his was certainly one of the earliest and the most influential biographies of Jesus. The old form critical view of things would have us believe that the writing of the gospels was inevitable, an organic process in which strings of tradition grew ever longer until finally a group of unreflective editors put them to paper. But if we take the literary side of things seriously, then Mark’s decision to write a biography rather than any other literary form is significant – perhaps one of the most significant moves in the early Church. Prior to Mark, the term ‘gospel’ (at least as used by Paul) referred only to the death and resurrection of Jesus. But Mark extends ‘gospel’ to include the life of Jesus too, so that Jesus’ way of life becomes as important for Christian
discipleship as the cross and resurrection. I think that’s a huge shift and by no means an inevitable direction.
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