![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2020\/04\/41ioNFnwtlL._SX331_BO1204203200_.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be seen by a reader of a text, and Mark\u2019s Gospel is largely meant to be heard by the majority audience, I think you have a good point about the use of synkrisis in Mark. This makes good rhetorical sense of various passages. What do you see as the main thing Mark is trying to accomplish using this device?<\/p>\n
HELEN:<\/p>\n
Actually my book started off as a study of synkrisis within the passion narrative, but then expanded in directions I hadn\u2019t quite anticipated! The great advantage of synkrisis, or juxtaposition\/comparison, is that it allows Mark to imply more than he actually says. So King Herod\u2019s birthday banquet is juxtaposed with Jesus\u2019 feeding of the 5,000. On the face of it, they are just two stories that happen to involve eating, but the more the hearer dwells on the similarities and differences, the more levels of meaning that are uncovered. In the end, a good case can be made that Mark has deliberately contrasted Jesus with Herod to say something about Jesus as king (a theme that will crop up again in chapter 15), and to contrast the benefactions from Jesus with those (rather dubious ones) from Herod. And so it continues throughout the work, with almost every anecdote saying more when it\u2019s compared with those around it. This seems to me to be part of Mark\u2019s general point that the Kingdom is mysterious and that people have to ponder things to reach deeper levels of understanding \u2013 and even then they may find they\u2019ve understood wrongly.<\/p>\n
BEN: Your discussion of secondary figures in Mark\u2019s Gospel is helpful, but I wonder how concerned Mark actually was with conforming how he portrayed the disciples to merely appear as types, or even stereotypes. This presumably doesn\u2019t work with Peter or the Zebedees, because at least in the case of the inner circle of 3, there is a more well-rounded portrayal of them and their ups and downs. And we need to keep constantly in view again, that Mark is writing about historical persons, some of whom he may have had personal knowledge of and contact with. My point is, that Mark may well have wanted to portray the disciples as they actually were historically, with failings and successes, as an encouragement to his own persecuted and stressed-out community in Rome. And we must conjure with others in his community who may well have known these persons better than Mark, and could correct him if he got something salient wrong. To me, it seems likely Mark wrote in the wake of the crisis for Christians in Rome in 65, but during the end of the Jewish war where \u2018the abomination that makes desolate\u2019 was on the verge of happening hence the alert to the reader. This makes the portrayal of Pilate, Barabbas and others all the more interesting and telling. I find your critique of both the form critical and narrative critical approaches to Mark telling in various regards. But perhaps after all since history is messy, and human beings are inconsistent and fallible, perhaps Mark is simply being honest about the disciples as he understands their behavior during Jesus\u2019 ministry. He\u2019s not trying to impose a consistent plot or series of characterizations on his material. You are certainly right that the disciples and others appear in the narrative mainly to reveal to us more about Jesus and his character.<\/p>\n
HELEN:<\/p>\n
I\u2019d put Mark in Rome in the 70s; I think he\u2019d seen the Flavian triumph and incorporates features of it into his account of Jesus\u2019 \u2018procession\u2019 to Calvary. But I\u2019m also more open to the idea that Mark had some connection with Peter than most critical scholars tend to be \u2013 for me, it helps to make sense of why Mark\u2019s work became popular so quickly. But even if he did have a certain amount of good material from Peter, the great apostle had died almost a decade earlier, well before some of the difficulties that Mark\u2019s audience would have faced. So I think there is good historical material here, but it\u2019s all packaged up into a distinctive literary form which focusses far more on Jesus than on secondary characters. I\u2019m not sure how conscious Mark was of how he was using secondary figures \u2013 the point is rather that he was so concerned with the portrait of Jesus that they took a back seat, largely being brought into the action as foils to Jesus. I suggest that in the first part of the gospel the disciples largely function as good and loyal followers (foreshadowing the community of faith in Jesus\u2019 own day), that in the middle part of the gospel their role is to ask questions, allowing Jesus to expand on his teaching, and at the end their cowardice and deserting emphasizes Jesus\u2019 faithful obedience and lonely journey to the cross. I doubt that Mark mapped all of this out in a notebook before he started, but the important things that he wanted to say about Jesus would have unconsciously shaped his portraits of the disciples. Once again, I found analogies to this in modern biography writing, where biographers frequently noted that by fixing the spotlight onto their subject all other people tended to be diminished, whatever their actual historical role in any event. I\u2019m sure Mark was being honest and truthful about all of the people in his biography, but I\u2019m not sure that this easily equates to saying that his work is \u2018factually accurate\u2019 (whatever that would mean in a world where it was so difficult to check facts).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be seen by a reader of a text, and Mark\u2019s Gospel is largely meant to be heard by the majority audience, I think you have a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Bible and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-06-23T05:46:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-06-05T12:51:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2020\/04\/41ioNFnwtlL._SX331_BO1204203200_.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Ben Witherington\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Ben Witherington\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/\",\"name\":\"Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-06-23T05:46:26+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-06-05T12:51:02+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b\"},\"description\":\"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Helen Bond’s The First Biography of Jesus– Part Twenty Two\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/\",\"name\":\"The Bible and Culture\",\"description\":\"A One-Stop Shop for All Things Biblical and Christian\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b\",\"name\":\"Ben Witherington\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Ben Witherington\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/author\/benw333\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two","description":"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be","robots":{"index":"noindex","follow":"follow"},"og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two","og_description":"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be","og_url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/","og_site_name":"The Bible and Culture","article_published_time":"2020-06-23T05:46:26+00:00","article_modified_time":"2020-06-05T12:51:02+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/55\/2020\/04\/41ioNFnwtlL._SX331_BO1204203200_.jpg"}],"author":"Ben Witherington","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Ben Witherington","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/","name":"Helen Bond's The First Biography of Jesus-- Part Twenty Two","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website"},"datePublished":"2020-06-23T05:46:26+00:00","dateModified":"2020-06-05T12:51:02+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b"},"description":"BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a \u2018visual\u2019 device, one that has to be","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2020\/06\/23\/helen-bonds-the-first-biography-of-jesus-part-twenty-two\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Helen Bond’s The First Biography of Jesus– Part Twenty Two"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/","name":"The Bible and Culture","description":"A One-Stop Shop for All Things Biblical and Christian","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/67da39aff728f9d015878d198839df4b","name":"Ben Witherington","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8cf1998568f0b6ccbd63f56b44d47303?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","caption":"Ben Witherington"},"url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/author\/benw333\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36385\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}