The Marcan Community

Larry Hurtado has a post discussing the prospects of the Marcan Community, particularly in light of critiques by Dwight Peterson and Frederik Wisse on the idea of communities behind texts, in preparation for an SBL session in November. Hurtado concludes:

Given the widely-shared (and entirely understandable) desire to link early Christian texts with particular provenances, it is inconvenient to have such critique and warnings [i.e., Peterson and Wisse].  But that’s no excuse to ignore them.  The credibility of the field just might be at stake.  And if the result is greater modesty in scholarly claims, that might not be all that bad.

For those interested, see my article in JTS from a few years ago: The Marcan Community, Myth or Maze? Bauckham’s The Gospels for All Christians Revisited, which deals with the problematic issues of finding a “Marcan Community.”