From Robert Lisle Lindsey :
A hebrew translation of the Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem,
1963
Trying to understand Mark's Method p 39-49
I had observed many instances of Markan annotation an desertion
of a basic Hebrew-Greek style. The greek surprise for me was that
Mark had used as at least one of his texts our Gospel of
Luke, a canonical text of the New Testament.
As I think of this development today I wonder why another
thought did not immediately occur to me: if Mark has used the
Gospel of Luke could he not also have use the book of the Acts of
the Apostles? Luke the physician is usually supposed to have
written both of these treatises and even if Acts appeared somewhat
later than the Gospel, is it not probable that Mark knew both
works? This question did not occur to me, however with the result
that when I later did begin to encounter numerous Markan
expressions which could only be accounted for on the theory that
either the author of Acts had used Mark or Mark had used Acts,
this discovery too came as a surprise.
Nor did I yet fully understand the love of word-play which was
becoming more and more evident in the Markan re-writing of texts.
Mark sees "the Son of Man" and decides to change this in "the sons
of men". He sees Luke use an occasional "unclean spirit" as a
synonym for "demon" and he decides to use the synonym in
preference to the much more frequent demon in Matthew and Luke. He
sees Luke use elegen to introduce a saying now and then,
regularly refuses to copy it in an immediate parallel with Luke
(yet of the two time he does parallel Luke in the use he deftly
copies it when removing the parable of the mustard seed from the
Lukan Q context to insert his re-written version of the parable -
cf parallels to Lk 13:18-19) but proceeds forthwith to use it
nearly fifty times, often as a vehicle to introduce some
expression found in a distant Lukan passage. Luke uses the Greek
word meaning "teach" eleven times in parallel passages to Mark,
Mark accepting only two of these in exact parallel yet using it
himself in fifteen unique instances where Luke has parallel
material but not "teach".
This pattern of
rejecting-to-accept-and-use-otherwise-as-one-pleases is usually
accompanied in Mark by a concomitant practice of replacing the
rejected immediate parallel word by a synonym. This synonym is in
turn, like the "unclean spirit" mentionned above, traceable to
another written text. Thus our writer looks at his immediate
written source, accepts some of the words without question but
tries to remember other texts which contain similar expressions or
synonyms, turns (at least very often) to these passages, read
them, and then methodically uses them as supplementary material
for his re-writing.
Mark is simply copying a well known story, perhaps for no other
reason than that he feels he has as much to do so as anyone else.
He enjoys words and their synonyms. He likes to recognize literary
allusions in his sources. He sees nothing wrong with borrowing and
expressions from unrelated and distant texts if they can give a
more interesting or more dramatic or more elaborate design to the
well known story...
There is no one who has left house our brothers or sisters
or mother or father or children or fields for my sake and for the
sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundredfold more now in
this time - houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and
children and fields, with persecution - and in the age to come
life everlasting. Mk 10:29-30
This sentence does not sound like Jesus, thought he. Jesus does
not make a habit of promising physical rewards for dedication to
his movement. When a disciple leaves his family he can indeed
expect to have new "brothers and sisters and mothers" in the
believing community, but can he expect literal houses and fields
to replace those he lost? Then the little expression "with
persecutions" certainly looked like a secondary accretion.
How different the Lukan version!:
There is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or
parents or children for the sake of the Kingdom of God who shall
not receive much more in this time and in the age to come
everlasting life. Lk 18:29
No houses are promised. No fiels will replace lost fields. More
important still there is not even a promise of the replacement of
the family. This is surely the original. To leave-house. The
idiomatic meaning is of course "to leave-home" and this means to
leave one's family. (Luke) has rendered the hebrew "house"
literally, yet he has explained the meaning by adding: wife or
brothers or parents or children. Thus the original can be
reconstructed: there is no one who has left home for the sake of
the Kingdom who shall not receive much more in this time and in
the age to come everlasting life.
Now it is clear what Mark has done: he had interpreted the
house literally! He supposes that a literal abandonment brings a
literal reward; therefore the disciple will receive houses and
lands in place of the houses and lands he had left. That Mark has
read Luke becomes probable when we note that the "wife" of Luke is
gone in Mark: it was not possible even for our redacting Mark to
allow more than one wife to a believer! For good measure "for my
sake" and "for the Gospel" (a Markan borrow from Paul) are the
replacements for the Kingdom and "with persecutions" (never found
in Luke but found in Acts) is Mark's way of toning down his own
enthusiasm for physical rewards.
For a fuller anlysis of Lindsey's theory:
http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/synopt/jerus.htm
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