Abstract
Students and teachers of Biblical Studies are likely to be familiar with the SPCK Discovering … series, including Joel B. Green’s Discovering Luke: content, interpretation, reception (2021), complementing the earlier titles on Matthew (Ian Boxall) and John (Ruth Edwards). From the title, it would be easy to make the assumption that Black’s volume completes the suite on the Gospels. It is very important to state at the outset that this is not the case: Black’s project differs in its aims and character, as well as its format and publisher, from the well-known series.
Rather than an introduction to Mark’s Gospel, Black offers a scholar’s compendium, leading us through a variety of fields of debate within which he has been actively and extensively engaged over recent decades. Readers who already have a reasonable grounding in the literary and critical issues, and an awareness of some of the directions of (relatively) recent scholarship, find themselves updated, refreshed and stimulated. Broadly speaking, it is fair to say that the basic questions and approaches have not changed; what has been evolving is how they are addressed and pursued.
Perhaps the chapter ‘Markan studies: whence and whither?’ is worth looking at first as it offers reflections on the genre debate (with Burridge’s work at the centre) and the source question (with an expected gritty engagement with Bauckham’s writing about the role and significance of eyewitness testimony). Black’s doctoral thesis (the basis of his 1989 book) was a radical re-evaluation of the significance of redaction criticism in the study of Mark’s Gospel, and of the assumptions that were being made by its practitioners. Two chapters, which feel more like surveys of scholarship than surveys of Mark’s Gospel, reflect Black’s keen and creative interest in this issue: ‘liabilities’ of the redaction-critical perspective include ‘its misplacement of the author at the centre of textual interpretation …, its overemphasis on the strictly theological quality of the Markan narrative; and its incompetence to answer all the critical questions that it has raised’ (p. 75).
There is a foray into the social and cultural background of Mark (the first chapter, ‘Was Mark a Roman Gospel?’), and later chapters – more theologically oriented – look at the themes of suffering and the cross (with the latter comparing Mark and Paul).
There are two surprising things about this volume. First, although it is an academic book, engaging in great detail with high-level and sometimes abstract debates, and presented in around 500 pages in a small typeface with many substantial and detailed footnotes, it presents, unapologetically, some homiletic resources in two closing chapters, the first of which is headed ‘Priming the pump: exegetical studies for preachers’, with the author making the point that he has been an ordained clergyman ‘for almost forty-five years, longer than my employment as a professional scholar’ (p. 371). The second surprise is the style in which the book is written. Anything but turgid, it could variously be described as convivial, loose and even egotistical: readers of academic books are seldom offered such a strong sense of the personality and preferences of an author.