'Salted With Fire' (Mark 9.42-50): Style,Oracles and (Socio)Rhetorical Gospel Criticism

Abstract

Recent rhetorical criticism of the Gospels has tended to focus on formal 'patterns of argumentation' and on their redactional variation in Gospel literary tradition. Partly from fear of backsliding into aesthetic and/or devotional readings, partly from impatience to differentiate specific social movements within early Christianity, New Testament rhetorical criticism has analysed the Gospels essentially from the argumentation-theoretical angle of their presumed displays and specializations of conventional rationalities. Style variation and characterization are treated more as elements in formal argumentation than as persuasive in themselves.

The article explores Jesus' strange yet pivotal speech in Mk 9.42-50 to illustrate the inadequacy of an argumentation theory focused on enthymemes and chreias to account for Markan oracular speech (logia). Mk 9.42-50 is often read as an instance of catchword agglomeration, yet it is one of the Markan Jesus' few major speeches. The speech does have a discernable purpose, not only in the Markan narrative con text, but in itself as a rhetorical unit: Jesus is placing Mark's readers under a curse of office as leaders. Neither Matthew nor Luke found the Markan Jesus' speech sufficiently persuasive in its imprecatory rhetoric to warrant imitation. We must entertain the possibility that here and elsewhere Markan rhetoric demanded too much of either its implied or its historical audiences: Markan rhetorics may have proven too experimental to secure early Christian audiences.