Mark’s Chiastic Gospel Structure and the Question of Jesus’ Identity
More than twenty years ago I was preparing to lead a Bible study on Mark. I began with the well known pair of verses that bookend the Gospel in which the heavens are torn. (At Jesus’ baptism and His death.) I then recalled that Mark is also fond of chiasm, an “X” shaped literary structure (A-B-C-B’-A’) that he used to shape the controversy stories in chapters two and three. And I wondered, “What if the paired “tearings” are indicators of a much larger chiasm. If this were true, then there would be similar auditory clues (I wound up calling them “hook words.”) to tie the pairings together. I went looking and they were there. I found also that the larger chiasm served a much more powerful function, contrasting two different Christologies and the way that the holder of these different Christologies will react to Jesus and to others.
It turned into the most adventurous bit of Scripture study I’ve undertaken. There were harder, longer papers I wrote in seminary, but this one was much farther “out there” than anything I had ventured (or have since). I wrote it up as a paper and tried to get it published. I failed. The basic premise was too fanciful for the scholars who reviewed it. And being honest, having just re-edited it, there were more than enough grammatical and other errors in it to have refused it on those grounds. Still, I’m pretty sure that one or two of the “no’s” I received were from scholars who said, “Chiasm? Nope.” and didn’t really read it. The evidence of the text is compelling. What’s more, the evidence is also awfully supportive of the reality of the text known as “Secret Mark.” The way that the texts from Secret Mark work their way into the larger chiasm is something Morton Smith could not have planned or imagined.
Once publishing was out of the question I just uploaded the paper in PDF form to my website. It got a fair amount of attention, including requests from two doctoral students to cite it in their research. Then I forgot about it. The website went the way of all things and the PDF almost went with it. I did manage to save a copy, but it didn’t have the Greek fonts embedded in it, so it looked really strange. Then I started up The Vicar’s Keep and I decided I’d like to try to reconstruct the paper. I fixed the Greek (had to learn a whole new Greek keyboard) and I fixed a lot of really embarrassing grammatical errors.
So here it is, cleaned up and presentable again. Or maybe for the first time.
The Chiastic Structure of Mark and the Question of Jesus’ Identity.
Most readers of The Vicar’s Keep won’t care to wade through all the Greek, but any student of Mark will likely find something really compelling in it. Just skip the bits that bore you. If you love Mark as much as I always have, I think you’ll enjoy it.
