Mark's Vocabulary: A Survey of Approaches and Material

Biblica, 2021

This article compares Mark’s vocabulary with the Septuagint’s vocabulary and with the Greek of its time. The relationship of the vocabulary of other works close to Mark’s Gospel is also contrasted with the LXX. These works have been chosen because of their Jewish register (Paul, Josephus, Philo, Joseph and Aseneth), closeness in terms of literary genre (Life of Apollonius, Evagoras, Agesilaus) or linguistic variety (Polibyus, Epictetus) with Mark. Mark’s vocabulary is also placed in his contemporary context to understand his semantic options. This analysis concludes that 90% of Mark’s vocabulary is Septuagintal. The 128 Markan words not found in the LXX could be reduced to as few as 43 words whose roots do not appear in the LXX.

This ground-breaking book is the first major work on Mark's use of Matthew and Luke since William R. Farmer's The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis. It is a commendably ambitious demonstration of how Mark used Matthew and Luke, a hypothesis advocated by Johann Jakob Griesbach in eighteenth-century Germany and revived by William R. Farmer in the United States in the mid-twentieth century.

The Early Text of the New Testament (eds. Charles E. Hill and Michael J. Kruger; Oxford: OUP, 2012), 108-120. , 2012

Peter Lang, 2014

This commentary demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a result of a consistent, strictly sequential, hypertextual reworking of the contents of three of Paul’s letters: Galatians, First Corinthians and Philippians. Consequently, it shows that the Marcan Jesus narratively embodies the features of God’s Son who was revealed in the person, teaching, and course of life of Paul the Apostle. The analysis of the topographic and historical details of the Marcan Gospel reveals that they were mainly borrowed from the Septuagint and from the writings of Flavius Josephus. Other literary motifs were taken from various Jewish and Greek writings, including the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato. The Gospel of Mark should therefore be regarded as a strictly theological-ethopoeic work, rather than a biographic one.

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Scriptorium Victoriense, 2023

In Mark’s Gospel, words and expressions that come from Latin appear. There are Latin loanwords, nonce borrowings, semantic calques and two switches of code from Greek into Latin, which are very significant when analysing the origin of the Gospel. Some of these Latin words and expressions reinforced the role of the Roman Empire in the narrative. The aim of this article is to present a first stage in the Wirkungsgeschichte (reception history) of these Latinisms by studying how these Latin words were received. This study is necessary in order to understand whether they continued to develop the sociolinguistic, literary and rhetorical functions that they fulfilled in the Greek text. In order to analyse how these words have been received in the tradition, four significant stages will be presented: first, Matthew and Luke’s reception of these Latinisms; second, the Greek textual tradition; third, the Latin and Syriac versions; fourth, the Church Fathers and medieval commentaries, as well as the works of Valla and Erasmus.

HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 1991

The interpretation of Mark's gospel is inextricably link ed to a conception of the gospel's genesis. By basing his argument on an aspect of the 'oral formulaic theory' the author of this paper argues that Mark's gospel can be seen as an example of oral traditional composition. The primary asset of this perspective is that it provides an alternative to the tradition-redaction stalemate, current in Marcan studies. Some general implications are brief ly discussed in conclusion.

Novum Testamentum Graecum EditioCritica Maior I Synoptic Gospels: The Gospel of Mark, Vol. 3: Studien, 2021

Readings in the Latin gospels are often approached as translations of a Greek “Western” text, a construct devised in the eighteenth century to explain parallels between Codex Bezae and the Latin version as native Greek readings and later adopted by nineteenth-century source critics as a way to access early Christian traditions. One limitation of this approach is a tendency to overlook the version itself as a tradition by deflecting the complexities of translation and inner-versional transmission onto putative Greek sources, while reducing the translation event to the mechanical replication of these sources in Latin. This essay takes a different approach, focusing first on the versional context in which these readings appear and the capacity of translators, editors, and copyists within the version to generate new readings without the aid of a Greek model. When we examine the habits of the translators, it is apparent that they frequently produced the same kinds of variation in their singular readings that we find in their parallels with so-called “Western” texts, raising the possibility that these readings arose in Latin rather than in Greek and, hence, that the theory of a “Western” text is superfluous in accounting for the development of the version.

Journal of Gospels and Acts Research, 2022

The oral dimension of the gospel became a key explanation for the Synoptic problem in nineteenth-century Gospel interpretation (Westcott). The burgeoning, critical hunt for the ipsissima verba of Jesus drove two subsequent modulations: the retroversion of the written Greek sources to a postulated Aramaic original (for at least some of Jesus' sayings) (Dalman); the formcritical excisions of authorial embellishments on gospel traditions, which were content with reliance on the Greek language of the written Gospels (including Thomas and other apocryphal texts) for their reconstructions (Bultmann; Robinson). The assumption of substantial continuity and unity between the oral and written Gospels was challenged in the second half of the twentieth century (Kelber). A reaction against the resultant polarisation of oral and written has swung attention to the oral/aural dimensions of the written Gospels (Dewey; Horsley). A bifurcation of research has developed, one accenting the performantial elements in the delivery of the Gospels, a second returning to the poiesis of the text, particularly emphasising what is called 'soundmapping' (Lee-Scott; Nässelqvist). This paper seeks to provide an overview of the changes in the understanding and development of orality in relation to Gospel research and then to apply some insights from socio-anthropological linguistics to Mark's Gospel to explore three elements crucial to its oral/aural dimensions. Firstly, what poetic and rhetorical structures are found in the text that invite an audiential response so as to produce a speech event-here reference is made to the mega-euphonic opening of Mark 1:1, the onomatopoeic extension of Mark 5:38, the assonantial associations of Mark 8:11 and the iambic abuse of Mark 7:27; secondly, what might these constructed speech events imply about the personnel involved in the delivery of Mark's Gospel demanded in Mark 13:14; and thirdly, what settings or spatial contexts can be inferred from such elements, building on the expansive territory of Mark 4. It will be argued that there is yet considerable mileage to be gained from studies in the oral dimensions of the Gospels.