A Critique of Liberal Scholarship - Part 6 - A critique of Joachim Jeremias’s interpretation of Mark 4

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding.

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Editor's note: This article is one part of a multi-part series which David Gooding wrote to critique in a scholarly way some of the work of a number of liberal scholars. The series comprises:

1. Can following liberal scholarship lead to a loss of faith?
2. Following liberal scholarship can lead to biased research
3. Observations on Herman Hendrickx's 'The Accounts of the Resurrection'
4. Observations on the interpretation of parables given by liberal scholars
5. A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Pounds (Luke 19:11–27)
6. A critique of Joachim Jeremias's interpretation of Mark 4
7. A critique of Haenchen's attempt to use Acts 1:9–11 as support for the theory of the delayed Parousia
8. A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1–8)
9. A critique of Beare's interpretation of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

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In criticizing the work of an ancient author such as Mark, there are certain basic principles of literary criticism which we must all observe. If we disregard them, we are almost bound to end up mistaking the ancient author's meaning.

The first of these principles is that, in order to interpret an author rightly, we must have a certain sympathy with that author. That does not mean we must necessarily agree with everything they say. But we must have sufficient sympathy with them to make us try to understand what they are trying to say; and that will mean assuming, at the beginning at least, that what they have to say makes some kind of sense, and not assuming that the author is so stupid as to be likely within the space of a paragraph or two to contradict themselves two or three times.

If we begin by supposing that it is quite likely that the author will frequently have made unintelligent blunders, and that we cannot expect him to be consistent for more than a few lines at a time, we shall not have the patience to try to understand anything that, at first sight, seems a little obscure; we shall immediately jump to the conclusion that the author has blundered here again. If, in addition to this unsympathetic attitude, we happen to hold a theory which, in order to be proved right, necessitates that our ancient author must have bungled things, the likelihood of our imagining that he has bungled them, even when he has not, will be increased alarmingly.

As an example of this principle, then, we may take the fourth chapter of Mark's Gospel. In any understanding of the parables, this is a key chapter, for in it Mark records that our Lord, in the course of teaching the crowds, spoke a number of parables. The first of these was the parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1–9); then in Mark 4:10–20 Mark tells us that our Lord expounded to his disciples the interpretation of the parable of the Sower.

Now, Jeremias holds as one of his basic tenets that Mark is not telling the strict and literal truth here, and that Christ did not give this interpretation, but the early church made it up.

Now let us examine one of the literary arguments that he uses to try to prove his point. Says Jeremias (The Parables of Jesus, p. 13):

In order to understand the passage it is necessary first of all to recognize that the grouping of the parables in Mark 4:1–34 is an artificial one. This is shown:

(1) by the contradictory details in the description of the situation. According to Mark 4:1 Jesus is teaching the crowd out of the boat, and Mark 4:36 resumes this detail: the disciples row him over the lake 'even as he was in the boat'. But in Mark 4:10 this detail has been long since forgotten.

(2) Parallel with this break in the situation goes a change of audience: in Mark 4:1–9 Jesus is addressing the crowd, as also in Mark 4:33, cf Mark 4:36. But this is incompatible with Mark 4:10, where we find Jesus replying to the question of a narrower circle (hoi peri auton syn tois dōdeka). Hence Mark 4:10 reveals a join in the narrative.

The first thing to notice about Jeremias's theory is the presupposition on which it is built. For the theory to be true, we have to suppose that Mark was an inefficient bungler with such an appallingly weak memory that he was unable to hold a structural detail of his narrative in his head for the length of time it took him to write ten verses!

In Mark 4:1, he has Christ entering into a boat and teaching the crowd from the boat. Nine verses later however, he has 'long since forgotten' that he has just put Christ in a boat, addressing the crowds, and represents Christ as being in fact somewhere else in private with his disciples. In private then he expounds the meaning of one parable and tells others; but, twenty-four verses later, Mark has once more forgotten that he has just told us that Christ was in private with his disciples, for he now tells us that Christ was in fact still in the boat addressing the crowds. And it would seem that not only did Mark make this howler of an oversight when he was composing his Gospel, but, once the Gospel was written, he never read it through again; or if he did, he was not intelligent and perceptive enough to see this glaring error.

But then perhaps it is not Mark who has made the error: perhaps it is Jeremias. For there is another possible way of understanding what Mark is saying, which does not involve supposing that Mark was a clumsy writer, but understands him to be talking perfectly intelligible sense.

This way of understanding him is based on taking what he says seriously and simply supposing that Mark means what he says. What he in fact says is that our Lord entered into a boat and was teaching the people from the boat (notice the Greek imperfect tense); and he was saying in the course of his teaching (notice again the imperfect tense, 'was saying'): 'A sower went forth to sow'. Notice, I say, these imperfect tenses. Mark is not claiming that, in this chapter, he has set down word for word everything that Christ said from the boat on that day; he was teaching them many things, from which Mark has chosen to record only the parables.

Nor is he even claiming that, in telling the parable of the Sower or any of the other parables, our Lord used precisely the words that Mark has used: no more and no less. A crowd needs to be told a thing many times, and to have things explained and gone over again and again. 'He was saying'—the formula that Mark uses to introduce each parable (see Mark 4:2, 21, 26, 30)—indicates that, with each parable, Christ spent some time going over it, doubtless using far more words and explanations than Mark has felt it necessary to give us. Obviously our Lord did not take the trouble to get into a boat, push off shore a little and then speak to the crowds the words that are written in this chapter, no more and no less, and then disembark. The speaking of the words of Mark 4 would scarcely take ten minutes!

Be that as it may, when Mark has finished recording the parable of the Sower (Mark 4:9), he breaks off to tell us the interpretation of the parable as given by Christ. And he has not forgotten that, when Christ spoke the parable, he was sitting in a boat and talking to the crowds. He himself tells us that Christ gave the interpretation of the parable on another occasion. He could not have made the point clearer: 'when he was alone, the disciples were asking him about the parables', says Mark (Mark 4:10). Again he uses the imperfect, for doubtless that occasion was a lengthy occasion too, in which the disciples put all sorts of questions to Christ regarding the parables: 'they were asking him about the parables. And he was saying', says Mark (Mark 4:10–11) — once again using an imperfect tense.

He was saying, then, what the general purpose of speaking in parables was, when presently 'he says to them'—and here we notice Mark's change to the present tense to indicate a something specific that was said in the midst of a general and long-drawn out conversation— he says to them the interpretation of the parable of the Sower. And the interpretation of this particular parable was given in the course of this general talk on parables at large, explains Mark, because, as our Lord remarked, the understanding of this parable of the Sower is a key to the understanding of all the other parables dealing with this theme.

Clearly, then, Mark means us to take him literally and seriously when he says explicitly that this long, private conversation with the disciples on parables in general, in the course of which Christ gave them the interpretation of the parable of the Sower in particular, was not given in the course of our Lord's teaching of the crowd from the boat, but on another occasion when they were alone.

You may ask: if Mark means to say that the interpretation was given on a different occasion, why does he record it in this chapter? The simple answer is that Mark has thought that his readers would find it mighty convenient to have the interpretation of this key parable directly after the record of the parable itself, and because he was grown up enough to have discovered the use of the parenthesis as a literary device. Of course, he had not available to him the methods used in modern printing to indicate a parenthesis. Even so, he doubtless thought that his readers could be relied upon to recognize a parenthesis when they saw one (though in this he has sometimes been mistaken, apparently).

After the parenthesis he has continued the record of the parables that our Lord gave from the boat (Mark 4:21, 26, 30; NB the return to the imperfect tense). And then— just to make sure that his readers have understood that the earlier passage giving the interpretation of the parable of the Sower was meant as a parenthesis, and not as a record of something that happened on the same day as the telling of the parables in the boat— he adds a general statement: 'And with many such parables spoke he the word unto them . . . but privately to his own disciples he expounded all things' (Mark 4:33–34).

If, then, Mark can be understood in this perfectly natural way, I submit that it is not sound literary criticism on the part of Jeremias to insist on interpreting him in a way that implies that Mark had blundered. Go about interpreting ancient authors as Jeremias here goes about interpreting Mark, and there is not a single author in the ancient world whom you could not at some time or other prove to have been completely incompetent in their writing.

But once more it is important to perceive how Jeremias came to make this unfair interpretation. The answer is that he came to Mark with his mind already made up. The unspoken presupposition of his theory was that Mark was incompetent in his attempts to weave together the sources available to him; and that the way to discern the various sources that Mark has attempted to put together is to notice the incompetence with which Mark has managed the 'seams', as Jeremias calls them. Coming to Mark, therefore, with these presuppositions, and being sure he would find incompetencies, he looked for them—and found them.