Beginning in the middle 4

Mark’s fresh start is immediately placed in an existing context, and I find echoes of this in a hermeneutical dilemma I face as I make a fresh start on his text.

I come to the text with a lot of expectations and prior understandings: I have read it before, many times; I’ve heard sermons on it; I’ve read devotional literature which works with it; the first half of it was the set text when I was learning Greek as an undergraduate; I’ve examined portions of it with the help of commentaries; I’ve read about how some of it is used in the various quests for the historical Jesus….

Part of what motivates my return to Mark is a feeling that the Gospel itself has got hidden behind all that I know about it. I approach it with a desire to get behind the veil of inherited opinion and my own too-easy conclusions, and encounter the text itself again. I want to make a fresh start with the text, or let it make a fresh start with me.

Unfortunately, if I remove my brain in order to read without pollution by all that I have read, thought and learnt, I will inevitably read brainlessly. The clutter of opinions and presuppositions I possess are precisely what enable me to read with any kind of discrimination or sensitivity. In other words, a fresh start would be a betrayal, hermeneutically as well as devotionally.

I can only start again in the middle, as the person I have become. But I can (I think) strive to pay attention to the ways in which the text does not match my expectations, the ways in which it resists the analytical tools I bring to it. It may not be possible to come up with an uncontaminated reading-from-nowehere, but I trust it is possible to register the ways in which the text “unsettles my judgment” – and goes on unsettling it.

So, my plan has been to begin by reading the Gospel through carefully without fresh recourse to secondary literature (apart from the odd dip into a lexicon or grammar). This is not because I hope thereby to manage an uncluttered reading of the text, but because I want to concentrate on discovering how the text unsettles my existing convictions about Jesus, about Christology, about the ways the Gospels work. Clearing the decks of fresh secondary literature is simply a device to help me concentrate in relatively controlled conditions on the part of the reading process that currently interests me. Only after that (or at least once it is well underway) do I plan to return to the secondary literature and let it make things even messier.

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