An interrogative field

With all this in mind – i.e., all I said in the previous post and in some of the posts before that – reading this first line carefully sets up what one might call an ‘interrogative field’: a clutch of questions to keep in mind as we step further into the text. I’ve explained why I don’t think it’s necessarily productive to try and answer these questions if they are seen simply as attempts to divine the one correct meaning of this opening verse; rather, they are proposals about ways of seeing the whole text, to be tested by the way the text goes on.

Beginning? I’ve laboured this enough already. What kind of new beginning is this? How does it relate to the Hebrew Scriptures, and to Judaism? And are these questions constitutive for the text?

Good news? In what sense is this news? If we are about to be led on a journey which is primarily about discovering what we already know – some Socratic process which shows us what is always already presupposed in our thinking and doing, perhaps – then it isn’t really news. News sounds like information: particular data that cannot be deduced from what we already know. To what extent will our good turn out to be dependent upon hearing such information?

‘Gospel from’ or ‘Gospel about’? That question about news segues into a more obviously Christological question. Is the good news about which Mark writes a message of salvation proclaimed by Jesus Christ, or is it the proclamation about Jesus Christ? Is Jesus’ proclaimer or proclaimed – or is this Gospel as ambiguous about that as the genitive in its first line is ambiguous?

News of an imperial birth? And to what extent is this news politically subversive, in Mark? To what extent is it the news of an alternative empire or emperor – a proclamation of regime change?

And, as I begin again in the middle, I note that all these questions connect to questions about my own stance towards this text. Do I read the Gospel as an accidental Marcionite, extracting it from its Jewish soil? Do I read it as news, or as confirmation of what I already know? What is the connection for me between the person of Jesus and his message? And do I either ignore the political dimension of this Gospel, or politicise it too easily?

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