Behind Mark's Gospel with Dr Vette

A Rising Star Uncovers Fiction and History in the Earliest Gospel

In this written interview, I ‘sit down’ with Dr Nathanael Vette, Teaching Fellow in Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh. I ask Nathanael about his interest in Mark, the dating of the Gospel and how Mark used scripture, the subject of Nathanael’s first book, Writing with Scripture (T&T Clark, 2022).

JN: Nathanael, your research has definitely earned you the moniker of a ‘Markan’ scholar. What is it that drew you - and continues to draw you - to Mark’s Gospel?  

NV: If you really want to get ‘behind the Gospels’ to the historical Jesus, Mark is your best shot! Paul doesn’t really tell us much about the historical Jesus – he is more interested in the glorified Christ. That makes Mark our earliest source to give us an account of Jesus’ life and death. Mark is also the primary source for later Gospels like Matthew, Luke and – in my opinion – John. So when we speak about the basic outline of Jesus’ life – his baptism, his reputation as a miracle-worker, his teaching in parables, his disciples, his execution in Jerusalem – we’re really speaking about Mark.

While it may seem familiar, Mark’s Gospel is actually very weird. It tells the story of a Jewish Messiah who arrives in Galilee, sets about restoring Israel until he heads to Jerusalem where he is rejected, executed and buried but not before he prophesies the destruction of the city and its temple. Then it just ends! Of all the stories you could tell about Jesus, why this one? This question is what fascinates me about Mark’s Gospel and why I can’t stop writing about it.

JN: In your monograph, you argue that Mark used Scripture compositionally as well as exegetically. This is how he was ‘writing with scripture.’ Can you unpack this distinction? 

NV: We have to remember in Mark’s day there was no ‘Old Testament’ or ‘Hebrew Bible’. The ancestral customs, legends and oracles of the Jewish people could be found in multiple textual, para-textual and non-textual traditions. Nevertheless for Mark, who was writing in Greek, certain sacred texts in Greek and possibly Hebrew appear to have been quite important. Our author interprets the arrival of Jesus’ ministry and the disbelief of his hearers as fulfilling oracles attributed to Isaiah. Our author also believes that Jesus’ glorious return will happen according to the language of Daniel. Here Mark is using scripture exegetically – our author takes a particular scriptural text and interprets its meaning by applying it to their subject, i.e. Jesus. We find this exegetical use of scripture in many ancient Jewish texts, e.g. the Pesharim of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Midrashim of Rabbinic literature.

But our author also uses scripture compositionally as the building blocks of new stories. Jesus is sent into the wilderness for forty days and ministered to by angels before calling his disciples, just as Elijah does in 1 Kings 19. Jesus multiplies a small amount of bread for a multitude, just as Elisha does in 2 Kings 4. The point of these episodes is not to present Jesus as a new Elijah or Elisha. Rather our author has used the legends of Elijah and Elisha as a compositional model to tell new stories about Jesus.

Jewish writers didn’t just interpret their sacred literature, they also used it to tell new stories in much the same way that Greek and Latin writers used Homer. For example, Pseudo-Philo uses Daniel 3 to tell a new story of Abraham being thrown into a fiery furnace. Judith uses the story of Jael in Judges 4 to tell a new story of Judith assassinating Israel’s enemy in a tent. We see the same compositional use of scripture in Mark. This is what I mean by Mark ‘writing with scripture’ – our author not only uses scripture to interpret the significance of Jesus’ life and death, but also as a means of narrating (and in some cases, inventing) the story itself. 

JN: Some people might object to your argument, claiming that Mark was simply writing history. Are there examples of other Jewish writers using Scripture to compose their works – and are there any examples which look particularly similar to Mark? 

NV: Mark is not writing history as we understand it. Our author is more than happy to invent non-historical details to fit a scriptural model – e.g. Antipas offering a young girl ‘up to half of my kingdom’ from Esther – or to further their narrative aims – e.g. the far-fetched role of the chief priests, scribes and elders in Jesus’ crucifixion just so Mark can blame them for Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 ce. Nevertheless Mark is interested in history because they believed that the events of Jesus’ ministry and particularly his death – which the author understood to be real events – had explanatory power for readers living after 70 ce. Mark writes from the conviction that events which occurred around c.a. 30 ce explained events around c.a. 70 ce. So while there are Jewish exegetical works which fashion new episodes on scriptural models – e.g. Pseudo-Philo, the Genesis Apocryphon – Mark is closer to works which have historical or pseudo-historical aims but also rely on scriptural models, like 1 Maccabees or Judith.

In 1 Maccabees, Judas Maccabaeus often behaves ‘according to the Law’, to the point where his actions seem to be pieced together out of stories in Torah. For example, Judas besieges the gentile city of Ephron in exactly the same language as Moses besieges Sihon (Deuteronomy 2). Did Judas actually besiege Ephron? 2 Maccabees seems to think so. But in so doing did he perfectly recreate Moses’ siege of Sihon? Almost certainly not. The point of the episode is to present Judas and his family as the heirs to Moses’ legacy.

The book of Judith is slightly different. The story is fictional but – as one of my Masters students has brilliantly discovered – it’s also responding to historical events, in particular Pompey’s siege of Jerusalem in 63 bce and the end of Judaean independence. To present the figure of Judith as the woman who would’ve saved Israel, the author tells a kind of alternate pseudo-history pieced together out of the stories of other famous Israelite women, e.g. Jael, Deborah, Miriam. Mark is somewhere in between: like 1 Maccabees, Mark presents their hero as acting ‘according to the scriptures’ and so tells historical events in scriptural language while also inventing non-historical details out of scripture. Like Judith, Mark’s scripturalized story is responding to – and shaped by – historical events in the author’s own day.

JN: What implications does your book have for historical Jesus studies? Or to put it more familiarly, if the Gospels are writing with scripture, does your work make it more difficult to get ‘behind the Gospels’? 

NV: The short answer is yes, Mark’s tendency to paint everything in scriptural colours makes it harder to get back to a historical core, if there always is one. On one level, it’s difficult to tell when historical tradition has simply been told in scriptural language and when the tradition has been invented wholesale out of scripture. Take the deaths of John and Jesus, for example. The events themselves are not in question: we know that John was executed by Antipas and Jesus by Pilate. But the details of Mark’s account are taken from scripture. The ‘pleasing young girl’ to whom a ‘king’ offers ‘up to half of [his] kingdom’? That’s from Esther. The righteous sufferer whose tormentors ‘divide his clothes’, ‘cast lots’ and ‘shake their heads’ while he cries out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ That’s from Psalm 22. The circumstances of John and Jesus’ deaths probably drew our author to each passage – but as it is, Mark’s scripturalized account tells us very little about what actually happened. The details have largely been made up out of scriptural language.

We’re on even less stable ground for Mark’s scripturalized accounts of Jesus’ miracles, the historicity of which is impossible to prove. On another level, Mark is not really interested in the historical events of c.a. 30 ce for their own sake. Mark is primarily interested in how these events explain what happened in the author’s own day, e.g. the failure of the Judaean revolt against Rome, the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple etc. Whatever historical recollections lie behind Mark’s Gospel, they are obscured by the author’s reliance on scriptural language and filtered through the lens of 70 ce. 

JN: Our doctoral supervisor, Professor Helen Bond, has made a case for reading Mark as an ancient biography. How does your idea that Mark was writing with scripture relate – if at all – to understanding the Gospel as a biography?

NV: It’s true, we’re both Bond girls (as Helen’s students are known)! This is a really great question. Helen has shown, convincingly in my opinion, that Mark uses elements of Greco-Roman biography to tell the story of Jesus’ life and death. (On a minor note, I prefer to call Mark’s Gospel a death of Jesus rather than a life – but I don’t see this as going against Helen’s theory!) Apart from Josephus and maybe Philo, Mark is the only example of this kind of life-writing by an ancient Jewish author. Because of this, we don’t have examples of other ancient Jewish biographies being told in scriptural language. But we might compare Mark’s use of Jewish scripture to the way Roman writers use the customs, legends, and oracles of the Roman people to present the lives of eminent Romans. One could weigh the greatness or naughtiness of a Roman emperor, statesman or general by how much they upheld or violated sacred customs, how heroically or tragically they resembled legendary figures of Rome’s past and how their rise or fall was accurately prophesied by oracles and omens. This is not dissimilar to the way Mark uses Jewish scripture to narrate Jesus’ life and death. At the same time, Greco-Roman writers – not just in biography but in all kinds of literature – use mimesis (Greek) or imatatio (Latin) to tell new stories by modelling them on well-known episodes in their literary canon, usually from the Homeric corpus. In other words, Mark imitates Jewish scriptures in much the same way a Greco-Roman writer might imitate Homer.

JN: As an extension of your doctoral work on Mark, you have recently argued that Mark is best understood as a text written after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Can you share how you arrived at this conclusion, and how it affects our reading of the Gospel?

NV: It comes back to this question of why, of all stories, Mark tells this story. Why a death of Jesus and not a life? I think the events of 70 ce might offer a clue. Ancient Greeks, Romans and Jews believed that cities and nations fell when the gods abandoned their temples because of defiling acts of sacrilege and bloodshed. When Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by the Romans in 70 ce, Jews and pagans would have reached the same conclusion: the city must have fallen because the Judaean god abandoned his sanctuary on account of defiling acts of sacrilege and bloodshed. As the Rabbis say, ‘Through the sin of bloodshed the Shekhinah departs and the Temple is defiled.’

This has its roots in Jewish traditions about the sacrilegious murder of Zechariah ben Jehoiada, whose death was believed to have caused the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians. Zechariah’s murder in the sanctuary was accompanied by omens portending divine abandonment and imminent destruction – which continued until the Babylonians had utterly destroyed the city. Sources responding to the destruction of the second temple by the Romans – like Josephus, the Apocalypse of Abraham and the Rabbis – also attribute its destruction to divine abandonment on account of sacrilegious murder. For Josephus, it happens because the revolutionaries murder the high priests Ananus and Jesus ben Gamla or Jonathan. For the Apocalypse of Abraham, it happens simply because of a murder in the temple. Whereas for the Rabbis, it happens because a priest murders his brother, a rival priest, in the temple. So we know that sacrilegious deaths had a certain explanatory power in the aftermath of Jerusalem’s fall in 70 ce.

What then do we have in Mark? A Galilean Messiah who sets about restoring Israel until he travels to Jerusalem, where its leaders conspire against him to have him executed by the Romans, but not before he prophesies its destruction and omens portend its fate. This, I propose, is another Jewish theodicy, this time attributing the city’s destruction to the crucifixion of the Messiah. Is it good history? Not really – Mark runs into problems trying to pin the blame on the chief priests, when the Romans were clearly the ones responsible for Jesus’ execution. Is it good theology? Not at all – like Josephus, Mark saw in the outcome of 70 ce the Judaean god’s judgment of Jerusalem and his favour of the Romans. Mark and Josephus thus attempt to exonerate the Romans and blame Jewish leaders for what befell Jerusalem. By blaming some Jews for Jesus’ death and Jerusalem’s destruction, the story first developed by Mark and elaborated in subsequent Gospels has been used to justify horrific attacks on the Jewish people as a whole. While Mark is using a classic Jewish theodicy to explain Jerusalem’s fall, later Christian writers would use the Gospel narrative to demonise Jews as Christ-killers. By recovering the Jewish context of Mark’s Gospel after 70 ce, we are in a better position to challenge these anti-Jewish readings of the Gospels. In the final analysis, Mark’s explanation of Jerusalem’s fall is not all that different from other Jewish responses written after 70 ce.

JN: This has been absolutely fascinating, Nathanael. Thank you so much for taking the time to guide us behind the Gospel of Mark!

For those interested in reading more of Dr Vette’s work, you can find his monograph here, and his recent article on Jesus’ death in Mark here.