The Greek Style of the Gospel of Mark

Carl Conrad has this to say on the subject:

Its Greek style appears on the surface at times grotesque. Opinions may differ on this matter; there was a time when I was fond of saying that the author of this gospel wouldn't have passed a first-year Greek composition course. Some careful reflection following upon some comments by Edward Hobbs a few years ago brought me to the view I now hold on this matter: (i) I think it very likely that Mark's gospel is the earliest of the genre and that it depends heavily upon oral tradition; but (ii) I suspect that the "solecisms" in Greek Mark derive fundamentally from those pericopes or oral traditions not created by the author but altered only enough to fit into his redactional framework, and I suspect also that most of the questionable Greek derives from inadequate conversion of Aramaic phrasing into Greek; (iii) In passages that seem most likely the author's own redactional compositions, the Greek is really quite good. Obviously it is a matter of judgment where the seams lie between traditional and redactional elements and/or compositions. At any rate, it seems to me that the author/redactor of Greek Mark did nothing akin to the wholesale stylistic recasting of phrasing of traditional elements seen in Luke and in Matthew with a view to making the narrative smoother and more readable (but that again is based upon an assumption of Marcan priority, which many find questionable).

Conrad’s remarks are properly qualified, except I think for the surmise about “inadequate conversion from the Aramaic.” If anything, the studies of Klaus Beyer and Maurice Casey suggest that examples of linguistic detail in the Gospel texts most plausibly explained as slavish reproduction of linguistic detail in (reconstructed) Aramaic originals of the reported words of Jesus and of the gospel narrative are few and far between. It isn’t the case that the Greek of Mark or “Q” can be retroverted without remainder into the narrative style of the Aramaic of Daniel or of the Targum of Job or the Genesis Apocryphon found at Qumran. One-to-one mapping of turns of phrase and supra-clausal and intra-clausal syntax does not obtain.

Semitisms in the New Testament are more easily understood as the outcome of linguistic contact within the bounds of an ideolect of Greek-speaking Jews and then Christians with no special training in Greek letters outside of intimate familiarity with hallowed literature in translation Greek and with varying degrees of fluency in the Koiné of the empire and in Aramaic, Hebrew, both, or none. In short, the Semitisms in the NT are the sociolinguistic outcome of general cultural processes across a variegated linguistic community, inclusive of selective mimesis in terms of vocabulary, tropes, and style of a collection of Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures in Greek translation the outer boundaries of which were not the same for all.

Semitic (Hebrew, not Aramaic, it seems to me) syntax crops up in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is sometimes due to adherence to a source which contains classical flourishes, or so it appears; and sometimes the result of a Gospel writer adding classical flourishes of his own - “classical” in the sense of style according to the diction of Hebrew Scriptures in Greek translation hallowed among Jews and then Christians in the time period in which the Gospels were written.

As far as I can see, the web of agreements and disagreements which characterize Matthew, Mark, and Luke cannot be explained on the basis of facile assumptions such as, Matthew and Luke had Mark to work with, and followed it outside of redactional contributions of their own. The solution lies in positing “oral” tradition on which all three synoptics depended - “oral” in the sense that its linguistic shape made it ideal for oral transmission, as is the case of the contents of the Talmud. That the traditions existed in written form on which the Three depended is a distinct possibility.

It is not unusual to propose as Conrad does that the gospel of Mark largely consists of “pericopes or oral traditions not created by the author but altered only enough to fit into his redactional framework.” I would further suggest that a common source the order of whose pericopae is preserved in Mark was used by the authors of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It also seems to be the case that Matthew and Luke took over, redistributed, and reworked the contents of other blocks of tradition in accordance with particular goals.¹

Why do I resort to such a proposal? It’s all Mark Goodacre’s fault. I was reared on the standard reconstruction, inclusive of Q. I have fond recollections of working through many a pericope in that sense with Bruno Corsani in Rome. I still think that a logia-tradition unknown or ignored by Mark on which Matthew and Luke drew, a source Luke takes over with relatively little modification and which Matthew seems to have known in a more developed form, best explains the differences for example in the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer which the versions of Matthew and Luke present. But if the Q-nixers are right at least insofar as they steadfastly refuse to contemplate a “Q” which is now a “sayings gospel” like the Gospel of Thomas, and now a narrative gospel like the Three - according to taste - detail in Synoptic narrative explained through the supposition of “a phrase here and a word there” from "Q" requires another explanation.

The proper way to test an alternative hypothesis is by heuristic reconstruction. In my next post, I reconstruct a common source behind Mark 1:16-28; Matthew 4:18-22; 7:28-29; and Luke 4:31-37.

¹ I know of no reason to suppose that either Matthew or Luke had a copy of the other in hand. What this goes to show is that there is more than one brand of Occam’s razor on the market. The razor I acquired in years of working through units of tradition attested in the Dead Scrolls (sectarian and biblical) and rabbinic literature –I am used to working with the often dizzying amount of micro- and macro-variation across attestations x, y, and z of specific units in Hebrew and Aramaic literature from the Second Temple to late antiquity – slices and dices on the default assumption that extended texts with narrative framing and discourse insets select from and reframe material derived from multiple sources. 

Comments

[Aramaic Scholar]

Thanks for your interesting post, and in particular the statements about the Greek of Mark being influenced by an Aramaic original. It seems that few students of the Greek NT would disagree much with the idea that the Greek has been heavily influenced by an Aramaic verbal original, since Aramaic is the language that the majority acknowledge Jesus and other Jews would have spoken. Yet, when suggesting that the Aramaic original was in fact written (i.e. the Aramaic Peshitta), and not spoken, those same students generally dismiss the idea out of hand. It's strange. All the evidence seems to point to an Aramaic original, yet most in the west dismiss the idea that the original could have been the Peshitta, preserved all along. And yet there is far more evidence that the Greek was translated from the Peshitta, and not the other way round. I was sceptical of all this for years until I looked into it.

[JohnFH]

Hi Aramaic Scholar,

I would encourage you to provide the evidence of which you speak. If you show on your blog how one gets from the Point A (the Peshitta) to Point B (the Greek New Testament, I would be intrigued.

Your opinion may be correct, but it is rejected by the majority of scholars. Let's work directly from the data, and compare the Syriac with the Greek. It would be a great exercise.