The baptism scene with rending of heavens and wilderness at the beginning, and the conclusion with literal and midrashic allusions to the destruction of the Temple and failure of the 12 disciples, has sometimes brought to mind the story that begins with creation out of chaos through dividing of waters and a renewed creation from a great flood involving a dove, and concluding with the destruction of the Temple and failure of the 12 tribes of Israel. My own interjection here: I have long wondered about what seem at times to be little signs that the Gospel of Mark was conceived as an attempt to write a new Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) for a “new Israel”. 87) (compare my related comment on another post) and these features “set the scene for comparison with the Elijah-Elisha narrative.”īrodie has earlier argued that the E-E narrative functions “as an interpretive interlude within a narrative that runs from creation to the fall of Jerusalem, it mirrors and synthesizes history in a way that emphasizes the presence not just of bare facts but of a deeper, divine dimension, God’s word, a word which effects everything from creation (1 Kings 17, rain and ravens) to death (2 Kings 13, bones and new life).” My question, however, is this: Do we have logical and evidential grounds for treating the narrative of the Gospels as an attempt to write some form of history, or as originating in historical events, and if so, what are they? I can see such grounds for reading references to Cicero’s slave or Seneca’s philosopher colleagues as historical, but have yet to find in the scholarly literature any comparable grounds for reading the Gospel narrative as history.īrodie’s demonstration of the Gospel of Mark’s indebtedness to the Elijah-Elisha narrative in 1 and 2 Kings: Genreīrodie sees the genre of Mark as “mystery-filled history expressed through biography” (p. Brodie is no Christ mythicist (he is a Dominican priest – an OP). This stands in contrast to “historical” methods of many New Testament “historians” who work such hypothetical evidence as “oral traditions” and hypothetical redactions in order to “discover” some historical event “beneath the narrative”. What I particularly like about Brodie’s discussion is that he addresses the verifiable evidence - the texts and the observable relationships between them. There appear to have been a range of sources available to Mark and that potentially influenced the final mix that became his Gospel. There are good reasons to opt for other models for Mark, too, and Brodie does not seem to deny this. I have a few questions about his overall thesis but need time to explore these. The earlier section explains the reasons to see the Elijah-Elisha section of 1 and 2 Kings as a cohesive single narrative unit within the Primary History of Israel (Genesis-2 Kings), and also to argue that this section is a synthesis of the entire Primary History itself. His discussion of the Elijah-Elisha narrative’s link with the Gospel of Mark consists only of ten of the last dozen pages of a 114-page book. It is published by the Order of St Benedict, Minnesota, 2000. His book is The Crucial Bridge: The Elijah-Elisha Narrative as an Interpretative Synthesis of Genesis-Kings and a Literary Model for the Gospels. I have no problem accepting that Mark used some of the miracle stories from Elijah and Elisha as templates for his Jesus miracles, but Brodie goes much further than this. I am not quite sure what to make of his case at times, but cannot deny its interest. Brodie presents an argument that the Gospel of Mark was in its basic outline, plot and structure based on the Elijah-Elisha narrative in the Old Testament.
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