Disputed Issues: Contending for Christian Faith in Today's Academic Setting

3. Did Mark Copy Homer?

25 Did Mark Copy Homer? 3 I Nothing is more important for Christians than Jesus. Christian faith begins with Jesus, with narratives about who he was and what he did. We believe that our salvation depends on the truth of certain claims about the life, death, resurrection, and person of Jesus. That is why Christians take an active interest in contemporary Jesus scholarship. Intellectual fads seem to come and go in that world with amazing rapidity (in fairness, this is probably true in most academic disciplines today). The most recent movement—one that seems to be growing in influence—tries to place the Gospels in a Greco-Roman historical and literary context. This chapter is a response to recent work by Professor Dennis R. MacDonald of the Claremont School of Theology. He is involved in a research program that aims to detect the influence of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other ancient Greek and Roman classics on early Christian literature. I will focus on MacDonald’s book, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000; citations from this book are placed in parentheses in the text), as well as his recent conference paper, “Did Luke Know His Stories Were Fictions ? Luke-Warm Attitudes to History in Luke-Acts.”1 MacDonald’s highly original and rather startling claim is that very many of the episodes, motifs, and characters in Mark and Luke/Acts were mimetically “borrowed” from the Homeric epics. MacDonald further claims that The present chapter is a slight revision of my “Mark and Luke: History or Imitative Fiction ? A Response to Dennis MacDonald,” Philosophia Christi 6, no. 2 (2004). 26 Disputed Issues Mark wanted his readers to recognize the Homeric influence and see Jesus as greater than the Homeric heroes like Ulysses. I will call MacDonald ’s overall theory “The Homer Thesis” (THT). Producing new and surprising theories of Jesus is a thriving industry among New Testament scholars these days. MacDonald’s book, which is attracting considerable attention in those circles, is allied with a growing movement. As noted, this is the effort to read New Testament texts in the context of Greco-Roman literature. This movement in itself is not threatening to traditional Christian views of Jesus (indeed, some evangelical scholars participate in it), not at least as long as the intrinsic and essential Jewishness of Jesus is not eclipsed. But MacDonald’s thesis seems to be the logical outcome of pushing the connections of the New Testament to Greco-Roman literature as hard as possible. Unfortunately MacDonald does—as I will explain—end up with a Jesus that orthodox Christian believers of all stripes will fail to recognize. One (but only one) aspect of this point is that, along with several other contemporary revisionist views of Jesus that have nothing to do with THT, he very much deemphasizes the influence of the Hebrew Scriptures on the New Testament’s picture of Jesus. For those reasons, his arguments need to be countered. II MacDonald argues that the Iliad and the Odyssey were read by and influenced writers throughout the Roman world in the first century. And so far as Greek and Latin speakers are concerned, this claim is obviously true. He then argues that their influence can be demonstrated in the Gospel of Mark. And this is the part of THT that concerns me. The two strong points of THT are doubtless the many parallels that McDonald cleverly finds between the works in question and his skill in placing those parallels in the context of the ancient educational and cultural tradition of mimesis. (This term means “imitation” and refers to the ancient educational and literary practice of imitating or emulating styles and themes from recognized literary masters such as Homer.) In his book, although MacDonald is clear that Mark was not writing historical biography, he largely avoids the issue of the historicity of the events that Mark narrates. Nevertheless, MacDonald’s readers will naturally wonder whether THT is an entirely literary claim, or whether it also has implications for history. For example, suppose we are convinced with MacDonald that there are striking similarities between Homer’s account of the death of Hector and Mark’s account of the death of Jesus and that Did Mark Copy Homer? 27 Mark borrowed from the Iliad in writing his passion narrative: [136, (“Mark seems to have created much of the Passion Narrative in imitation of...