Fundamental Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic

 Mark as Story

David Rhoads’ book, Mark as Story: an Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel takes a unique approach to the Gospel of Mark through what the book calls “narrative analysis.” What Rhoads does in his book is to contextualize not only the historical and social context of the writing of Mark’s gospel account, but also the narrative writing of Mark’s author. Rhoads makes it plain that his approach analyses Mark as a story, rather than an historic accounting of Jesus’ life by Mark’s author. Rhoads examines storytelling culture in first century Mediterranean culture, which he notes was primarily done by oral composition. The Gospel of Mark, he argues, is not only intended to be read, but also performed. By this, Rhoads means that the story told in Mark was to be told in a “lively and meaningful” way. In this sense, Mark is filled with all the necessary attributes of storytelling such as tone, voice, volume, body language, etc, all designed to evoke a response from its intended audience. 

The center of Rhoads’ book include sections on the narrator, the settings, the plot and the characters of Jesus, the disciples and other characters secondary to the story within Mark. In all these sections, Rhoads argues that there is a storytelling intent to everything about the Gospel of Mark; a narrator who tells the story as well as its first writer, settings designed to place the story in a time, place and culture, and a plot that twists and turns to climax in the death of Jesus of Nazareth, and dynamic characters existing with purpose within the story. Rhoads concludes with a section on the audience; how it was read two thousand years ago and to whom it was read and how it may be read by contemporary readers today.