I. The setting of Mark's Gospel

1. When and Where ?

A considerable number of scholars have held that Mark's Gospel was written for predominantly Gentile Christians at Rome shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by the Romans in 70 A. D. and in the aftermath of Nero's persecution.(1) But a growing number of scholars propose that the Gospel was composed in or near northern Palestine (Galilee - Syria) around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem.

The manner in which Mark writes about Galilee, and the way he describes Galilee as the place of Jesus' activity, and other data within the Gospel appear to indicate that, for the Markan community, Galilee, and perhaps the sea of Galilee, had special significance. The Markan Gospel summons Christians to the land of Galilee, where the risen Lord will soon return. Galilee becomes a Christian Holy Land (Willi Marxsen).(2)

Mark was probably written in close chronological proximity to the first Jewish revolt, in all likelihood before it came to an end with the capture of the city and the destruction of the temple.(3)

2. The Socio-Economic, Political Situation

Palestine, and in a special way Galilee, was an occupied country. Herod the Great was permitted to be king of the Jewish people under the auspices of Rome. However, he was not accepable to many Jews, partly because of his non-Jewish ancestry and partly because of his cruelty and his oppressive taxation. When he died, in 4 B. C., revolts occurred and continued sporadically until the outbreak of war in 66 A. D.

In addition to trouble during and after the reign of Herod the Great, there were other causes of unrest. The main ones were:

(1)occupation by foreign troops;

(2)class conflicts, which included anticlericalism;

(3)social banditry;

(4)religious fanaticism and the concept of God as a divine warrior;

(5)revolutionary prophets and messianic pretenders;

(6)misconduct on the part of Roman officials;

(7)strife between the various factions of Jewish revolutionaries;

(8)taxation, both by the Romans and by Herod and his successors;

(9)the bitter hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans.(4)　

The Latinisms found in Mark, often referred to in support of the Roman hypothesis, indicate rather the expected linguistic penetration in the socio-economic and administrative spheres of the colonized culture of Palestine. A socio-political description must, then, focus upon conditions in agrarian Palestine, which were very different from those in urban Hellenism.(5)

In Palestine, the majority of an estimated population of seven hundred and fifty thousand was peasant. A very small independent artisan and bureaucratic class, and a tiny aristocracy, made up less than one-half of one percent. The local ruling class after Herod was increasingly urban-based, and tended to accommodate the colonial forces culturally and economically. The rural peasantry on the other hand experienced hellenization as further economic marginalization and cultural isolation, especially in Galilee. The main socio-economic conflict was the economic threat to the traditional agrarian way of life posed by the urban oligarchy, due to the economic vulnerability of small landholders and tenant workers.(6)

For the Galilean peasantry, the perennial burden of the imperial tribute, the social pressure of the nearby Hellenistic cities, and the repeated experience of retribution at the hands of Roman legions, would have been more than enough to sow deep-seated alienation. At the same time there would have been a natural class alienation from the native aristocracy, whom the peasant saw not as leader but as collaborator and landlord. This double antipathy could have translated into solidarity with the local social bandits and subsequently the Zealots, and for many it did, but the evidence indicates that this was a minority. We know, for example, that in Galilee the organized insurrection collapsed early, and that Josephus complained bitterly of the difficulties of trying to organize resistance there.

What if a prophet arose who advocated a strategy that disdained the collaborationist aristocracy and Romans equally, and who repudiated Qumranite withdrawal and Pharisaic activism on the grounds that neither addressed the roots of oppression in the dominant symbolic order? We know that uneducated peasants, largely unable to articulate their dissatisfaction, often looked to those able to express in popular discourse a populist vision. It is not difficult to imagine such a prophet invoking the Deuteronomist vision of a just redistributive system, and appealing to the subversive tradition of the great prophetic social critics of Israel. A pedagogy could have been developed to help the peasants unmask the oppressive economic self-interest of the Jerusalem leaders. There is no a priori reason why an alternative to the reformists and rebels could not have been proposed that addressed peasant grievances more concretely. And although it would have been remarkable, it cannot be ruled out that such a prophet might have taken the logic of solidarity among the poor so far as to challenge the artificial gulf that kept the oppressed Jew and Gentile segregated.

There was ample social, economic, political, and cultural justification for a strategy that delegitimized both the Roman presence and the authority of the Jewish aristocracy as it was embedded in the debt and purity systems and reinforced in the temple cult and the dominant interpretation of the Torah. We can only conclude, without further evidence, that the determinate social formation of Palestine in the 60s A. D. produced conditions which render such an "alienative, confrontative and nonaligned" ideology hypothetically plausible. If such an outlook manifested itself as literature which we know to have come from this period, this should be accepted as concrete evidence for a unique social movement which must be evaluated on its own terms.

Mark's Gospel may be such a document, articulating a grassroots social discourse which is at once subversive and constructive. This document was probably written during the Roman reoccupation of Galilee, between the first (66-67 A. D.) and the second (69-70 A. D.) Roman sieges of Jerusalem. The immediate and specific issue occasioning the Gospel was the challenge of rebel recruiters in Galilee, who were trying to drum up support for the resistance around Palestine, and no doubt demanding that Mark's community "choose sides." Though sympathetic to the socio-economic and political grievances of the rebels, Mark was compelled to repudiate their call to a defence of Jerusalem. This was because, according to his understanding of the teaching and practice of a Nazarene prophet, executed by Rome some thirty-five years earlier, the means (military) and ends (restorationist) of the "liberation" struggle were fundamentally counterrevolutionary.(7)

Mark's concern is not only liberation from the specific structures of oppression embedded in the dominant social order of Roman Palestine; it also includes the spirit and practice of domination ultimately embedded in the human personality and corporately in human history as a whole. The struggle against the powers and the individual and the collective will to dominate, is articulated over and over again in different ways throughout the story. This strategy of repetition represents an apocalyptic characteristic of the Gospel: the narrative device of "recapitulation." First in his miracle stories and again in a cycle of visions, Daniel dramatized a single point: the imperative and possibility of resistance to the Seleucid state. So too does Mark restate the discipleship of the cross in a variety of ways. His focus upon the cross set him against those who used apocalyptic symbols to legitimate a militant practice of "holy war" against their enemies. By anchoring the story of discipleship firmly in the lived world of his audience, he stood against those who used heavenly visions to legitimate a withdrawal from political struggle into gnostic communities.(8)

1.Cf. Frank J. Matera, What Are They Saying About Mark? (New York: Paulist Press, 1987)7-11.

2.Ibidem, 11-12.

3.Howard C. Kee, Community of the New Age. Studies in Mark's Gospel (London: SCM Press, 1977) 100.

4.J. Massyngbaerde Ford, My Enemy is My Guest (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1984) 2-12, 65-95.

5.Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man. A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, N. Y.: Orbis Books, 1988) 41.

6.Ibidem, 50-51.

7.Ibidem, 85-87.

8.Ibidem, 103-104.