The Island Parson

In September 2023 we started an in-person Small Group Bible Study here in the Anglican Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Crete, and we meet at 4:00 PM every Monday at a congregant’s home. The group decided to study the Gospel According to Mark, being a relatively short and “simple” gospel, and perhaps one of the earliest witnesses to the good news about Jesus. If you are in Crete, contact me and I will tell you how you can join us.

An Ancient Text

Before I make any posts with some notes about the various chapters, I will start with some general ones about the Gospel, as well as the New Testament.

The Christian Bible, with its two parts we call the Old Testament and the New Testament, is probably the oldest text that most people in Western society will ever read. Unless they are type of folks who enjoy reading Homer or Julius Caesar, or are adherents of Confucianism reading The Analects, or just a reader having a go at a translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible is likely the only ancient work that they look at. So, I suggest, we need to consider the fact that it is not a text like one produced in modern times – it is not a novel like the ones written by Charles Dickens, or an historical document like constitution of the United States, or a history like the one Winston Churchill wrote about the Second World War. The conventions around such texts were unknown in the first century when the gospels were written, and the expectations that the readers had and the assumptions of the writers were also different.

Among those assumptions are these:

• Most people experienced the text not as readers, but as listeners. They probably listened to someone reading the text.
• The text may well have been read in one go. It might take ninety minutes to two hours to read something like the Gospel according to Mark.
• The author was anonymous, and the identity of the author was not as important as the content. The earliest attribution to John Mark, mentioned in Acts, dates from the late second century. The earliest record of the title with the text dates from the fourth century. This anonymous character is true of all four gospels. Thus, we only have the text.
• Mark is considered to be the first of the four gospels that was written, and Matthew and Luke demonstrate that they used Mark as a written source for their versions of the life of Jesus. Thus, it is important to know that this was a new genre – there were no preconceptions from the first readers/listeners about what form this text should take, or how the story should go.
• The listeners would not have expected the text to be literally true, in the sense that it was in a historical sequence; rather, they were looking for the truths that mattered to them.
• The first readers/listeners would not have considered the gospels to be sacred, in the same sense that the Torah or the Prophets were holy writings – but they would have considered the object of the story told as sacred.
• At best the readers/listeners were ambivalent about the Roman Empire, and more likely considered it to be the means of oppression by an elite. The first readers/listeners did not speak Latin, the language of the Empire, but Greek, and were probably not citizens, but subjects, including freedmen and slaves.

Transmission

Let’s consider its transmission history. This is some 1900 years long – a tremendously long time. Initially it was probably written on papyrus, a kind of paper hand made from the pith of Cyperus papyrus, a kind of reedy plant. Papyrus paper does not last in most climates, as humidity and the ordinary ravages of time destroys it, so most of what we have comes from the dry climate of Egypt. These have been found in graves, buried in the sand, and occasionally reused for various purposes. The oldest fragment of the gospel appears to be something scholars catalog as P.Oxy LXXXIII 5345 from late second to early third century A.D. Below is a photo of the two sides of the fragment from the scholarly report about it, and the little piece, about an inch (two cm) tall, is, as you can see, just a scrap. Despite that, it is identifiably from Mark 1.7-9, 16-18. It is, of course, written in Hellenistic Greek, or koiné.

In the time of Jesus all manuscripts were on scrolls – sheets of papyrus joined together in a long roll, and written on only on one side. Indeed, to this day, in synagogues Jews read from Torah scrolls. In the two centuries after Jesus a new technology emerged, called a codex – a bound manuscript with many individual pages sewn together and written on both sides of the paper. As used as we are to these codices, which we think of when we thing of books, someone had to invent them, and when invested they quickly caught on, largely because they were more cost effective (using both sides of the paper) and more easy to use, as one only had to flip pages instead of scrolling along and rolling and unrolling the book. We can tell that P.Oxy LXXXIII 5345 above is from a papyrus codex because it is written on both sides.

We do not start finding complete manuscripts until the Fourth Century. By then there is usually a title attached, commonly at the end of the gospel. These are often written on vellum – sheep skins that have been treated to form a kind of canvas on which a scribe can write something. Vellum was very expensive, and complete Bibles would have cost a king’s ransom. The two oldest more or less complete Bibles are on vellum and have names – Codex Vaticanicus, because it is in the Vatican Library, and Codex Sinaiticus, because it was found in the Monastery of St Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai. It is not an accident that these codices were written only after Christianity was legalised, and they were probably financed by Imperial patronage or some other wealthy aristocrat. Codex Sinaiticus may well have sat in the monastery in Sinai from the 4th Century until it was “rediscovered” in the late 19th century. Likewise, while Vaticanus was known to exist in the 16th century, it was only in the late 19th Century that a copy of it was published. A third great Bibe, the Codex Alexandrinus, appears to date from the Fifth Century. Both Alexandrinus and Sinaiticus are in the British Library, and are on display physically in its gallery of treasures, and they have been made available digitally in whole or in part. If you are wondering how they are dated, it is done by an analysis of the writing (paleography) and the material it is written on.

It needs to be kept in mind that these were written by hand. The hands in these codices are identifiable. Because the codices were handwritten, moveable type not reaching Europe until the 15th century, it means that variations occurred. Sometimes the variations were due to mistakes, such as skipping a line or a word. In other cases the copier might not have been able to make out what a word was in the text they were working from, so made a guess. Often the scribe disbelieved what a text wrote, and so smoothed it out, or made additions. Over time these variations accumulated. Because the texts were copied repeatedly, there developed “families” of manuscripts. In the late fourth century one family of texts, known as the Byzantine, began to predominate. These were the types of texts that were rediscovered in the early modern period (sixteenth century) and became known in Western Europe as the Textus Receptus, or the received text. In the 19th century, as older manuscripts were found, it was determined that the Byzantine family of texts did not always preserve the very best readings, but the accumulations of errors and editorial changes. Thus, starting in the mid- to late 19th century, critical editions of the New Testament emerged that were based on Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, and Sianaiticus. These were supplemented by even older papyrus fragments of scrolls, which continue to be unearthed to this day. As well, there are very old translations into Syriac, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian which may preserve variant readings from Greek originals that no longer exist, or which preserve older readings that disappeared in the Byzantine family of manuscripts.

Modern textual criticism deals with all of this, and sifts through all the variants and makes educated guesses at the best readings. Most modern translations of the New Testament use the Novum Testamentum Graece (The New Testament in Greek) that is now in its 28th Edition; as the original editors were two men named Eberhard Nestle and Kurt Aland, it is known as NA28. The United Bible Societies have a less heavily footnoted version of NA28, now in its fifth edition, and is known as UBS5. There is also a commentary in English on the text, noting the most important variants, why the editors preferred one reading over others, and the strength of that conviction (listed as A, B, C, D, where A is quite certain, and D means they really don’t know what was in the original). Some Bible translators continue to use the Textus Receptus (the New King James Version is an example of that), but they are in the minority and, in my opinion, just wrong.

The Art of Translation

Unless you are fluent in Koine Greek (pronounced “Kee-neh”) you are dependent on translators; I am not fluent in either Koine (or Standard Modern Greek), but I know enough to be able to distinguish between translations that I think are good and accurate and those that are not.

Translation is an art. Sometimes it is simple enough, but it becomes more complex when the grammar and vocabulary in the original text are different from that in the target language. English has a massive vocabulary that allows for many shades of meaning, Koine Greek, not so much. Word order in English is very important, whereas in a highly inflected language like Greek playing the word order is much more flexible. Further, because of the inflection, what we in English would consider as run-on sentences are perfectly allowable in Koine Greek.

There are three basic types of translation. One aims for word-for word translation. In English the King James Version is the best example of that – where a word is translated one way in a text, it is probably translated the same way elsewhere. This can be problematic, because the word in English may not have exactly the same range of meaning as the word in Greek. Thus, πνεύμα in Greek can be translated as “breath”, “spirit”, “wind”, and “ghost.” As well, and particularly in Paul, the KJV sometimes reproduces the Greek syntax and word order, which makes it less than fluent English. More recent translations in the last hundred years have used a broader vocabulary, works to get fluent English word order, and breaks up the sentences into digestible lengths. These types of translations are often called “literal” in that they try for a great degree of accuracy.

A second type of translation is called “dynamic equivalence”. This type of translation attempts to find equivalent phrases in a language to match phrases or words in the original. In Hebrew, for example, if someone is standing before someone else, they “before the face of” that person; in English instead of the literal translation one can simply say, “in front of.” This, of course, allows for greater judgement on the part of the translator.

A final type of translation is a paraphrase, where the translator will use modern idioms or situations to give the meaning to the original. While many people find these kinds of translations helpful, they are very interpretive and often demonstrate the translator’s biases. I personally avoid paraphrases. I have been in too many Bible studies where people think they understand a difficult passage because their paraphrase phrases it in a particular way, but what they fail to understand is that it may just be an obscure passage in the original, too, or it is so far removed from our experience that we do not get the meaning. Often the translators using paraphrase remove ambiguity where the author intended it.

Translation gets very difficult indeed when it is poetry, because much of the effect is built up in compact sentences with poetic meters and sounds. The Gospel according to Mark does not have poetry in it, and there are debates about how much is in the New Testament, but it is definitely present in the Hebrew Bible.

One of the important things to know about the Gospel of Mark is that much of it is written in the present tense of Koine Greek. This is the difference between, “I threw the ball to Billy” and “I throw the ball to Billy.” Now, while it is not unknown in modern English literature (John Updike’s Rabbit, Run is in the present tense) it is not common. This gives it an immediacy, but most translations put the verbs into the various forms of the past tense, as that is more conventional in English narration. So, right there, we have lost a major stylistic decision of the author.