THE GREATEST OF ALL SHRUBS
Gnosticism and the Elusive Gospel of Mark
“And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk 16:8)—so ends the Gospel of Mark. The women, having discovered Jesus’ tomb empty, and heard from a mysterious young man dressed in white that he has risen from the dead, run away from the tomb in terror, in what is probably the most enigmatic, mysterious, downright unsatisfactory ending to be found anywhere in Western literature. Throughout the years many have tried to make the ending make a bit more sense by adding to it or otherwise altering it. Even the editor of the Oxford Study Bible felt it necessary to mention, in a rather unscholarly annotation, that “obviously, [the women] eventually told the tale, or Mark’s Gospel could not have been written” (Mk 16:8fn). But all these additions, while they may make the story feel a bit more complete, do nothing to address the real question, the question of why the author of Mark chose to end his gospel in such a strange way.
As striking and mystifying as Mark 16:8 may be, it is only one of many narrative enigmas that pepper the short gospel. In general, Mark is an extremely baffling piece of writing, one that continually frustrates efforts to fit it into a comprehensive interpretation. For all their differences, critics throughout the centuries, as Frank Kermode notes, have been united by their “conviction that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together” (Kermode, 72). But, try as we might, the text lithely dances out of any and all frameworks that the interpreter tries to impose upon it, leaving us to “[return] to the question later, as we must” (Kermode, 73). And because of this very uninterpretability, Mark contains the potential for infinite interpretations, each incomplete in its own way. As Harold Bloom wrote of Hamlet, possibly the only work of literature to rival Mark in bottomlessness, it is unlimited.
In this paper I will present my own incomplete interpretation of the Gospel According to Mark. As everyone agrees, there is a mystery at the heart of Mark, a mystery that many interpreters have sought to resolve: Who is Jesus? What is his message? What is the “kingdom of God”? What does it all mean? The two most famous interpretations of Mark are, of course, Matthew and Luke. By adding to, subtracting from, and generally embellishing the text, they hammer it into the shape that fits more readily with a comprehensive interpretive structure. But the more these interpretations “hang together,” the less faithful they are to the original text they are supposed to be interpreting, and the more “limited” the text becomes—as soon as you decide that you have discovered the solution to the mystery, all other possibilities disappear. My interpretation does not deny the uninterpretability of Mark, but actually rests upon it, paradoxical as that may be. I propose that the answer to the mystery of the gospel is its own unanswerable nature—the true meaning of the gospel is not to be found in the text itself, but in the struggle that the reader goes through to understand the text, and to confront its impenetrability. I will argue that the hermeneutical quest to apprehend the meaning of Mark is a metaphor for the spiritual quest to apprehend the divine. Because of this and other evidence, I propose that even though it is in the canon, Mark actually has strong undertones of Gnosticism that may be in conflict with its place in the New Testament.
We can say few things with certainty about Jesus’ message, but it is clear that the heart of it is what he calls the “kingdom of God.” As Norman Perrin notes, “The central aspect of the teaching of Jesus was that concerning the kingdom of God. Of this there can be no doubt” (cited in Crossan, 23). But, unanimous as scholars may be on the centrality of the kingdom, there is little agreement on what it actually is, as Mark pointedly does not tell us. The mystery of Mark revolves around the mystery of the kingdom; it is the spot at which the impenetrable darkness of the gospel is most clearly visible. George Aichele, in The Phantom Messiah: Postmodern Fantasy and the Gospel of Mark, describes the kingdom as “a metaphoric abyss… The oscillation of connotations that arises around this ambiguous phrase can only be resolved through a hermeneutical decision, which is an act of violence” (Aichele, 107). It is exactly with this sort of violence that Matthew and Luke conquer the kingdom, fixing its fluid meaning at one particular point of oscillation. But this violence involves editorial changes to such a degree that the interpretation becomes a new text entirely, while the original remains just as reticent as it was before.
The first words we hear Jesus speak in Mark are a summary of his ministry: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mk 1:15). This strange little sentence tells us virtually nothing about the kingdom other than its imminent arrival, which is the only fact about it that Jesus openly[1] reveals. Over the course of the gospel, Jesus speaks about the gospel openly, but only in a few instances. “Truly I tell you,” he says later on, “there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mk 9:1), which is a stronger statement than the previous one but tells us nothing new. Jesus also tells a scribe in Jerusalem who “answers wisely” his questions that “You are not far from the kingdom of God” (12:34), but that is also not very helpful. In general, the gospel tells us next to nothing directly about the nature of the kingdom.
Matthew and Luke both offer viable interpretations of what sort of place, or thing, or event the kingdom might be. In Matthew the “kingdom of heaven,” as it is called in that gospel, is literally a kingdom in the political sense. Matthew is largely a political gospel, casting Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and King of the Jews, descended from the bloodline of David, destined to reclaim the throne of Israel from Herod and deliver the Jews from bondage at the hands of the Romans. Jesus speaks of the kingdom of heaven as a new political order in which Mosaic law, which had been corrupted by the Jewish elite, will be purified. It will be a place where “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:19). In general, Matthew’s kingdom is tangible and definite, a more allegorical interpretation of Mark’s fluid mystery.
Luke’s treatment of the kingdom is slightly more ambiguous, but it seems to be more or less a universalized version of Matthew’s, a new world in which the poor and downtrodden will rise up and the rich and powerful will be cast down. “Blessed are you who are poor,” says Jesus, “for yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20). There is one somewhat mysterious passage in Luke where Jesus, when a Pharisee asks him when the kingdom is coming, says that “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed…For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Lk 17:20-21). This implies that the kingdom is something more ineffable than simply a political order, possibly a shift in consciousness that has already begun. But this is still consistent with Luke’s overall vision of a new world order, especially because Jesus follows it with an eschatological account. The kingdom of God in Luke may be intangible, but it is still just as closed an interpretation as Matthew’s. Both of these versions of the kingdom are examples of the sort of hermeneutical “violence” that the interpreter must inflict upon Mark in order to make it “hang together,” as Kermode and his fellow scholars wish it would.
The parts of Mark that are the clearest expression of its theme of interpretation are the parables. Kermode describes the parable as “similitude…It means placing one thing beside another” (Kermode, 23). But what makes a parable more than merely an analogy is obscurity—the meaning of a parable is not readily evident. “Parables,” says Kermode, “are stories…which are not to be taken at face value, and bear various indications to make this condition plain to the interpreter” (Kermode, 24). The meaning of a parable is pointedly more than what it happens to mean manifestly; the true meaning is latent. In my interpretation, the key concept in Mark is not the passion, but the parable, and therefore the key passage is Jesus’ explication of the parable, which is found in 4:1-34. It begins with the Parable of the Sower, a story about farming that bears the distinctive mark of a parable: when taken at face value it is meaningless and pointless, and yet it seems somehow pregnant with meaning. Anyone who hears it cannot but suspect that there is more to it than is readily apparent. But what does it mean? The disciples, it may comfort us to learn, are just as confused as we are, and ask Jesus to explain what he meant. What follows is the “skeleton key” to understanding Mark. Because the text is an enigma, and moreover the very point of it is its enigmatic nature, the way to at least try to understand it is through hermeneutical analysis. And the verses that follow the Parable of the Sower effectively serve as “Hermeneutics 101” for both the baffled disciples and the equally baffled reader.
Jesus punctuates the Parable of the Sower, as well as many of his other parables, with a catchphrase: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Mk 4:9 and passim) which Kermode describes as a “formula that tells you the enigmatic part of the text is concluded, and you need to start interpreting” (Kermode, 29). The key point about this phrase, though, is that, in order to hear, you must have ears to do so—that is, you must have the skill of interpretation. And the implication of the phrase, which other passages in the section corroborate, is that it is a certain type of person, an initiate, who has that skill. Those who have been initiated have the ability to understand the secret meaning, but to those on the outside the door remains closed. “There is seeing and hearing,” says Kermode, “which are what naive listeners and readers do; and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved for the elect” (Kermode, 3). Kermode refers the elect as those with “circumcised ears[2],” and that “All who teach and practice interpretation...are in the business of aural circumcision” (Kermode, 3). To us, this sort of exclusivity might seem markedly un-Christian, but we have to bear in mind that the idea of the universality of Jesus’ message is an interpretation founded in established Christian doctrine rather than in the text. And it will become evident presently that, in Mark, Jesus’ message is not intended for all ears, but only for the circumcised ones.
Jesus begins the aural circumcision by emphasizing to his disciples the exclusivity of his ministry. “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,” he tells his disciples, “but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that”—and here he quotes Isaiah—“’they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand’” (Mk 4:11-12). This is a troubling passage for Christians, because it seems to be saying that Jesus spoke in parables in order to deliberately mislead outsiders, but it makes sense if Jesus indeed intended his message only for those “who had ears to hear.” When Jesus refers to the “secret of the kingdom of God,” then, the secret he is referring to is not the kingdom itself as such, but rather the “circumcised ear,” or capacity for hermeneutical divination, that is the key to at least trying to plumb the depths of the kingdom itself. Jesus is well aware that the gift of interpretation is not universal, that “[t]o divine the true, the latent sense, you need to be of the elect” (Kermode, 3), and when even his disciples ask him to explain his parable to them, he tries to explain to them the mechanics of interpretation—in other words, to circumcise their ears.
“Do you not understand this parable?” says Jesus, a bit vexed that his disciples are so obtuse, “Then how will you understand all the parables?” (Mk 4:13), the implication being that a hermeneutical sense is, simply put, something you either have or don’t have. If you do not understand the parable of the sower, you will not understand any parables, and you can understand any parable once you understand the idea of latent truth. He then goes on to offer a simple allegorical interpretation of the parable: the sower sows the word, et cetera. The point of this interpretation, though, is not just to explain the parable of the sower, but to demonstrate the nature of parables and the mechanics of interpretation in general. Jesus continues his lesson with a series of parables, maybe in order to give his disciples, as well as the reader, a chance to try out for themselves their newfound skill of interpretation. The parables can be, and have been, interpreted in any number of different ways, but for the purposes of my argument I will offer my own interpretation of them, which is that they are all about interpretation itself. In the parable of the lamp, the lamp itself represents the hidden meaning of the parable. It is luminous with truth, but is hidden underneath the bushel basket of obscurity; it is the interpreter’s job to take the hidden lamp and put it up upon the lampstand for all to see. As if to drive this point home, Jesus stresses that “there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed,” and then reiterates, “nor is anything secret, except to come to light” (Mk 4:22). Jesus feels so strongly about this disclosure that he not only says it openly, but says it twice.
Jesus then moves on to two troubling sayings, both of which explore the idea of interpretation: “Pay attention to what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given to you. For those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Mk 4:24-25). The Oxford Study Bible editor reads these “as a warning not to accept any cynical ‘realistic’ advice that the established power-relations will inevitably continue” (Mk 4:24-25fn), which is a pretty poor interpretation. Bible scholar George Martin offers the more apt interpretation that Jesus is saying “[i]f you make an effort to hear and understand and respond to what I am saying, then you will profit accordingly” (Martin, 91). If what you must “give” is divinatory effort, then it follows that the second saying is also about interpretation—“those who have” are the people who possess a hermeneutical sensibility, who will receive more understanding, while those who do not have one are doomed to remain on the outside.
Finally Jesus concludes the lesson with two parables of the kingdom, bringing us back to the central mystery of his message. Both parables, like the Sower, involve the planting of seeds. The first is a simple story about a planter who plants seeds, lets them grow, and then goes out with his sickle to harvest them. The key part of the parable is when it says the planter “would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how” (Mk 4:27). The seed, in my interpretation, is the parable itself, which seems meaningless on its own, but somehow produces meaning by some mysterious process that we can only understand indirectly. The parable’s emphasis on the passage of time, and the impenetrability of the processes that take place over time, express the way that “Whatever is preserved grows enigmatic; time, and the pressures of interpretation, which are the agents of preservation, will see to that” (Kermode, 64)—that is, it is interpretation that makes hidden meaning manifest, but that manifest meaning grows and blossoms as time passes and more interpreters find new meanings in it.
The last parable, the famous Parable of the Mustard Seed, has much the same meaning as the previous one, only state even more simply: the parable, like a seed, seems small and insignificant when taken at face value, but with interpretation in grows into “the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mk 4:32). The manifest meanings, or “branches,” that interpretation yields, blossom into whole ways of living, in which people can take shelter.
The obvious question regarding parables is: What’s the point? Why not just say it? There are several answers to this question. First, their obscurity serves to “create participation” (Crossan, 15). “All [parables] require some interpretive action from the auditor; they call for completion” (Kermode, 24)—in other words, the ball is in your court. If the teacher speaks in parables, the student ceases to be merely a listener and is forced to become an active participant and uncover the hidden message for himself. Hiding the message like this is a smart pedagogical tool; the thrill of uncovering a secret, like the thrill of unwrapping a present, makes that which is uncovered that much more memorable.
Another benefit of parables is that, unlike allegories or analogies, their obscurity grants them the possibility of polyvalence. An allegory has only one, albeit latent, meaning—the intended meaning. A parable, on the other hand, may have in addition to the intended meaning any number of other possible interpretations that are just as apt. In fact, a parable need not have any specific intended meaning at all, in which case it is the interpreter’s job to actually create meaning. Jesus’ parables of the kingdom in Mark are of this variety—they have a “polysemic and paradoxical structure generated by an infinitely regressive metaphor” (Aichele, 106) that locks within them the potential for unlimited meanings. It is this polyvalence that allows the parable, like a mustard seed, to yield so many meanings, and to continue to yield more and more as time passes and more and more interpreters come at it from different angles and with different backgrounds.
Although we tend to associate Jesus’ teachings in Mark with the parables, it is important to remember that his message was expressed not just in his words but also in his actions. In this way, Jesus himself is a sort of parable, a manifestly ordinary human being whose hidden meaning lies buried underneath his rough surface. This hidden meaning of Jesus is a major source of tension in the gospel: Jesus’ primary objective in his ministry is to proclaim his message, as he says in 1:38, but none of his disciples or any other people he encounters understand what he is trying so desperately trying to tell them. This is perhaps most evident in scene between Jesus and the disciples after the feeding of the four thousand, when Jesus tries to explain to them the meaning of the miracle. “Do you still not perceive or understand?” (Mk 8:17) he asks, with frustration in his voice, and then, reversing his parable tagline, “Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?” (Mk 8:18). It is four chapters after Jesus gave his disciples a hermeneutics lesson, and they still are unable to divine the hidden meaning behind his actions. The passage ends abruptly with Jesus desperately asking the disciples once more, “Do you not yet understand?” (Mk 8:21), a question whose answer, not included in the text, was surely nothing more than ashamed silence. And, of course, the meaning that Jesus is trying to communicate remains as impenetrable to us as it does to the disciples.
If Jesus wants so badly for his disciples to understand his message, we might ask, why doesn’t he just tell them openly what it was? Why does it have to come in parable form, even for the elect? Neither of the two functions of parables that I discussed earlier—to facilitate participation and to allow for polyvalence—can answer this question. Jesus’ desire to be understood is clearly desperate enough that pedagogical strategy would not be a consideration, and there is definitely a very specific meaning that he wants his disciples to grasp, so polyvalence is not an issue here either. This brings us to a third possibility of why Jesus taught his message in parables, which is that he was unable to express it any other way, that plain language was simply inadequate to communicate what it was.
The inadequacy of language is a concept that comes up again and again in Gnostic literature. In the gospel of Thomas, when Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is, Thomas answers that his “mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like” (Robinson, 127). But more generally—and this gets at the very heart of the matter—what makes Mark so identifiable with Gnosticism, more than with established Christianity is the way it demonstrates the inadequacy of human concepts in general. The gospel of Philip describes this inadequacy when it says that “[t]he truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images. The world did not receive truth in any other way” (NH 150). That is, the concepts that truth comes clothed in are the only way we are able to view them, but the clothes obscure our view. In order to see the real truth and apprehend the divine, we must strive for self-knowledge, in just the same way that, in order to understand the gospel of Mark, we must strive for hermeneutical knowledge
One profound question about parables, as well as the gospel as a whole, which is a parable unto itself, that I have thusfar failed to address is: does the interpreter actually uncover hidden meaning, or does he create meaning and impose it upon an essentially meaningless phrase? Is the meaning contained within the interpreter only, or somehow metaphysically within the parable itself? But this is not a problem at all if we view the gospel in light of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God” (Pagels, xix)—that is, as Thomas says, “the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you” (Robinson, 126). And just so, the meaning of Mark is both the one in the interpreter’s head and the one contained within the text itself, the one that Jesus struggled in vain to make his disciples understand.
Another major tenet of Gnosticism is that “that infinite power [at the “root of the universe”] exists in two modes, one actual, the other potential” (Pagels, 133). This power is contained in everyone in a latent form, but must be made manifest through spiritual practice. And, as we have seen, latent things being made manifest is the central theme of Mark. The latent meaning of the parables, of the gospel, and of Jesus himself is made manifest through interpretation—potential meaning is converted into actual meaning. And just as the power is infinite, Mark yields infinite meanings, and yet the true meaning still seems asymptotically distant. The latent mustard seed is made manifest by good soil, manifesting itself as the greatest of all shrubs.
The gospel of Philip expresses the Gnostic idea of the latent being made manifest, and the hidden being revealed, in a way that resonates especially clearly with the Gospel of Mark: it says, “’Jesus’ is a hidden name, ‘Christ’ is a revealed name” (Robinson, 144). In other words, the name “Christ” is the manifested form of the name “Jesus,” the same way the mustard shrub is the manifested form of the seed. One of the ways in which the Jesus of Mark is different from the Jesus in Matthew and in Luke is that, in the two embellished gospels, Jesus is manifestly identified as “Christ” from before his conception. John takes it even further and pushes the manifested Christ back before the beginning of the universe. In Mark, though, we only first meet Jesus at his baptism, when the Spirit descends upon him and says to him, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mk 1:11). This is the point at which Jesus becomes Christ, and there is no reason given to suspect that, before that experience, he was anything other than an ordinary person. There is evidence that he was an ordinary person later in the gospel, when Jesus returns to his hometown at the beginning of chapter 6. After a triumphant ministry, he finds he is hardly able to heal or teach anyone. The reason for this is that, while everyone else knows the revealed Jesus, the Christ,[3] the one who heals people and performs miracles and teaches in parables, the people in Jesus’ hometown know him only as “the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon” (Mk 6:3). These two stories also resonate with the Gnostic idea, particularly espoused in the gospel of Thomas, that Jesus was someone who is essentially no different from anyone else, which is why Thomas is referred to as his “twin.” The only thing that makes him special is that he has achieved gnosis—in fact, the experience he had during his baptism may very well have been gnosis.
Another passage from Mark that connects with both Thomas and Philip is the scene that parallels the aforementioned Thomas saying in which Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is. In Mark, when he asks “Who do you say that I am,” Peter replies, “You are the Messiah” (Mk 8:29)—that is, you are Christ. Peter may not fully comprehend the mystery of Jesus, but his hermeneutical sense is acute enough to allow him to discover the revealed name of Jesus, as it is mentioned in Philip. And the Thomas version of the scene resonates with Mark on an additional level:
"Peter gives, in effect, the same answer as he does in the gospels of Mark and Matthew: 'You are like a righteous messenger.' a phrase that may interpret the Hebrew term messiah ('anointed one') for the Greek-speaking audience whom Thomas addresses. The disciple Matthew answers next: 'You are like a wise philosopher"—a phrase perhaps intended to convey the Hebrew term rabbi ('teacher') in language any Gentile could understand. (This disciple is the one traditionally believed to have written the Gospel of Matthew, which, more than any other, depicts Jesus as a rabbi.) But when a third disciple, Thomas himself, answers Jesus' question, his response confounds the other two: 'Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like” (Pagels, Beyond Belief, 46-47).
We could see these three responses as symbolizing the three synoptic gospels. Peter, who represents the gospel of Luke, identifies Jesus as a messiah and universal savior, and Matthew, who represents his own gospel, calls Jesus a rabbi. If this is true, then the third disciple, Thomas, represents the gospel of Mark. And, just like the gospel of Mark, he shies away from offering his own interpretation of Jesus, and choosing only to mysteriously proclaim his reticence—and it is worth noting that, of the three disciples, Thomas is the one whom Jesus chooses initiate further into the mystery. This would imply that, of the three synoptic gospels, Mark is the one that comes the closest to “getting” Jesus because, instead of purporting to solve the mystery, it only acknowledges its inability to do so, but leaves readers with instructions in case they want to try their hand at it.
Even though Mark is fully accepted into Christian canon, there is no doubt that it is a very problematic text from the standpoint of Christian doctrine. It preceded the other two synoptic gospels historically—indeed, they are both based on it directly—but it does not come first in the New Testament. The leaders of the early church, when they were compiling the scriptures, must have felt that Mark would leave too many questions unanswered. So they sandwiched it between Matthew and Luke, both embellishments of Mark that resolve most of its troublesome ambiguities. Between the two filled-out gospels, Mark looks more like a poor summary than a source text, whose only purpose is to act as a buffer between Matthew and Luke in order to make their sometimes glaring incongruities a little less noticeable. But read on its own, especially through the lens of Gnosticism, it has a power and a resonance that the other two lack. This power comes from the impenetrable enigma at its center, the enigma that allows it to remain a living text.
Orthodox Christianity purports to have a universal message, but if we look at other, unrelated religions that bear striking similarities to Gnosticism, it seems we could easily make the claim that it is the more universal faith (if that is even the right word). The divine within and without that Gnostics seek to bring to light correspond to the Hindu concepts of Atman and Brahman. Gnosis itself bears a striking resemblance to Nirvana in Buddhism. And the Gnostic belief in the inability of language to apprehend real truth is also expressed in the beginning of the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao. / The name that can be named / is not the eternal name. / The unnamable is the eternally real”. It is as though these four different religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Gnosticism—are just four different languages to talk about, or at least try to talk about, the same ultimate reality.
WORKS CITED
Aichele, George, The Phantom Messiah: Postmodern Fantasy and the Gospel of Mark. New York: T&T Clark International, 2005.
Coogan, Michael D., ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, New Revised Standard Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. (All bible citations from this source)
Crossan, John Dominic, In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. Cambridge: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1973.
Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy: On The Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Martin, George, The Gospel According to Mark: Meaning and Message. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2005.
Pagels, Elaine, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Robinson, James M., ed., The Nag Hammadi Library. San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1978.
[1] When I say “openly,” what I mean is that the message is not “encoded” in the form of a parable—I will discuss the parables of the kingdom presently. See also Mk 4:11 and 4:34.
[2] The term is borrowed from the apocryphal Epistle to Barnabas
[3] Although they do not know him by that exact name yet, as I shall discuss shortly.