No one knows the original form of Mark’s Gospel.

No one knows how it began or ended. No one knows how it was transmitted from place to place. No one knows if it was created as a written narrative or as oral proclamation. No one knows why it was created, or where or precisely when or to whom it was addressed – and its creator remains utterly unknown to us, even in the unlikely event that his name was Mark. Most scholars believe that this gospel was the earliest of the New Testament gospels to appear..

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Recited From Memory

We know the Gospel of Mark as a written narrative. It was not passed down to us through oral tradition. In order to learn to speak it from memory, I had to memorize it from a written text. In classical oral tradition, the storytellers are illiterate and they learn the stories – many of them extremely long – by listening to other storytellers. The stories are never repeated verbatim, but are always tuned to the moment, to that day’s particular performance. Identical repeat performances are unheard of; so are fixed written texts. For the great bards of oral cultures, writing kills the word. The word lives only in the space between the storyteller’s performance and the audience’s hearing. It exists only there.

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Copyright Rev. Bert Marshall
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