Abstract
Helen Bond is Professor of Christian Origins and Head of the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, well known for her work over several decades, particularly after her doctoral thesis on Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas and others involved in Jesus’ death and passion. She has also become an accomplished communicator, making many television and media contributions.
This attractive new volume was also originally intended to be about Mark’s passion, but it has subsequently expanded into a treatment of the whole of Mark as ‘the first biographer of Jesus’ (p. 5). Bond begins with a wonderful anecdote about an essay written ‘as a schoolgirl in the 1980s’ which ‘began with the confident assertion: “The gospels are not biographies”’ (p. 1). She then relates briefly the subsequent revolution, kindly noting that ‘Richard Burridge’s monograph What Are the Gospels? (1992) seemed to settle the matter. By the mid-1990s there was a measure of broad agreement that what we have in the first four books of the New Testament are bioi, or lives of Jesus.’ However, she makes a very interesting point: ‘But the practical results of the identification of the gospels as bioi – the payoff – seems disappointingly meagre. Certainly, it does not seem to have revolutionised gospel interpretation in the manner promised by those caught up in the heady debates of the 1980s’ (p. 2). However, her view, ‘in contrast, is that reading the gospels as ancient biographies makes a profound difference to the way that we interpret them’ (p. 4).
The opening chapter charts the scholarly debate, from the assumptions of early readers through to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, which was then eclipsed by the rise of form criticism, Schmidt’s work on the ‘framework’ of the Gospels and Bultmann’s stress on uniqueness, through to the more recent consensus that ‘research subsequent to Burridge has tended to reinforce his conclusions’ (p. 33).
Bond then devotes the next chapter to describing the rich variety of ancient bioi, from its emergence through Isocrates, Xenophon and Theopompus, to the origins of Latin vitae with Nepos and Plutarch, and the rising interest in morality, character and the subject’s noble death. The third chapter considers how ‘Mark the biographer’ wrote his work, discussing the likely level of his own education and that of his audience, including the social setting of the Gospels, Mark’s structure, his use of pericopes and anecdotes and his possible sources for Jesus’ death – as well as the lack of a distinct authorial voice and opening prologue, which will have disconcerted his audience’s expectations.
The next two chapters discuss the characterization of Jesus (Chapter 4) and of others (Chapter 5) in the light of ancient understandings of character and personality, idealization and moralistic purposes. Chapter 6 considers how Mark’s account of Jesus’ death succeeds in transforming an ignominious end into something almost noble, drawing on the accounts of various deaths in biographies and the first-century interest in death itself. Bond’s ‘final reflections’ concern the challenge of ‘the earliest Life of Jesus’ and consider automimesis, ‘self-imitation, or transference’, where a biographer ‘fills in the gaps’ with their own ‘values and interests’, concluding that ‘Mark’s biography has forever set the contours of how the story of Jesus should be told’ (p. 258). A substantial bibliography and three comprehensive indexes provide a solid scholarly undergirding at the end.
As in the rest of her work, Bond matches her excellent scholarship with accessible and understandable communication. In beautifully clear prose, which reflects the book’s handsome production, Helen Bond has made a significant contribution to the dilemma that she herself identified at the start: ‘what it means to say that Mark’s gospel is an ancient biography’ (p. 5). And, in doing so, she follows the direction also traversed recently by Andrew Lincoln, Jonathan Pennington, Michael Licona and Craig Keener in exploring some of the hermeneutical implications of the Gospels’ biographical genre – and I, for one, cannot wait to see where it might lead us in the future!