This is a continuation of my response to R.G. Price’s Case Against the Historical Jesus. To be honest, the more I read of this, the more surprised I am that some one could makes these claims.
This post is on the Gospel of Mark and is some ways relayed to the previous post on Mark.
The Gospel of Mark shows clear signs of being written as an allegorical fiction
Having demonstrated that Mark is likely the earliest Gospel and the one that Matthew and Luke used as a source, Price now claims that Mark is allegory and not history.
The first part of his argument is that Mark is not history. He does this by comparing Mark to Josephus and Livy and demonstrating that Mark lacks some of the literary features of ancient histories.
The problem is that I don’t know of any biblical scholars that claim that the Gospels belong to the genre of history. The Acts of the Apostles does have those features but the Gospels seem to be a different genre.
I’m convinced by Richard Burridge’s argument that the Gospels belong to the genre of ancient bioi or lives. Having recently read some of the Lives written by Plutarch, I can totally see that similarity.
If the Gospels (including Mark) are not histories, does that mean that they are not historical? Of course not. Even today, people who identify as biographers are also doing history. But a person who is writing a biography of General Georg Patton is going to write differently than someone writing a history of the Second World War.
Having attempted to discredit Mark historically, Price then claims that Mark belongs to the genre of allegory. Is he correct? Not at all.
Yes there are theological interpretations of the events being described. But that is found even in the histories of Josephus and Livy.
The Cambridge dictionary defines allegory as:
a story, play, poem, picture, or other work in which the characters and events represent particular qualities or ideas that relate to morals, religion, or politics
I do not see any evidence of this in Mark. And it is not because we lack first century data about allegory. Philo is a good example of what first century Jewish and Hellenistic allegorical interpretation can look like. And what we find there is far from Mark. We do have allegory in the New Testament, but it is found in books like Hebrews, which is swimming in the same waters as Philo.
Another good example is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In that allegory, it is just some guy and some cave. There is no link to history. The only thing that is important is the point of the story, and all other details are left out.
And yet in Mark, we have numerous to known places and historical figures. Mark seems to be going out of his way to make it clear that these events take place in time and space, something not necessary if it was an allegory.
So the conclusion is that the Gospel of Mark is not an allegory. No matter how “clear” R.G. Price seems to think it is.
