Mark’s Gospel is a highly crafted poem and eventually I want to show the structures of all its parts. Our culture has different conventions for telling stories and for writing books than Mark did, so his book can seem very disorganized to us. But whenever we have the feeling that it’s just a pile of paragraphs, completely at random, invariably what’s going on is that the narrative is built around a center of some kind, and we have to read it concentrically. Our culture favors a more linear style, and our “road signs” are titles, chapters, headings, subheadings, and so forth. Why heck, we even put spaces between words and use punctuation! (Ancient writers hadn’t thought of that stuff yet.) Such writing technologies are helpful for our more-visual-than-auditory culture, and make it easy to look up things in a book.
But few ancients were literate, books were hard to produce, and book technology didn’t yet include headings, subheadings, punctuation, and spaces between words, so most books would have been experienced by hearing them read, often by a reader trained and practiced at reading a specific text. I was ordained a “Reader” in the Orthodox Church in a rite that not only presupposed that I could read and read well, but also specifically exhorted me to familiarize myself with my parish’s books so that I could read them well for the people— because their experience as a congregation would be auditory, not visual, and the reading needed to be smooth and clear, even though I’d be reading from a manuscript that looked like this:
In a culture that didn’t have the writing technology of headings and subheadings like we do, writers, speakers, and hearers needed an aural way of keeping track of what was being said. A device called the “chiasm” was one very popular way of doing this. The name “chiasm” (sometimes chiasmus, in Latin) is related to the Greek letter Chi, written as “X”. A basic chiasm is an arrangement of things in an X—
A B
B A
Two simple examples are—
“The Sabbath was made for man,
not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2.27).
“When the going gets tough,
the tough get going”
Even a single word or phrase can be chiastic—
Abba
a Toyota
Madam, I’m Adam
Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
—although these are usually referred to as “palindromes”. My favorite example of these is often found around the rim of the baptismal font in a Greek church—
+ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ
(+ νίψον ἀνομήματα μὴ μόναν ὄψιν)
—which reads the same backwards and forwards, and means “Wash sins not just face”.
The ancients delighted in such things.
Now, as I said above, a basic chiasm is just a simple X— a,b : b,a. But you could also arrange the parts around a center—
A B
C
B A
—and build it out even further—
A B C D E F G —H— G F E D C B A
—and so on. In this case it’s sometimes called a “ring composition” or “concentric structure”, etc. Sometimes whole books or speeches have such an order.
The important member of a chiasm is its centerpoint, and after that, its first and last members (A and A’). The center is the meat of the sandwich, and the bread keeps the mayo, tomato, and lettuce around the meat. But the meat is the main thing! So the center and the first and last items in the structure are naturally the ones that a person sensitive to chiastic composition will remember most. Not sure you can see this, but try and you’ll get a glimpse of how the Sinai Narrative in the Old Testament is structured.
Now, because we don’t tend to think in, to hear, or to read any but the most obvious chiasms, we can very easily miss the “point” of an ancient text, precisely because the author lodged it at the center— for the center is where we tend to put our supporting arguments, before we reach a conclusion. For ancient writers, the center is for the main point, and the support would be organized around it. You’ll see the importance of understanding the author’s method in the chart of Mark’s passion narrative that I provide below.
Now, how does this work in performance?
When a speaker understands his text well, and is practiced at highlighting its key terms as he recites it— and when his audience has the cultural competence to recognize a chiasm when they hear one— then everybody can process the argument easily enough. Yet the effort that it takes to do so also forces them to remember the point. How so?
Well, if you know or suspect that I’m reciting a chiasm, you’ll be listening for the midpoint. So I start, A B C D E F G. Now, you’re following me carefully, so as soon as I say F again, you know I’ve just passed the midpoint (G), and that what follows is going to be E D C B A. And when I get to A again, you’ll have a feeling of completeness and satisfaction. Ah, you’ll say— just so! But you’ll remember the midpoint, because you were listening for it and you had that Aha! moment when you recognized it.
Knowing that a writer (such as Mark) often writes chiastically can be enormously helpful when you want understand what’s important in a passage. At the end of this post, I will provide is one way of looking at the structure of Mk 14.1–16.8, Mark’s passion narrative. There are others ways of looking at it, but they tend to be similar or to work in similar ways. As you’ll see, the organization of these two and a half chapters is rather elaborate, but it’s quite lucid and clearly tends toward a single, very clear centerpoint, at which Jesus himself reveals the answer to a question that’s been with us ever since chapter 1 verse 1— What does it mean to claim that Jesus is “Messiah” and “God’s son”? I would say that, especially in context, Mk 14.62 is actually one of the most powerful moments in all of literature, and we’ll have to unpack it a good deal more, later on. But for now, let’s just look at its position in the narrative.
I do intend to come back to the theology and other considerations of this exceedingly dense and profound verse in the future. But because my friend Stefan Smart, who goes around performing the entire Gospel of Mark to live audiences, recently invited me to his Question Mark podcast to talk about Jesus’ trial before the High Priest (Mk 14.53-65), and because his viewers/listeners will surely want to see the structure I was talking about there, I’ll provide the outline here and now, in advance of that much longer discussion of narrative and theology.
As you can see from the structure, there would have been an advantage to discussing all of 14.53–15.1, including Peter’s betrayal, as a single unit. And indeed we couldn’t avoid doing so, to some extent— but not knowing the structure in advance, Stefan had already planned to have someone else discuss Peter’s denial later on. Which is fine as far as his podcast goes— but once you see the structure of Mark’s whole passion narrative, you won’t be able to unsee how everything converges around 14.62— the single self-disclosure of Jesus the Messiah, who is none other than Yhwh himself, Israel’s God, who is about to be enthroned (on the cross!) as the Son of Man, and who is coming to judge and to rescue Israel and— this is most remarkable, but you would have gotten it from reading the rest of the story, especially in its Old Testament contexts— the nations as well.
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