Note 5 — II THE JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

Mark’s main proof for this purpose is that of miracles. Jesus’ doctrines are with Mark of so much less importance than his miracles, that we never learn exactly what Jesus preached. “Consequently the historical portrait is very obscure: Jesus’ person is distorted into the grotesque and the fantastic”(!)5 Not only does Mark often introduce his own thought into the tradition about Jesus, and so prove perfectly wrong, and indeed absurd, the view held, for instance, by Wernle, that Jesus had intentionally made use of an obscure manner of speech and had spoken in parables and riddles so as not to be understood by the people;6 but also the connection which he has established between the accounts, which had first gone from mouth to mouth for a long time in isolation, is a perfectly disconnected and external one. At first the stories reported by Mark were totally disconnected with one another. There is no evidence at all of their having followed each other in the present order(!).7 So that only the matter, not what Mark made of it, is of historical value.8 Single stories, discourses, and phrases are bound into a whole by Mark; and often enough it may be seen that we have here a tradition which was first built up in the earliest Christianity long after Jesus’ death. Experiences were at first gradually fashioned into a story—and the miracle-stories may especially be regarded in this way. In spite of all these trimmings and alterations, and in spite of the fact that neither in the words of Jesus nor in the stories is it for the most part any longer possible to separate the actual from the traditional, which for forty years was not put into writing—in spite of all this, the historical value of the traditions given us by Mark is “very highly” estimated. For not only is “the general impression of power, originality, and creation” “valuable,” which is given in this account of Mark’s, but also there are so many individual phrases “corresponding to reality.” Numerous accounts, momentary pictures and remarks, “speak for themselves.” The modesty and ingenuousness(!), the freshness and joy(!) with which Mark recounts all this, show distinctly that he is here the reporter of a valid tradition, and that he writes nothing but what eye-witnesses have told him(!). “And so finally, in spite of all, this Gospel remains an extraordinarily valuable work, a collection of old and genuine material, which is loosely arranged and placed under a few leading conceptions; produced perhaps by that Mark whom the New Testament knows, and of whom Papias heard from the mouth of the elder John.”9