The Gospel of Mark: Baptist Voices in Biblical Scholarship

Abstract

As scholarship on the Gospel of Mark has developed over the years, Baptist scholars have entered into the conversation as they have sought to make the Gospel meaningful and “applicable” to the Christian life. In doing so, they have always negotiated a tension between their own traditions of interpretation and the methodological and theoretical claims of critical scholarship. An expository tradition of interpretation, dedicated to exploring the historical context and carefully analyzing each word of the text, has led to numerous studies and commentaries by Baptist scholars. Many of these evidence a conservative, evangelical frame of reference and ground their search for meaning in historical, theological, and moral teachings of the author of Mark to be retrieved from the text. Other Baptist scholars, while continuing to engage this expository tradition and find usefulness in its insights, have turned toward investigations of the Gospel which seek to find meaning also in the text itself (apart from the author's “original” intent) and in readers' experience of it. While the former approach focuses on the systematic, line-by-line “exegesis” of the text, the latter approach leads to a variety of analyses that ultimately serve more as a guide to reading the text than as an explanation of exactly what the text means. These varied approaches reflect a range of understandings of how God speaks through Scripture, but all of the Baptist scholars share out of their formation in Baptist communities a confidence that God is indeed revealed in the words of the Gospel.