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INTERTEXTUALITY AND THE GOSPELS:

AN INTRODUCTION

Shawn Kelley

Daemen College

This session takes up the problem of “intertextuality and the Gospels”. We shall be taking up a theoretical perspective which plays an increasingly important role in current critical landscape, and seeing what it does (and does not) have to say to biblical scholarship. This paper, which is designed to introduce the problem, will proceed through two major topics. (i) I will begin by defining intertextuality and by looking at some examples of intertextuality in current literary criticism. (ii) I will then examine the ways that biblical scholarship has taken up the question of the relationship between the Gospels. I will focus upon views of redaction criticism, and will try to show the ways that redactional assumptions have continued to guide some narrative critical studies of Gospel intertextuality.

INTERTEXTUALITY: KRISTEVA AND BEYOND

The term “intertextuality”, which has come to have a life of its own, was coined by Julia Kristeva in the seminal essays “The Bounded Text” (1980: 36-63) and “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1980: 65-91). Given the ubiquity of intertextuality in the current critical landscape, it is somewhat surprising to discover how little space each essay devotes to the term itself. Both essays include a few oft-quoted programmatic statements about intertextuality, mostly at the beginning of each essay. Since these quotations set in motion later studies of intertextuality, they are worth quoting in full.

The text is therefore a productivity...it is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another. (1980: 36)

The concept of text as ideologeme determines the very procedure of a semiotics that, by studying the text as intertextuality, considers it as such within the (text of) society and history. (1980: 37)

The literary word is an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings. (1980:65)

Each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one word (text) can be read. (1980:66)

Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and a poetic language is read as at least double. (1980: 66)

In the remainder of this section, I will attempt, with the help of those critics who have appropriated the term `intertextuality’, to draw out the implications of these programmatic statements. I will do so by differentiating between intertextuality and more traditional studies of poetic influence and by pointing out some of the ways that intertextuality might help shape (and might be unable to help shape) biblical scholarship.

i) Those of us trained in American forms of literary criticism, do need to be careful in how we think of the term “text”. For much of Kristeva’s analysis (i.e. the semiotic typology of utterances that find their way into the novel) she does not limited text to single work (i.e. Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist) but expands to include a typology of utterances (i.e. the novel). Much of the subsequent intertextuality criticism likewise does not limit itself to the analysis of individual texts (although such analysis is often part of the larger argument).[1] Intertextuality opens up a form of criticism that includes, but does not limit itself to, close reading of individual texts.

Most critical readings of the Gospels- from redaction criticism to narrative criticism to poststructuralism- tend to be close readings of one or two texts. As a result there is bound to be a certain disconnect between what Kristeva proposes and what biblical scholars do.

ii) The practice of close reading, as developed by the New Critics, was based on the assumption of an autonomous text. The following statement, from the seminal essay “The Affective Fallacy”, is typical.

The intentional fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins...The affective fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does)....the outcome of either fallacy...is that the poem itself...tends to disappear (Wimsatt & Beardsley 1022).

For Kristeva, however, a text has no fixed borders but is, instead, a mosaic of quotations, allusions and other intertexts. Intertextuality challenges the notion that a text is an autonomous and self-regulating organism. For the New Critics, the critic should focus on the text itself, while for a poststructuralist like Kristeva, it does little good to speak of “the text itself”. This is not because there is no text, but because the text has no fixed borders. There is a text, but rather than being autonomous and isolated it is always part of, and in relationship to, other texts.

The New Critical emphasis on textual autonomy has had little impact upon biblical scholarship. Redaction criticism, for example, is inherently comparative and virtually all New Testament scholars, no matter what their methodological bent, are trained to use a Synopsis of the Gospels. It is the case that the first generation of narrative critical studies of the Gospels have tended to focus upon individual texts in isolation from each other. This is understandable given the need to establish narrative criticism as a legitimate discipline separate from form and redaction criticism. There is no reason for New Testament scholarship to be opposed to the possibility of intertextual relationships. There is no question in my mind that the Gospels exist in intertextual relationship to each other (and to other texts). The question involves the nature of the intertextual relationships.

iii) Julia Kristeva was not the first critic to notice that texts are related to each other in many and complicated ways. Since the 18th century, critics have tried to trace the influence of one text upon another (see Clayton & Rothstein 4-7). T.S. Eliot’s essay (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”) is one prominent example of an extremely influential critical essay that takes this process seriously.

Not only the best, but the most individual parts of his (the poet’s) work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously....No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (Eliot 784)

For Eliot, it is the task of the poet to fuse his mind with the larger mind of the European, poetic tradition- a tradition which is more important than the mind of any single poet (Eliot 785). This fusion of self with poetic tradition ensures that mature poetry is decidedly intertextual.

Kristeva takes great pains to separate her position from that of such studies of influence. By 1974, Kristeva has given up on the term intertextuality, complaining that it was being consistently misused by those who wished to revert to more traditional ways.

The term intertextuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of `study of sources’, we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of thetic- of enunciative and denotative positionality. (1984: 59-60)

There is, as has often been noted, something quaint about Kristeva desire to assert authorial control over the theory that texts are authorless and uncontrollable. According to Friedman, Barthes and Kristeva “refuse to have the discourse of the `author’, `sources’, `allusions’ (etc.) clash, blend, or intersect with the discourse of anonymous intertextuality” (Friedman 153). In practice, intertextual criticism does share many points of contact with traditional studies of influence (see Clayton & Rothstein 3; Friedman 150, 152-155). This is as true of the criticism of Barthes and Friedman as it is of anyone else (see Friedman 154-155). As Kristeva suggests, intertextuality is not reducible to influence studies, but it is also not possible to completely and unalterably sever the two perspectives. With this caveat in mind, let us try to distinguish between the two. I see intertextuality going beyond the more traditional method of studying literary influenced in three major ways.

a) One major way of dividing intertextuality from influence involves the question of intention. For influence-based studies, textual allusions are the product of conscious authorial choices. Intertextuality, on the other hand, is part of the poststructural movement and, as such challenges both the centrality of the author and traditional notions of consciousness. Michel Foucault, for example, argues that the “author” is not the inevitable and only ground of textual meaning. The author, instead, emerged as foundational in the modern era and is part of the modern political and philosophical project. For Foucault, the author serves a variety of functions.

They can be summarized as follows: (1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all civilizations; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producers, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects- positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals. (Foucault 1984: 113)

Along with rethinking the author, Foucault proposes rethinking such notions as “book” and “oeuvre”.

The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. (Foucault 1972: 23)

Notions about the death of the author lead Roland Barthes in a slightly different direction. “For him (Mallarmé) for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality...to reach that point where only language acts, `performs’, and not `me’.[2] This is not the place to adjudicate between Foucault’s notion that texts are part of a complex field of discourse and Barthes sense that texts are part of the infinite play of textuality. It is enough to recognize that both are a long way from the traditionalist notion (defended most vehemently by E.D. Hirsch) that meaning is entirely dependent upon the author.[3] From the perspective of intertextual theory, intertexts occur as part of the ceaseless, uncontrollable circulation of writing- authorial choices have nothing to do with the process.

In practice, of course, this is a difficult distinction to maintain. Barthes’ `death of the author’ perspective (where it is language rather than an individual consciousness which speaks) is less influential in American than it has been in France (see Friedman 156-161). This is not to reject entirely the force of the arguments against the traditional notions of author. It is to suggest, however, that the relationship between author and intertextuality is necessarily complex and divided. Poststructuralism correctly points out that the self is not single, undivided, self-possessing and the ground of all creativity. Subjectivity is mobile, fluid, constantly changing, and often divided. As a result of this new view of the self, intertextual theory recognizes that many intertextual connections occur irrespective of the intentions of the author, and this condition does not make them any less meaningful or textual significant. This insight does not mean that one must reject entirely the notion that an author intends a certain amount of intertextual relations. The author may not be the ground of meaning or the source of all (or even most) intertexts, but the author is hardly dead.

Perhaps an example would help. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates sets out to establish that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple stands in intertextual relationship to a variety of African-American texts, most especially Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (see Gates 239-258). He does so, with the help of intertextuality, in a variety of complex ways: by establishing the presence of Signifyin(g) in African mythology, slave narratives, and popular culture; by exploring the relationship between Signifyin(g) and gender; by identifying the way this practice structures formally a variety of sophisticated African-American texts; by exploring the shifting relationship between speech, writing and Signifyin(g) in a variety of texts. These critical moves on Gates’ part could all be identified as poststructuralism, as pointing out anonymous forces that find their way into a variety of texts, including Walker’s. At the same time, Gates makes some rather traditional critical moves: he compares the ways that houses and trees function in both novels, for example, and compares a picture Walker had of Hurston with a picture Celie had of Shug Avery, thereby implying that Walker intends a rather explicit textual allusion (see Gates 252-255). In other words, anonymous intertexts and conscious textual allusions function side by side, and a careful reading should be able to account for both.

Most of the New Testament scholarly analysis of the Gospels emphasizes conscious authorial redactions, usually based on the assumption that the Gospels were composed for a specific community. One of the challenges for future New Testament scholarship is to imagine Gospel inter-relationships without relying upon that assumption.

b) A second distinction between intertextuality and influence studies involves the question of literature. For traditional criticism, mature literature alludes to other works of mature literature. Let us return to the example of Eliot. For him, the poet loses himself (and I do mean a gendered “him”) into the essence of poetry, which is revealed by the great (male, European, elite) writers of the literary canon. Great poets, who are presumed to be male and European, speak in dialogue with other great poets- ignoring the scribblings of the multitude of mediocre writers of their day. The dichotomy between elite and popular literature, however, is the sort of border that intertextual theory wants to knock down for a variety of (aesthetic, philosophical and political) reasons. As a result, intertextual theory would assume that even a great work of literature is replete with intertexts from a variety of literary and nonliterary texts.

Recent African-American literary criticism helps provide an example of the way that intertextuality expands and challenges conventional notions of canonicity. Gates uses intertextuality as one way of suggesting that black literary artistry exists and is richly layered and textured (Gates xx). He does so by demonstrating the variety of complex ways that African-American writers repeat and revise each others texts (Gates xxii-xxiii, 110-113). If Gates demonstrates that the honorary term literature applies to socially marginalized texts, Nielsen expands upon this point by arguing that even classic American texts (i.e. Moby Dick) interact with African-American experience and literature. The criticism of Gates

must be carried forward along with equally insistent readings of the blackness of white writing. We read Melville with the text of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, but we must also read Melville differently because of Ellison’s text....We must read the texts that black writers inscribed between the lines of America’s master texts, and we must read the echoes of those palimpsestic black texts in the writings of white readers. (Nielsen 24)

Intertextual readings insist on blurring the lines separating the literary and the nonliterary, the center and the margin, and black and white. No text and no writer is hermetically sealed off from the range of texts that exist in his/her larger cultural text.

The question of canonicity, as carried out within literary criticism, is not directly transferable to New Testament scholarship. The shape and make-up of literary canon is necessarily fluid, with the inclusion of new authors (i.e. Zora Neal Hurston, Harriet Jacobs) and new genres (i.e. the novel, film noir) along with the re-evaluation of established texts. The canon of the New Testament has long been established by orthodox Christianity and the cultural and ecclesial preeminence of the four canonical Gospels has little do with aesthetic judgments. Shifting aesthetic values are unlikely to do anything to displace the preeminence of the four canonical Gospels. Noncanonical Gospels are occasionally rediscovered (i.e. Nag Hammadi) or reconstructed (i.e. Q1), and these discoveries do indeed shape the way that the Gospels are read. At the same time, however, these changes will not have the effect of expelling Matthew from the New Testament and replacing it with the Coptic Gospel of Thomas- no matter how exciting and promising Thomas research may become. The bulk of Gospel criticism will continue to explore the four noncanonical Gospels and the scholarly study of noncanonical Gospels or precanonical sources will do nothing to change that.

c) For intertextual theory, no writer (no matter how powerful or insightful) and no text (no matter how beautiful or important) is cut of from the larger cultural world. It follows, therefore, even elite literary texts take part in, and refer to the social text. As Allen explains, “the on-going ideological struggles and tensions which characterize language and discourse in society will continue to reverberate in the text itself” (Allen 36). Perhaps an example will help clarify what I mean by this.

For most of this century, philosophers have assumed that the philosopher Martin Heidegger developed his philosophical and aesthetic ideas in dialogue with the other great Western philosophers (i.e. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Husserl, etc.) and with the great poets of Germany (i.e. Hölderlin) and Greece (i.e. Sophocles). Under this assumption, it was quite difficult to explain how a decent man and a great thinker could end up enthusiastically supporting Hitler. The only plausible explanation was that, as a thinker of great depths, he was unaccustomed to the rough and tumble world of politics and, therefore, made in inexplicable “blunder”. More recent Heidegger criticism, inspired by Herf’s analysis of German fascist intellectuals, has argued that, besides reading great philosophers, Heidegger also read, with considerable enthusiasm, Spengler’s racist The Decline of the West and Junger’s fascist meditations on war, violence and technology (see Kelley; Fritsche; Zimmerman). He also rather explicitly commented upon the social issues of the day, and often did so in terms dictated by the fascist right. The challenge, then, has been to find a way to recognize, in Heidegger’s philosophical texts, traces of the texts of Spengler, Junger, and other fascists and to recognize traces of social debates about the future of Germany. Such analysis makes it altogether too easy to see how it is that Heidegger ended up an active member of the Nazi party. Because many critics insisted up on staying within the philosophical and literary canon, they were unable to account for significant (and disturbing) aspects of Heidegger’s texts.

In short, intertextual theory offers readings that are often explicitly political. I have cited a number of examples of intertextual readings that stress political themes: finding implicit political allegiances in canonical texts, asserting aesthetic value in marginalized texts, challenging the socially constructed dividing line between literary and popular writings. This list of politically motivated intertextual readings is only partial and could (and probably should) be significantly expanded. There are any number of ways for intertextual readings to bring political questions to the fore of the analysis and, conversely, intertextual theory helps ground political analysis in the concrete study of specific texts.

It is here, at the question of the social and political intertext, that intertextual theory has the most to offer New Testament scholarship. Gospel criticism tends to emphasize theological conflicts (i.e. redactions motivated by a different Christology, soteriology, or eschatology) or ecclessial differences (i.e. Matthew’s Jewish community, schisms within the Johannine community, Luke’s Hellenistic audience). This emphasis has the effect of limiting intertexts to other theological texts (i.e. the Gospels, Paul, the Hebrew Bible, Qumran). There have been some helpful attempts to expand beyond this by rhetorical critics (who look for the influence of the rhetorical handbooks) and by those (i.e. Tolbert; Shiner) who take up the question of the influence of popular Hellenistic novels. There has also been a significant amount of recent political criticism (from feminism to postcolonialism), although politicized narrative criticism seems rather rare. Intertextual theory should encourage the exploration of other, nontheological intertexts and should also encourage Gospel readings that are more self-consciously political. The studies of Gates et. al. provide Gospel scholarship with helpful models for infusing political questions into the analysis of the texts of the Gospels.

Conclusions to Intertextual Theory

Let me wrap up this section by drawing some general conclusions about the nature of intertextuality. For intertextual theorists, the text (which is not limited to a single work) is made up of a mosiac of quotes and allusions to other texts. Some of these quotes and allusions can be explicit and consciously made, but many intertexts will occur irrespective of the intentions of the author. The intertexts can consist of other works of literature, nonliterary texts, or to events or codes from the larger social text. The author may try, but will ultimately be unable, to control the flow of textual allusions. He/she will not be able to limit the number of intertexts, nor will he/she be able to control how these intertexts function within his/her text. Finally, intertextual analysis is theoretically grounded and often explicitly political.

With these conclusions in mind, let us turn now to the second part of the paper: scholarly studies of the relationships between the Gospels.

THE GOSPELS: APPROACHES TO INTERTEXTUAL RELATIONS

Mainstream biblical scholars may not be comfortable with the term “intertextuality” and may be a bit put off by the poststructural baggage that comes with it. At the same time, they are hardly surprised by the idea that Biblical texts exist in textual relation to each other. The relationship between the Christian Gospels and the Hebrew Bible has been a topic of theological discussion since the patristic era. The interrelationship between the Gospels (particularly the Synoptic Gospels) has been discussed, with equal fervor, down through the ages. Both topics (i.e. the relationship between the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible, the relationship between the Gospels) are also staples in modern biblical scholarship. Modern biblical scholarship posits that the Gospels actively reread and reinterpreted the Hebrew Bible, and that the later Gospels actively reread and reinterpreted the earlier Gospels. Since the eighteenth century, biblical scholars have posited a direct textual relationship between the Gospels, especially between the Synoptic Gospels.[4] Carlson, summarizing the scholarship, lists five major reasons for positing such a direct, textual relationship: verbatim agreement, extensive agreement in order, substantially similar selection of material, the presence of editorial comments, a consistent literary pattern.[5] These factors are enough to convince most scholars of the existence of direct literary relationship between the (Synoptic) Gospels.[6] Yet what exactly is the nature of this relationship? If (to choose one theoretical relationship) Luke uses Mark as a source, what is he trying to do with or to Mark?[7]

In this section of the paper I will take a closer look at how redaction criticism conceives of the intertextual Gospel relationships. I do so because most of this analysis has been done within the context of source and redaction criticism. In the analysis that follows I will not be offering my own source-critical position, nor will I be advocating my own solution to the problem of the relationship between the various Gospels. Instead I will be examining some of the assumptions (i.e. aesthetic, historical, ideological, political, theological) that permeate the various interGospel readings. This analysis is intended to serve as a prelude to the narrative critical study of this issue.

In the analysis that follows I will be trying to get past the question of authorial intention (i.e. why did Matthew compose the scene this way?) and get to the question of reception (i.e. how would someone read Matthew’s composition?). Behind this is a further question: does this hypothetical reader of Matthew know Mark’s version? How would such prior knowledge, if it existed, effect the way that he/she hears Matthew’s story?[8]

I will argue that the redactional reading of the Gospels does contain some contradictory elements when it comes to intertextuality; and it may prove helpful for narrative critics to dwell on these contradictions as we begin proposing our own models of Gospel intertextuality. On the one hand, redaction criticism posits that each Gospel is composed primarily for one particularly community. The implication of this assumption is that the each community is only aware of one Gospel. The author of Luke is, on this view, aware of Mark, but the Lukan community remains unaware of Mark Gospel. At the same time, some of the language of the redaction critical reading of the Gospels (particularly when borrowed from parable scholarship) leads in the opposite direction. Some of the actual analysis suggests that the Gospels are in competition with each other and are struggling against each other. Under this assumption, then, the Gospels texts are in an intertextual relationship with each other and the readers of the Gospels are juggling competing versions of the truth.

It is to the question of intertextual texts and readers that we shall now turn.

Distinct Communities:

Intertextual writers without intertextual texts

One of the fundamental premises of redaction criticism is that each Gospel is composed for a particular community. It has long been assumed that the Pauline and Johannine letters are composed to address specific problems in one specific community (i.e. proper sexual relationships in Corinth or the conflicts with the Synagogue in John). This assumption was often carried over to Gospel criticism. In the same way that Paul or the author of the Johannine epistle is responding to a crisis in his church, so too is each Gospel responding to a particular crisis in his community (see Peterson 5). Mark addresses the problem of the war against Rome and the coming eschaton, Matthew takes up the delay of the parousia and the destruction of the Temple, Luke is addresses the problem of the delay of the parousia and the relationship with Rome, while John is worrying about a schism within the community. Not only does each community have separate concerns, but each community is isolated and insular.

The implication of this assumption is that the Gospels writers may be in an intertextual relationship with each other, but the Gospel texts do not. The author of Luke presumably knows Mark (and perhaps Matthew), but the members of Luke’s community do not.[9] Mark is one of Luke’s source (or so the dominant theory goes), but those who originally read Luke were not familiar with Mark’s Gospel and did not read Luke with Mark in mind. The author of John may or may not have known one of the synoptic Gospels, but the Johannine community read only John’s Gospel. There were multiple Gospels floating around early Christianity, but they were originally read in isolation from each other. This assumption is rarely explicitly affirmed, but it does seem to be implicit in most redactional readings. If this assumption is true, then it implicitly challenges the notion of an intertextual reading experience.

Narrative critics tend to dispense with the notion of an autonomous and independent community for each Gospel. Most narrative critics focus on John’s or Luke’s text rather than John’s or Luke’s community.[10] Let us assume, for the time being, that Gospels were not part of isolated and autonomous communities. How does that assumption make us rethink our views of the Gospel writers as authors? How does it make us rethink our views of the Gospels as texts? These are the questions implicitly facing us at today’s session.

Redaction Criticism, Parables and Intertextuality:

Hints and Warnings

Despite the claim that the Gospels are produced by isolated communities, redaction criticism does also put forth a rather particular and rather influential reading of how the Gospels are related to each other. More specifically, it puts forth a rather explicit reading of how Matthew and Luke relate to the Gospel of Mark. The metaphors put forth for this relationship are mostly culled from parable scholarship- with Mark being the polyvalyent and primordial parable and Matthew and Luke the domesticated, suffocating allegory. This parabolic view of the interrelationship between the Synoptics has found its way into at least some narrative critical discussions of intertextuality. Since this view runs from parable scholarship through redaction criticism to (some forms of) narrative criticism, it is worth analyzing in some detail.

Mark as Parable/Matthew & Luke as Allegory

Redaction critical readings of the Gospels are inherently intertextual. The method proceeds by analyzing the way that later Gospels (i.e. Mt/Lk) redacted their source (i.e. Mk). The question, for redaction critics, is not whether the (Synoptic) Gospels are intertextual but how the various Gospels relate to each other. Many redaction critics came out of parable scholarships and were therefore deeply influenced by Romanticism (by way of Dodd’s definition of parable) and Heideggerian existentialism (by way of Bultmann).[11] It is not surprising, therefore, that these first, redactional, intertextual readings of the Gospels shared the aesthetic and ideological commitments of parable scholarship. It is not surprising, in other words, that Mark, Matthew and Luke were read, by redaction critics, through the lens of parable scholarship.

Most redaction critics accepted uncritically the Heideggerian narrative of primordial origin followed by inevitable fall. If this narrative is true, then the earlier the tradition, the more pristine and primordial the teaching. We see this tale in historical Jesus research- where Jesus’s direct, immediate, uncalculated, vibrant, dynamic teachings give way to tame, domesticated and misunderstood primitive traditions and decadent written Gospels. Originary teachings inevitably fall into derivative traditions. This aesthetic assumption will also play a role in the literary analysis of the Gospel of Mark. For those who accept the priority of Mark, it is written somewhere between the late 60s and early 70s, making it later than the historical Jesus and earlier than the remaining Synoptic Gospels. If literary analysis of Mark stays within the fundamentally parabolic orbit (as it often does), then it has two distinct options, depending on the starting point of the analysis. (i) It can see Mark as derivative and fallen, as dulling the edges of the historical Jesus and as an obstacle to be overcome.[12] In this instance Mark is described in terms that had been used for allegory. (ii) It can see Mark as originary, as a paradoxical and primordial voice in early Christianity- as that which itself will be dulled by the later Synoptic Gospels. In this instance Mark is described in terms that had been used for parable, or is actually defined as parable. This is the position assumed by a surprisingly large number of literary critics of Mark. It is also possible to step outside of the Heideggerian orbit, to renounce the originary/fallen dichotomy and to configure Mark in other ways. This is the position most clearly articulated by Mary Ann Tolbert.

Let us dwell briefly on the parabolic reading of Mark and the allegorical reading of Matthew and Luke. Again, I wish to reiterate, I will necessarily limit my analysis to the view of intertextuality implicit in this particular model of reading the Synoptics. I will have to refrain from taking up methodological questions (i.e. how is Mark constructed as a parable?). Let us begin with Norman Perrin, who helped set this model of reading Mark in motion. This drift towards literary criticism of the Gospel of Mark emerged out of his (Perrin’s) practical historical criticism.[13]

Perrin

Norman Perrin was still trying to come to terms with the implications of Mark’s newly discovered literary skills when he met his untimely death. As a result, we will have to be content pursuing the implications of his few suggestive yet extremely influential statements. Perrin tends to find himself moving between position (i) and position (ii)- between Mark as fallen from the glorious heights of the historical Jesus and Mark as originary parable. This should not surprise us, given his own scholarly trajectory. Not only did he come to Markan scholarship from historical Jesus research in general and from parable research in particular, but his literary investigation of Mark coincided with his own literary reading of parables as aesthetic objects. As he was recognizing Mark’s creative literary skills he was also, and at the same time, singing the praises of Jesus’ unique aesthetic mastery. As a result, Perrin ends up caught between two antithetical positions- between Mark as allegory and Mark as parable. As a result he will be caught between what will become two antithetical evaluations of the Markan Gospel.

In an important early attempt (“Historical Criticism, Literary Criticism, and Hermeneutics”), Perrin explores the ways that Mark is both similar to and dissimilar to the parables. Most especially he is concerned with the ways that Mark and the parables are both reinterpreted by later texts. He repeats here an argument that he and others have already made elsewhere about the horrors of allegorizing the parables. Allegorization is never valid, always does violence to the form and function of the text, and is an example of eisegesis rather than exegesis (Perrin 1972: 367). It even borders on rape (Perrin 1972: 363). Matthew and Luke also take over, transform, and discard the Gospel Mark. They have their way with Mark, yet is it a comparable act of sexualized violence? Or is it closer to a consensual (if somewhat sordid) affair? In its way, this reinterpretation of the Gospel of Mark by the evangelists Matthew and Luke is as drastic as the church’s allegorization of the parables of Jesus. But there is also a difference in that the allegorization of the parables does violence to their nature as texts- as parables- whereas the transformation of the Gospel of Mark into a foundation myth does not do violence to its nature as a text. (Perrin 1972: 369)

The ambiguous and conflicted nature of the Markan aesthetic encourages the Matthean and Lukan reinterpretation of Mark (Perrin 1972: 372). Unlike the allegorization, the Matthean/Lukan redaction of Mark is, for Perrin, appropriate and even desirable.

Perrin takes this question up again several years later in his final book, The Resurrection According to Matthew, Mark and Luke. In this study he once again addresses the question of the nature of Mark and the appropriateness, or inappropriateness, of its reinterpretation at the hands of Matthew and Luke. This time, however, he turns to the category of myth rather than that of parable for help in interpreting the Synoptics. We should note, however, how quickly he slips back to the language, categories, and aesthetic assumptions of parable scholarship. He argues that each Synoptic Gospel embodies mythological structure, which he defines as “a narrative expression of the deepest realities of human experience” (1977: 11). He distinguishes between two types of myth, between foundational myths (which provide group structure and identity) and primordial myths (which explore archetypical questions of human existence). Mark turns out to be a primordial myth, while Matthew and Luke are foundational myths.[14] Mark does not concerned itself with anything as mundane as the founding of a Christian community. Instead it takes up the universal themes of suffering, death, and the overcoming of death. His Gospel resides in the world of archetypes and absolutes, of clashing ultimacy and primordial values (1977: 34-38). Mark, therefore, is difficult to interpret or to verbalize. “For me the Gospel of Mark is the gospel which comes closest to the primordial element in great art” (1977: 35). We should pay particular attention to Perrin’s aesthetic assumptions here. He points out Mark’s aesthetic brilliance, its universality, its concern with the themes of human existence, its primordiality. He is dipping into categories which were developed in the existentialism of Bultmann and his heirs. “Mark is attempting to convince his readers that they can experience the ultimacy of God in the concreteness, the historicality of their everyday existence” (1977: 83).

Suddenly, and rather surprisingly, Perrin returns to earlier, historical claims of the gap between the teachings of Jesus and their reception in the early Church. Jesus’s teaching consisted of polyvalyent parables, of “tensive” symbols which could not be exhausted by any single referent (1977: 37; see also 1976: 29-30, 197). Jesus’ eschaton is not a single event occurring on a particular date but is, instead, each person’s own experience of God as King (1977: 37). Mark’s apocalypticism shows that he follows the primitive Church in reducing Jesus’ polyvalyent symbolism into allegory and “steno-symbol”. In a statement that is directly antithetical to the one quoted above, Perrin concludes the following about both Mark and the rest of primitive Christianity. “Now it is no longer a matter of the experience of ultimacy in the historicality of the everyday, but the destruction of everydayness itself” (1977: 38). So is Mark existentially authentic (i.e. ultimacy in the concreteness of the everyday) or existentially inauthentic (i.e. destruction of the everyday in the misunderstanding of ultimacy)?[15] Perrin’s thought remains in tension with itself, never fully deciding if Mark is parable or allegory[16], but also never challenging the appropriateness of applying these categories to the study of the Gospels.

Fowler

Readers have been accustomed to giving all of the credit for parabolic speech to the protagonist (i.e. the historical Jesus), which would probably please a master of indirection such as Mark, but that Mark’s own use of indirection is masterful should now be brought to light. Fowler 183

Literary criticism of the Gospels is both an extension of redaction criticism and an act of rebellion against the earlier methods of form and redaction criticism. If the older methods broke the text down to discrete source/redactional units, literary criticism sees the Gospels as unified wholes. If redaction criticism was compulsively comparative, the first burst of narrative criticism sought to do the opposite: read each Gospel as an autonomous document with its own inner logic. As a result, most of the serious narrative-critical studies have interpreted a single Gospel without exploring the relationship of that Gospel to the others. The question of intertextuality (at least, intertextuality of the Gospels) has tended to be bracketed while other (quite important) issues have come to the fore. Now that literary criticism has established itself, however, it is time to broach again, from a strictly narrative-critical point of view- the question of the relationship between the Gospels.

There has been at least one serious attempt to read the Gospels intertextually: Fowler’s Let the Reader Understand.[17] Fowler’s text is explicitly literary-critical in a way that Perrin’s (or Kelber’s) is not. Fowler nimbly works his way through critical theory (Fowler 25-58) and carefully applies this theory throughout the remainder of the text. His goal is to break free from the historical critical perspective and to replace it with something else:

“This book intends to hasten the metamorphosis of my critical guild. This guild is still predominantly philological-historical in its presuppositions and practices....Here I take up the enduring legacy of philological-historical biblical criticism and more recent formalist literary criticism of the Bible to demonstrate one way we can move on from there” (Fowler 1).

He certainly works in that direction by reading widely in literary critical theory and by reading Mark from an entirely narrative-critical perspective. As I hope to show, however, Fowler’s study ends up, ironically enough, reaffirming the aesthetic and ideological commitments of historical criticism.

Fowler sees Mark as an indeterminate parable that is domesticated by later Gospel writers (for a critique of this general view, see Tolbert xi, 57, 87-89). The first thing to notice about Fowler’s book is his explicit indebtedness to parable scholarship. We shall encounter repeated references to terms drawn from parable scholarship (parable, metaparable, metaphor, polyvalyent), to fundamental assumptions drawn from parable scholarship (origin/fall), and to Crossan’s later parable scholarship (particularly to Cliffs of Fall and Dark Interval). As he himself explains, he is performing the same service for Mark that others have done for the parables. “Only in recent decades have we made significant progress in freeing the parables of the historical Jesus from the smothering embrace of Matthew and Luke. A similar mission for Mark’s parabolic discourse must also be conducted” (Fowler 256). It is this indebtedness to parable scholarship that helps him construct a Mark that if fundamentally polyvalyent, mysterious, indeterminate, open to multiple interpretations, and parabolic (see especially Fowler 133-165). “We cannot solve the puzzle, but we never seem to tire of unraveling and reknitting the threads. Should we not gather from our activity that the act of unraveling and reknitting is the thing and that the achievement of a final, definitive product is a false hope? Can we not recognize that Mark’s narrative is a puzzle, without supposing that a definitive solution exists?” (Fowler 174-5).

Having offered a thorough reading of Mark, Fowler concludes by taking up the question of Matthean and Lukan rereadings of Mark (chapter 9). He does so within the context of critical theory, as he explores the concepts of tangled Gospels, reading grids, intertextuality, palmipset and strong readings (Fowler 230-237). Unfortunately, the meat of the analysis is more indebted to parable scholarship than it is to Kristeva. The parabolic logic of origin/fall dictates that the remainder of the New Testament must fall from Mark’s dizzying heights. Fearful of the radical, parabolic freedom offered by Mark’s rhetoric of indirection, Matthew and Luke must necessarily run to the security of inauthenticity. The later Gospels blunt Mark’s sharp ironic edges, clarify its ambiguities, fill in its gaps and rectify its indirection (Fowler 173, 181). They prefer direction to indirection, transparency to opacity, and clarity to puzzles. In doing so they “completely destroy this revelatory moment” and dilute the infinitely richer experience of reading Mark (Fowler 199-201). These “creative and powerful misreadings” (Fowler 237), are powerful assaults on Mark’s text but also upon the dignity and freedom of the reader. “Matthew’s text curtails the very thing that Mark’s text revels in: the reader’s exercise of interpretive freedom” (Fowler 251). Fearing interpretive chaos, Matthew “severely restricts the interpretive options available to the reader” and “seals up the empty tomb” (ibid)- transforming (in strikingly Bultmannian diction) the puzzle of the narrative into “a physical fact primarily in the story” (Fowler 250). The authentic parable has become an inauthentic, mythological, and theologically illegitimate. Mark’s open-ended and liberating parable has become a closed, despotic allegory. What was once geared to the reader’s free imagination, is now limited to textual facts. Matthew in particular literalizes Jesus and the disciples- who had functioned figuratively in Mark- and “represents perhaps the first such revision and the first great step toward the domestication, literalization, and historicization of the parabolic discourse of the Gospel of Mark” (Fowler 255-256, italics mine).

Conclusion to this section:

Some thoughts on Parable/Allegory/Gospel

So what are we to make of this perspective (i.e. the parables of Jesus/Mark as parable)? What sort of species of intertextuality does it represent?[18] There are several things worth highlighting.

i) There is a remarkable consistency in aesthetic assumptions. A sort of Heideggerianized Romanticism informs the parable scholarship of Funk and Crossan (where the primordial parables are domesticated by the derivative allegory) to the redaction criticism of Perrin (where Mark’s primordial myth is domesticated by the foundational myths of Matthew and Luke) to the literary criticism of Fowler (where Mark’s rhetoric of indirection is domesticated by Matthew’s authoritarian rhetoric of indirection). Despite this constancy, I doubt that this particular reading of the relationship between the Gospels will stand the test of time. I have three reasons for thinking this.

a) The same critical forces that led to the narrative-critical challenge to the methodology of form and redaction criticism will lead to challenges to the aesthetic assumptions of historical criticism. The Romantic dichotomy between parable/allegory; the Heideggerian narrative of primordiality followed by a fall- all of this is ripe for deconstruction. There are a lot of ways to think about the relationship between later Gospels and earlier ones. I would suggest, however, that “domestication” (i.e. Matthew domesticated Mark), is not a terribly productive way to think about this relationship (see Kelley forthcoming chapters 4-6).

b) The “Mark as parable” view has hardly won universal acclaim among Markan critics. Tolbert offers a non-parabolic reading of Mark that strikes me as eminently persuasive. While I am speaking as a former student of Tolbert’s, I suspect that future narrative-critical readings of Mark will continue to affirm Tolbert’s position over Fowler’s.

c) The view that Matthew and Luke domesticate a more primordial Mark is even less likely to win acclaim among Lukan and Matthean narrative critics. It is hard to imagine someone working for a decade on the intricacies of Luke-Acts, only to conclude that Luke’s primary goal is to (perhaps inadvertently) squish a more original and powerful Gospel.

d) The parabolic view implicitly limits the question of Gospel intertextuality to the Synoptics, leaving no framework for thinking about how Luke might reread John or Mark.

Intertextual readings of the Gospels need to put forth readings that are persuasive on a variety of levels. An intertextual reading (say of Mark/Luke) needs to be persuasive in its interpretation of Mark, of Luke, and of the relationship between them. We continue to see the publication of more and more careful and nuanced narrative-critical readings of each of the Gospels. These studies will inevitably lead to alternative intertextual readings of each of the Gospels. This is not to suggest that Matthew and Luke are immune to critique. In criticizing the parabolic framework, I am not trying to suggest that Matthew and Luke are immune from criticism. It may well be the case that Matthew and Luke change some of the most interesting aspects of Mark. Their portrayal of, say, the disciples, may be less interesting and challenging than Mark’s. The challenge is to conceive of this relationship without recourse to parable scholarship and, by extension, the aesthetic values of Romanticism and Heidegger.

ii) There is an intriguing (albeit confused) politics implicit in the parabolic reading. There is an implicit relationship between polyvalyence and freedom. So, for Crossan, Jesus’ multivalyent parables represent freedom while the univocal allegories are examples of totalitarianism.

Is a too great thirst for univalence an indication of totalitarian imagination? Or, in other words, even if univalence is not always totalitarian, must totalitarianism always be univalent? If one understands univalence to be the normal situation of human communication and polyvalence to be a confusing interruption by artists and comedians, is such an understanding totalitarian? (Cliffs 56).

For Fowler, it is Mark’s open-ended, parabolic nature that renders it liberating. Having structured his argument around the categories of direction and indirection, Fowler attributes political values to each. Direction is authoritarian and dominating, while indirection sponsors freedom on the part of the reader. The dominance of rhetorical indirection renders Mark a reader-oriented text (Fowler 57-58, 219), one which the reader can freely encounter and freely interpret. Fowler’s Mark not only permits, it demands the free exercise of the reader’s imagination and, thereby, makes possible readerly freedom. Mark is an “antiauthoritarian voice that I welcome and that I would like others to hear as well” (Fowler 262). For Fowler, the later Gospels blunt Mark’s sharp ironic edges, clarify its ambiguities, fill in its gaps and rectify its indirection (Fowler 173, 181). These “creative and powerful misreadings” (Fowler 237), are powerful assaults on Mark’s text but also upon the dignity and freedom of the reader. “Matthew’s text curtails the very thing that Mark’s text revels in: the reader’s exercise of interpretive freedom” (Fowler 251).

There is in these arguments a faint, although perhaps unintentional, allusion to the aesthetics of Bahktin and Kristeva. One of Bahktin’s crucial ideas is to oppose the dialogic utterance to the monologic utterance (see Allen 21-30). The dialogic utterance is double-voiced and polyphonic and implicitly challenges unitarian, authoritarian voice of official power. Kristeva, in her celebration of the jouissance of certain texts, argues something similar (see Allen 56-58). The problem for biblical scholars is that Bahktin and Kristeva argue, often at great length, that these dialogic texts are explicitly modern or even postmodern. Bahktin sees the novels, especially the novels of Dostoevsky[19], as dialogic while Kristeva celebrates modernist and Avante-garde texts. It seems to me to be an anachronistic misapplication of the term dialogic to apply it (or something like it) to Mark’s Gospel, with its reliable narrator and its reliable (i.e. divine) hero.

Finally, both Crossan and Fowler get their definition of freedom from Heidegger.[20] Heidegger himself was, of course, a member in good standing in the National Socialist party, which renders his definition of freedom necessarily suspect. I am not trying to suggest that Heidegger’s politics should mean the dismissal of all of his ideas, but I would suggest (at the very least) that we are long past the time when Heideggerian ideas, particularly Heideggerian political ideas about freedom, can be uncritically appropriated. If we wish to align critical biblical scholarship with the elevated concept of freedom (and I do), then we should not uncritically ground this quest in the thought of Heidegger. Perhaps further engagement with the theory of intertextuality would prove to be helpful.

CONCLUSION

Narrative criticism should certainly be open to exploring the question of Gospel intertextuality. Critical theory pushes us in that direction, as does the nature of the Gospels themselves and the general flow of the discipline of biblical scholarship. At the same time, it is worth asking how exactly should a narrative Gospel critic proceed? There are, I would suggest, a number of distinct problems to be overcome.

I have argued that Gospel critics interested in the problem of Gospel intertextuality should ground itself more carefully in intertextual critical theory. Unfortunately, this is not as easy to do as one might first suspect. The theory itself, as Kristeva presents it, is suggestive rather than prescriptive and can plausible go in any number of directions. Furthermore, Kristeva’s theory has been applied in a number of different ways by a number of different critics. Engagement with Kristeva seems like an essential first step, but such engagement leaves as many questions as it does answers. The critical application of the theory has been applied to texts that are so different from the Gospels, that they too do little to directly illuminate the relationship between the Gospels. Intertextual theory and intertextual practice is quite helpful, but it is not a single thing that can be directly applied to the study of the Gospels.

Turning to redaction or parable criticism (as Fowler does) for inspiration does not seem to help much. One major strain of redaction criticism implicitly denies the importance of intertextual reading experiences by positing isolated communities which do not share Gospels. Another strain of redaction criticism takes over the aesthetic values of parable criticism and posits a simplistic relationship between the Gospels (where later Gospels seek to domesticate the early, authentic Gospel of Mark).

The challenge, I suspect, is to find a more complicated set of intertextual relationships between each Gospel. Those who reject the consensus position on Mark and Q (i.e. Greisbachians, Farrerites), as well as those who have been laboring on literary readings of individual Gospels, might be especially well positioned to contribute to the discussion. The rest of today’s panel will be spent taking up that challenge.

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NOTES