reviewed by Gary W. Charles
What do you get for the preacher/ teacher/Bible student who has everything? M. Eugene Boring has made that shopping decision easier. His new commentary on the Gospel of Mark is one book that serious students of Scripture will want on their bookshelf or by their bedside. As the church on Advent 1 entered a new lectionary year with Mark, Boring’s book is a gift that will enrich its readers for the entire year and for years to come.
In recent decades, few biblical books have been read with more scrutiny and have evoked more interpretive debate than the first gospel. Literary, political, social, rhetorical, feminist, cultural readings of the Gospel of Mark have contributed fresh and often challenging understandings of how Mark tells his “gospel.” Boring is well acquainted with recent Markan scholarship and in this commentary he presents the readers with a fascinating blend of traditional, current, and his own insightful perspective on Mark. This familiarity shaped his goal for this book: “I have attempted to present the information readers of Mark need in order to engage the text, without merely assembling a collection of miscellaneous comments — a commentary in the worst sense of the word (Preface).”
Boring respects the history of the story of Jesus, but his commentary focuses more on how Mark retells the story of Jesus, i.e., Mark’s theology. A startlingly effective gift in this book is Boring’s fresh translation of Mark. For years, we have known that this gospel was composed to be heard by its Greek-hearing audience. We have known how frequently Mark makes use of the historical present and shifts verb tenses within the same sentence, but Boring’s new translation captures the effect of this storytelling technique with often stunning effect. His translation also captures the force of Greek tenses, especially the imperfect and perfect, in a way rarely achieved in English translations. Oftentimes, his translation opens new vistas into Mark by the way he renders the Greek: “Where does this guy get this from?” “and they snorted at her” (14:5); “I do not know nor understand what you are talking about” (14:68). Throughout the commentary, Boring anticipates the theological questions that Mark’s Gospel prompts as he includes eight excursus essays on everything from “The Messianic Secret” to “Miracle Stories in Mark.”
Perhaps the greatest gift Boring gives in this commentary is his keen eye, and ear, to Mark’s theological intent. After a discussion of the call of the first four disciples in Mark 1:16-20, Boring reflects: “The followers of Jesus are not a voluntaristic society for promoting good, but those whose business-as-usual lives have been disrupted by a draft notice” (p. 60). Recognizing the profound influence of Isaiah on Markan theology, Boring writes about the baptism of Jesus: “The Spirit descends into Jesus. … The coming of the Spirit is not a soft, warm-fuzzy image (despite the analogy of the dove). ‘Spirit’ connotes power, eschatological power, as in Isa 11:1-5 — another Isaiah connection in this context” (p. 45). Reflecting on how Mark ends, Boring asks the key narrative question, “Is there anyone else who might after all be a faithful disciple? … Now, the readers stand at the brink of the incomplete narrative in which all have failed, and, with terrible restraint, the narrator breaks off the story and leaves the readers, who may have thought the story was about somebody else, with a decision to make. … ” (p. 449).
While I read the literary-political-theological intent of the final two chapters of Mark differently than Boring at some critical junctures, I appreciate his fairness in acquainting readers with the variety of ways that one can read this gospel. I could wish that he would have given greater credence to exegetical and theological insights from such scholars as Ched Myers, Mary Ann Tolbert, and Brian Blount, but neither does he ignore these and other important Markan scholarship. On occasion, it is hard to know whether it is Boring reading Mark faithfully or Boring reading into Mark his own theological disposition; i.e., in the trial before Pilate Boring wonders why Jesus does not speak with the power demonstrated in chapter 1. He concludes: “Yet here it is not the powerful Son of God who acts, but the truly human Jesus, who has resolved to suffer and die according to the will of God” (p. 420). These, though, are minor disputes with what is a masterful piece of scholarship.
I suspect that by next Christ the King Sunday this book will be worn from weeks of grateful wear. I can almost promise it.
Gary W. Charles is pastor of Central Church in Atlanta, Ga.
