The Genre of Mark’s Gospel Is ‘Gospel’: Reconsidering Literary Innovation in the Markan Incipit

Abstract

Classifying Gospels as ancient Graeco-Roman biographies addresses an array of scholarly questions about how these texts relate to their wider literary culture. That classification also requires considerable qualification since Gospels—particularly the Gospel of Mark—at times diverge from certain generic conventions. This study rearticulates the out-of-fashion claim that ‘Mark’ created a new literary genre, even if penned in a biographical structure. When this pioneer evangelist breaks the compositional silence, he reveals immediately that he is writing ‘gospel’. As a recognizable communication type, ‘gospel’ was an oral proclamation of deliverance and rescue that this writer innovatively narrativizes and textualizes. If this work is a biography, it is so only secondarily, because primarily, Mark is a ‘gospel’ announcing an interruptive divine deliverance that is narratable and so scripturally evocative that it is worthy of textual rendering. In opening the scroll to Mark, εὐθύς there is εὐαγγέλιον (immediately, there is gospel), a designation beckoning the audience to receive what follows as if the skies have been split open and the soundscape burst apart with a new story-shaped word that disrupts reality as well as literary conventions. What is the genre of this early Christian text? It is just what Mark tells us: ‘gospel’.