R. Meynet, L’évangile de Marc. Deuxième édition, revue et augmentée, RBSem 45, Peeters, Leuven 2025 (632 p.)
For a long time, it was thought that the books of the Bible, being the product of oral traditions haphazardly compiled by a final writer with little regard for order, were nothing more than a sort of patchwork. Today, an increasing number of exegetes realize that these texts are composed and well composed. But they must be examined according to the specific literary tradition to which they belong. They do not belong to classical Greek-Latin Rhetoric, but to Semitic Rhetoric, whose laws are much better known today.
Some scholars have taken an interest in the composition of the Second Gospel, in particular Jean Radermakers, Benoît Standaert, and Bastiaan van Iersel. Their pioneering work deserved to be revisited, using a more rigorous, now well-established methodology: Semitic Rhetorical Analysis.
Mark’s composition is a marvel of regularity, both in its details and in its overall architecture. Two large sections comprise seven sequences that focus on one of Jesus’ great discourses, the discourse of the beginning in chapter 4 and the discourse of fulfillment in chapter 13. Between these two sections, a third, located outside the borders of Israel, is composed of Jesus’ discourse on the disciple. At the heart of this central discourse — and therefore at the heart of the entire Gospel — resounds the twofold question: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and lose his life?” (8:36-37).
Curiously, therefore, the Gospel of Mark does not focus directly on Jesus, but on the disciple. This is precisely what the later author of the long ending that concludes the book intuited, showing Jesus leaving all the space to his disciples for the proclamation of the Gospel of God.
