Larsen and Mark

Andrew Criddle muses about what “a gospel” was in the first two centuries, and how that shapes what we can responsibly imagine about Mark’s textual history. On one side is a “bookish” model: a gospel is a finished, authored volume, published once for a specific audience. On the other is a “process” model: gospel as an ongoing dossier of notes, rearrangements, and expansions, with the codex-stage, author-name, and fixed text arriving relatively late.

In the process model, stories about Mark being written from preaching and only later arranged are not just pious anecdotes; they mirror ordinary ancient workflows, where hypomnēmata were rough notes or memoranda that might circulate, be excerpted, then be shaped into a more polished composition. Papias’ famous remark, preserved by a fourth-century historian, is often read this way: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately all that he remembered – not, however, in order – of the things said or done by the Lord”. On this reading, what we call “Mark” can be seen as the textualization of oral teaching, a first-stage documentary record that someone else might later rearrange or expand, rather than a self-enclosed monograph. That same model then interprets “according to X” titles not primarily as naming authors in the modern sense, but as tagging who arranged or transmitted a particular configuration of the dossier.

From there, the suggestion is that Mark and Matthew were originally experienced less as two separate, competing “books” and more as a short and long state of one living project. Matthew would be the same material “according to” a different arranger who has added taxis, elaboration, and interpretive framing to an earlier set of Markan logia or notes. If that’s right, then multiple Markan recensions – including the possibility of a lengthened or restricted version for advanced instruction – cease to be intrinsically odd; they fit the expectation that such dossiers could be expanded, reordered, and tailored for different audiences.

The cautionary side of the discussion insists, first, that the key terminology is not as clean as this reconstruction assumes. The explicit “hypomnēma” language for Mark in later writers may be paraphrastic and technically imprecise, and the semantic range of hypomnēmata and related terms is broad enough that one should be wary of building a rigid genre model on them. Second, the extant Mark is too artfully composed – with intercalations, thematic structuring, and deliberate narrative effects – to be treated as an unarranged notebook waiting for someone else to make it into a real book. From this perspective, the evangelists are indeed tradents who work with inherited material, but they are also authors of coherent narratives, and projecting a hypomnēmata-to-finished-work pipeline onto them risks over-theorizing what were, in practice, diverse and messy textual habits.

So the “open gospel” thesis does important negative work: it undermines the argument that multiple Markan states or recensions are anachronistic or impossible in principle. But it does not, by itself, provide positive evidence for any particular longer or “secret” Mark, nor does it override the literary integrity of the canonical text or the ambiguities of our second-century testimony. It shifts the default from “that kind of fluidity couldn’t have happened” to “that kind of fluidity could have happened,” leaving the hard questions to be decided on more specific philological, stylistic, and historical grounds.