Centre for Studying New Testament Texts

17/10/2024

Bible Sunday (this year on the 27th October) needs celebrating, but the Bible's writers themselves need liberating...

On Bible Sunday every year, the great work of Bible Societies around the world - to make Bibles, New Testaments and Gospels available to people in their own first language - is celebrated and applauded. But it is not so with everyone! There is one group that would go into hiding as Bible Sunday approaches if they were still around. It is the heavenly court of writers, the writers themselves of the Biblical texts.

To celebrate Bible Sunday last year, a columnist at the Church Times wrote:
‘We do not know how blest we are to have our modern Bibles presented to us with such beautiful clarity, and with every assistance for wise reading.’
It would not have been well received by the writers. Rather, ever since their works were first translated, their texts have not been read in the ways that they first were, the ways that the writers intended.

Cally Hammond is the Church Times’s Sunday’s Readings columnist. She is also the Dean of Gonville and Caius College and a staff member of the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. It is to this Faculty that the Methodist Church sent me in 1981, kicking and screaming, to complete my pre-ordination training. At the end of my time there I did apologise to the then Ministerial Secretary for Probationer Ministers, the Revd Gerald Burt. He had been the one who had insisted I went there. ‘You have degrees as an Architect;’ he said, ‘you need a degree in Theology. If you don’t go this year, you won’t be going at all.’ I understood his threat and left behind my lay-ministerial and Pre-Collegiate Probationer’s appointment in Holloway and Camden Town. It was the only work I wanted to do at that time. But I submitted to the discipline of the Methodist Church, nevertheless. To my great surprise, as I left Cambridge, I knew that I knew things about the four Gospels and Acts that had never been seen before, never been published. By 1988, I was publishing my own work on these texts and The Revelation!

What did I know then that others didn’t? I knew that the biblical writers had done a better job at presenting their texts in their languages than all the translators and editors of their works of the past eighteen-hundred years! Cally Hammond and millions like her may be able to celebrate Bible Sunday, but the writers cannot! In all the Bibles that have ever been produced, their purposes have been thwarted. If they could see their texts now, they would charge us all with indifference towards them; the texts are in a hideous state of ambiguity and unhelpfulness.

Absolutely no text is presented as its writer intended.
No text, therefore, is read as its writer intended.
And, because of this, no text is understood as its writer intended.

But who wants to know this? Revd Dr Carolyn J.-B. Hammond doesn’t. Her article moved me to write to her personally to tell her what she and others like her were doing to the texts. She courteously replied, even quite quickly so, but she made it clear that she did not wish to engage with me further. Was it because I was a Methodist Minister and not an Anglican Priest? Personally, I am glad I am a Methodist Minister. I have the evidence, haven’t I, that the Bible’s writers were God’s first ‘Methodists’. Whether of the Old Testament in the Hebrew, or of the New Testament in the Greek, all the texts are disciplined and have their own divisions and sub-divisions which indicate their structures and their employment of style. It is these that reveal the writers’ meaning and purpose.

I make my principal point here: rather than give us the actual divisions that the writers gave their texts, the editors of the Bibles we read today give us two lots of alternative divisions merged in to one. One set goes back to Stephen Langton who became Archbishop of Canterbury in the thirteenth century, years after he had devised his portioning of the two Testaments. His ‘chapters’ survive to this day. The second set attempts to take account of some divisions that recent scholars and commentators have drawn attention to, like Lk 9.51. Together, with editors’ titling and sub-titling, they add up to nothing more than a jumble (a jungle?) of signs to readers. Yes, using chapter and verse, we can all find the same piece of text as each other anywhere in the world at any time, but what is the point if the starting reference to a piece of text is not that of its writer? The letters of James, 1 Peter and 1 John, for example, are given five chapters each, though they possess just four sections, two outer and two inner! Or consider the reference Lk 9.43b: it cannot be right that the largest section in all the New Testament’s texts begins at an obscure reference like this, yet it is here that Luke’s ‘Central Section’ begins (and not at 9.51).

Reading to the writers’ own divisions and sub-divisions alone leads readers to the intended meaning and purpose of the writers. All the texts have their own structure and style. Mark’s Gospel comprises a Title, a Prologue, Four Series (A,B,B’,A’) each of Seven Days (in the Homeric arrangement of ABB’XABB’) and an Epilogue. All these elements are composed to the structure ABB’ and the writing style from the beginning to the end is ABB’, where A is the introductory piece, B is the first development and B’ is the second, paralleling and concluding development. Matthew, Luke and Acts all share the same basic arrangement 1,2,3,4,5,C,5’,4’,3’,2’,1’. John’s basic arrangement is ABB’XABB’ (see Mark above). Meanings and purpose pour out of all these arrangements! In Mark, in the first three days of each series, Jesus is completing the Old Covenant; in the last three days of each series he is establishing the New Covenant. Consider The Acts of the Apostles. Acts parallels Luke for structure: the life of Jesus is lived over again in the life of the church; it is a life of mission and service that the Spirit brings to birth, directs in the world and sustains through every kind of trial.

In our Bibles, the texts do not give up their meaning as the writers intended because translators and Bible editors choose to use an artificial (and muddled) method for dividing up of the texts. It has been ever so, over all the generations. Essentially, they have been in ignorance of the writers’ writing discipline.

The texts are disciplined writings that fulfilled the rules of writing in their day - of oral/aural communication at a time when few people could read or write. These rules were generated from the time of Homer and included: Idea, Structure, Style, Memory and Performance. Without this understanding, Bible editors and translators have, however, seen ‘the words’, if not ‘the works’ (in their parts and as wholes). Yet even then, they have not always translated all ‘the words’, even the important ones. Where, for example, is reference to 'rising up' - anastas - in Mark's two ‘middle days’, at 7.24 and 10.1 in the GNB and the NIV? Consistent translation of ‘the words’ too, of course, would improve the representation of the texts. But until ‘the works’ are seen, for their ‘words’ and their syntax, no improvement will be made.

In ignorance, translators have attempted in the past to improve the texts before they knew how they were supposed to be read. See 1 Cor. 13: compare the Greek with the English. This piece of poetry is never allowed to be what it actually is. Translators disrupt the poetic flow of the passage by switching and swapping words. And presenters of the passage invariably include 13.13. But 13.13 begins the following passage! Its inclusion (with 13.1-12) is a distraction which undermines the writer’s purpose here. Paul is trying to say that in our lifetimes we must never let differences in our understanding cause division in the church, for we can know or prophecy only ‘in part’, even with the help of spiritual gifts. The key thought of Paul here is: ‘Love - never - fails’ (13.8a).

Or consider the King James Version of The Revelation. The translator comes across a repeating phrase in its middle section and instead of presenting ‘And I saw…’ seven times so that it stands out for the listener as the writer intended, he shows himself to be wanting to improve the text. He actually muddles the first, follows it with ‘And I beheld…’, then with ‘And I looked upon…’, and only at the fourth and thereafter with ‘And I saw…’: this results in the reader being prevented by the ‘refined’ translator from ‘hearing’ that the writer is signalling ‘Seven Visions’. The Revelation consists of a menorahic, seven times seven arrangement.

Sometimes, we find translators interpreting pronouns badly, thinking themselves to be helpful. At a Methodist Circuit Service I attended I was listening to a reading of John 10, the ‘I am the Gate, the Good Shepherd’ passage, and I heard the reader read out ‘Pharisees’, not just once, but twice! I was shocked. I found out later that the reader was reading from Zondervan’s New International American Giant Version (produced for people with poor eyesight). It is the only translation in existence, possibly, which interprets this passage as one in which Jesus is speaking to Pharisees. Yes, he is speaking to ‘Jews’, but in this chapter, in the Greek there is no mention of ‘Pharisees’. There is, of course, in Chapter 9 a mention of ‘Pharisees’, but the literary gap between the ending of Chapter 9 and the beginning of Chapter 10 is huge.

At a Methodist Carol Service I attended this last Christmas, the Christmas reading from John chapter 1 was reduced to 1.1-5. I was astonished! The week before it, I had attended an Anglican Service; it was the traditional 1.1-14 that I was asked to read from their lectern. I confess to reading 1.1-18 instead! It is in 1.15-18 that we read the writer’s punch-line to his Prologue. Every year, at Christmas, this writer gets no justice! It is true also at Easter. The writer’s three readings are 20.1-13, 14-29 and 30-31, but it is 20.1-18 that is read. The presentations in our Bibles of passages such as these are to blame for our misuse of the texts.

I allow myself another illustration. For this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, we had study notes prepared by Church Leaders in Burkina Faso (in West Africa) which promoted a reading of Luke 10.25-37, when for the writer it should have been 10.25-42. Translations of v.38 frequently mislead because they add more than the Greek provides and make people think vv.38-42 cannot possibly belong with 10.25-37. But they do belong. The disciplined text reveals this.

Editors’ breaks in the texts, their titles and their subtitles also add to the unhelpful nature of the presentations. They very rarely aid understanding of the whole text and how to read it. As for titling going astray, several examples are found in the GNB and the NIV. In Luke 15, the first title, ‘The Lost Sheep’, precedes Jesus talking and eating with ‘tax collectors and other outcasts’. The three-part (dactylic, ABB’?) writing of the writer is totally unexpressed in all the breaks and sub-titles of this chapter. The clear parallel piece to ‘The Lost Sheep’ is, of course, ‘The Lost Coin’: these are the B and B’ pieces which follow the introductory piece A. Following this, we get ‘A Man and His Two Sons’, in a similar construction: the introductory A piece which introduces the father and his two sons is followed by the first development, the B piece, with its focus on the ‘Adventurous Son’ and the second development, the B’ piece, on the ‘Stay-at-home Son’. Inconsistent translation becomes clear, rather amusingly, in the openings of ‘The Lost Sheep’ and ‘The Lost Coin’. They should have begun as follows: the first, ‘What man of you, having a hundred sheep…’, and the second, ‘Or what woman having ten drachma…’. Instead, the first reads, ‘Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep…’ and the second, ‘Or suppose a woman who has ten silver coins…’ How are we to interpret the translator here? Did not Jesus tell some stories appropriate to men and others appropriate to women? Or was it that the translator had pressure put on him/her to create a text totally free of the word, ‘man’?

The modernising of texts by translators and editors is additionally problematic. Translators and editors may try to justify developments, say, when representing ‘brothers’ in the Greek by ‘brothers and sisters’ in the English, or by substituting ‘mob’ for ‘legion’, but they rob the texts of their authenticity and rob teachers and preachers also of their responsibility to explain such things. Further, ‘legion’ and ‘centurion’ are Roman army terms. ‘Mob’ is not! In translating Mark’s Gospel, it is necessary to preserve the many dualities: they are the writers’ aids to its reading. (Compare the different translations of Mk. 5.1-20 and 15.1-47.)

Bible editors could do better also when they wish to deny the authenticity of a part of a text like the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel. They appeal to one lot of evidence but not to another. In most Bibles, there is a reference to ‘the earliest manuscripts’ which do not include it, but no reference at all to still ‘earlier manuscripts’ which did reference the longer ending that was known to the Early Fathers in AD 155, 165 and 180 (without verses 17-18 until AD 200 or so), long before 331 when Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (the Bible editors’ ‘earliest manuscripts’) were written.

Bible editors need to know the texts. They would do well also to reflect on the dates they were written. Most scholars know that Paul’s Early Letters pre-date the Gospels by at least twenty years. Editors should be bold enough to open the New Testament with them, surely? The Gospels literally ‘build’ on them!

Translators and editors have never known what the writers actually achieved, or that it was professional writers who worked with the ‘named writers’ (at the top of each text) to produce texts that could be copied easily, memorised securely and interpreted accurately to listeners distanced in space and in time. Because of scholarly short-comings, no one gets to read and understand any text in the way that the ‘writers’ themselves intended twenty centuries ago!

The quote of Cally Hammond with which this paper opens gives expression to the scale of the problem facing the church and academia today. It is a massive job that lies before us to make good past and present damage. It is as daunting as it is exciting. No reader will want to be told that their Bibles are deficient in their presentations. Who believes anyway, today, that the texts were meant to be read by everyone in exactly the same way?

Of course, this doesn’t matter too much to the one who claims his/her Bible is the Word of God and, for the most part, reads only pieces of text and does not see the need to read whole texts. Rather, they jump here, there and almost anywhere to find something relevant to their need at any particular time. For the most part, their own needs dictate their reading. They never think to consider how the writers wrote their texts, what kind of texts they are reading and how they ought to be reading the texts - for the meaning the writers intended.

The writers themselves deserve justice in our generation. They have waited long enough for it. They have been cheated in their first-century endeavours, failed by both the Church and Academia. Could it be different at next year’s Bible Sunday? I won’t be holding my breath.

Some Postscripts:
As I concluded this paper, I saw an advert, in the pages of the British New Testament Society, for yet another Zondervan Commentary. Downloadable access to the author’s notes on Acts 2.1-31 is offered to anyone who signs up to purchasing the book which will be out soon. It will be the first of two volumes and it will cover Acts 1.1-9.42. It reminds me of earlier publications of Luke’s Gospel in two volumes where the second volume begins at 9.51. The Bible’s writers would not be at all encouraged to see any of these charted breaks!

For a Sunday reading recently, Mark 10.17-31, an edition of the NIV put the first part under the title ‘A Rich Young Man’. The Greek, however, reads that he kept the commandments that Jesus asked him about, not ‘since he was a boy’, but ‘since his youth’; and not that he has ‘great wealth’, but ‘much possessions’. Is he not simply, in the writer’s mind, an old man who has all that he ever wanted?

David G Palmer

Methodist Minister (Supernumerary), Architect (retired) and (still active) Bible Scholar

17/04/2024

YOU MIGHT THINK THAT YOUR BIBLE IS THE BEST IT CAN BE, BUT IT DEFINITELY IS NOT!

Rather than give you the actual divisions and punctuation of the texts as the writers intended, your Bible gives you a man’s opinion of them from the thirteenth century which, when compared with scholarship today, looks like nothing more than just a stab in the dark. Yes, the use of chapter and verse means we can all find the same piece of text as each other anywhere in the world at any time, but what is the point if it does not square with the writers’ own referencing systems for their texts? James, 1 Peter and 1 John, for example, are given five chapters though they each possess just four sections, two outer and two inner. Or consider the reference Lk 9.43b: it cannot be right that the largest section of all the New Testament texts begins at a reference like this, yet it is where Luke’s Central Section begins.

Reading to the writers’ own divisions and sub-divisions alone leads readers to the intended meaning and purpose of the writers. All the texts have their own structure and style. They are disciplined writings that fulfilled the rules of writing in their day - of oral/aural communication at a time when few people could read or write. These rules were generated from the time of Homer and included: Idea, Structure, Style, Memory and Performance. Your Bible’s editors and translators, however, are unaware of these things. Translators translate the words, but not systematically and not always all the words, even important ones. (Where is reference to 'rising up' -anastasas - in Mark's two middle days, at 7.24 and 10.1, in the GNB and the NIV?) But more importantly still, translators don’t translate the ‘works’, that is, both the words and the syntax. They need to see know the texts for what they are.

Too many times we find translators attempting to improve the texts before they know how they were supposed to be read. See 1 Cor. 13: compare the Greek with the English. This piece of poetry is never allowed to be what it actually is. (And note: the last verse of chapter 13 actually begins the next piece.) Or consider the King James Version of the Revelation: in wishing to improve the text, the translator comes across a repeating phrase in the middle section and instead of presenting ‘And I saw…’ seven times (so that it stands out for the listener as the writer intended) he muddles the first, follows it with ‘And I beheld…’, then with ‘And I looked…’, and only at the fourth and after with ‘And I saw…’.

Editors too need to know the texts and their comparative ages. Order is given these texts which is inappropriate. Breaks in the texts, titles and subtitles, likewise, are often inappropriate. This helps no one. As Paul’s Early Letters pre-date the Gospels, editors should be bold enough, surely, to open the New Testament with them today because the Gospels literally ‘build’ on them. As for titling going astray, several examples are found in the Good News Bible in Luke 15: here, the first title, ‘The Lost Sheep’, precedes Jesus talking with ‘tax collectors and other outcasts’. The three-part (dactylic?) writing of the writer is totally unexpressed in all the breaks and sub-titles of this chapter.

The modernising of texts by translators and editors is also problematic. They may try to justify developments when representing ‘brothers’ in the Greek by ‘brothers and sisters’ in the English, or by substituting ‘mob’ for ‘legion’ and the like, but they rob the texts of their authenticity and rob teachers and preachers too of their responsibility for explaining such things. ‘Legion’ and ‘centurion’ for instance are Roman army terms, but not ‘mob’ and ‘centurion’; in Mark’s Gospel in translation it is necessary that dualities, of which there are many, are maintained.

Bible editors could also do better when they wish to deny the authenticity of a part of a text, say, like the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel. They appeal to one lot of evidence but not to another. In most Bibles, there is a reference to ‘the earliest manuscripts’ which do not include it, but no reference at all to earlier manuscripts which did have it and the Early Fathers who knew it in AD 155, 165 and 180 (without verses 17-18 until AD 200 or so), long before 331 when Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were written.

Translators and editors have never known what the writers achieved. Because of their scholarly short-comings, no one gets to read and understand the texts in the ways that the writers themselves always intended. It has been so for eighteen centuries! The quote below gives expression to the problem facing the church and academia today. Both are blissfully unaware (sadly) of what they are missing.

Cally Hammond writes weekly on ‘Sunday Readings’ in the Church Times. On 27 October 2023, she stated: ‘We do not know how blest we are to have our modern Bibles presented to us with such beautiful clarity, and with every assistance for wise reading.’ (Cally is a staff member of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.)

David A Dorsey’s book (1999), ‘THE LITERARY STRUCTURE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT’, addresses the issue of the structures of the Old Testament’s texts and makes a good start with considerations of style.

My latest book (2023), ‘CHALLENGING NEW TESTAMENT SCHOLARSHIP: THE TEXTS IN FULL AND IN DETAIL’, is a compilation which reveals completely the structure and style (and therefore the self-referencing methods) of all of the texts in the New Testament.

(Revd Dr) David G Palmer, 17.04.2024

PS: I should like to get preparations going to produce a Bible that is 1) true to the writers’ endeavours and 2) useful to the needs of readers who wish to understand the texts.

Up until now, our Bibles have been the product principally of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. It is now time for a greater input from the Methodist Church. Ours is a natural affinity with Christendom’s ‘first methodists’, the writers. It is proper, therefore, that we Methodists, the Nonconformists that we are, challenge the status quo today that Wesley himself challenged in 1754 as he commended following the ‘chain of arguments in each book’ rather than those that attach to ‘each chapter’ (see his Preface, para. 11, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament).

We don’t really have a choice! Under the 1976 Methodist Church Act, Wesley’s Notes are literally a ‘must read’ for all (Methodist) preachers (in Great Britain). Further, my research has been sponsored by the Methodist Church now for forty-five years. It is only right, therefore, that Methodists today respond as we can to Wesley’s want.

1) If you are for this, tick this; and
2) If you are up for it, book me to speak at a meeting to muster more support.

22/01/2024

I was preaching last night, the windy night of Storm Isha, at an ecumenical service. About twenty people made it to Ss Peter and Paul, Swadlincote. I make my sermon available here so that others may learn what was on my mind:

31/08/2023

My new book is being advertised:

Forty years of research persuades us that there is more to the Greek texts than is generally known:

01/03/2023

My Kickstarter, crowd-funding 'PROJECT: PRINT AND PROMOTE' is now launched. Anyone can click on the URL below and simply explore what it is about, with no fear of being dragged in to doing what they don't want to do.

PROJECT: PRINT AND PROMOTE

22/02/2023

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dgp-lit-nt/the-lost-new-testament-the-texts-the-first-readers-knew

Launching 1st March...

PROJECT: PRINT AND PROMOTE

07/10/2022

One man’s forty-year battle with Academia and the Church over a jaw-dropping, far-reaching new discovery will end in the summer of 2023 as he reaches the age of seventy-five, whether he knows success or failure. Ahead of that time, therefore, he has written his story in the hope that by then the wholly subjective and undisciplined way of reading New Testament texts (throughout the past seventeen-hundred years!) is jettisoned and replaced with the wholly disciplined and objective way which the writers themselves facilitated even as they wrote their texts.
His paper can be found by clicking on www.davidgpalmer.co.uk/my-forty-year-battle/ and then by clicking on My Battle Rev (in red). He is inviting readers to leave him feedback on his Blog.

09/08/2022

This Summary of my literary analysis of Mark's Gospel has been prepared so that I will have it with me at the up-coming British New Testament Conference and, in particular, available for the members of the Synoptic Gospels Seminar Group:

04/07/2022

Lectionary Readings of the Central Section of Luke's Gospel began on Sunday 26th June 2022. They continue throughout the Summer to the 30th October, through 18 weeks in all. But, sadly, few preachers (and, therefore, congregations) will ever know this. They have few books to turn to - to make sense of this reading. For instance, in his Greek Commentary on Luke, I. Howard Marshall introduces this section as beginning at 9.51 (as all scholars do, it seems, but for me); he speaks also of uncertainty as to its ending; and he says too that it lacks logical progression, that there is no kind of thread running through it or any easily defined themes.

But see my presentation of 9.43b-19.48. It shows that it is disciplined in its organization. It reveals structural symmetries: an overall symmetry of 9.43b-10.24, 10.25-18.30 and 18.31-19.48 and symmetries within these three main elements.
The central Catechism itself balances around an important revelation that links with revelations in Jesus Setting Out for and Arriving In Jerusalem. Check out 13.31-35, at the very heart of the Central Section and the Gospel: Jesus is not going to be deflected from what he is here to do.

Reading 9.43b-45, here the writer has Jesus telling his disciples what is soon to happen to him. The disciples cannot understand. (A highly significant, parallel piece to this is to be found in 18.31-34.)
Then at 9.51, Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem. Even though he is going to his death there, he is determined to do what he has to do. In 9.51-56 and 10.1-16, the writer presents parallel stories of messengers being sent ahead of him.
Given in the first of these pieces, 9.51-56, that as their message is rejected and they want Jesus to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village, the writer tells us that Jesus is absolutely opposed to that! In the second and parallel piece, 10.1-16, however, the writer has Jesus speaking about the sufferings that cities will inevitably face. The writer is surely saying it is not Jesus’ will that any suffer.

When Jesus is about to arrive in Jerusalem, 18.31-19.48, the writer presents Jesus now as going ahead of his disciples (19.28): Jesus is even more determined than ever to do what he has to do! At the last, in this Section, Jesus weeps for that city, for what is going to happen to it and its people, and judges too, those involved in the Temple’s business. Jesus’ fate and that of many cities, but especially Jerusalem, are tied up with each other, says the writer.

The writer is totally in charge of what we are reading: contrary to I Howard Marshall’s judgements, the writer demonstrates logical progression; reveals and defines themes; and, though the itinerary makes little sense (between the pieces that tell of Jesus setting out for and arriving in Jerusalem), the structure of the whole does show that there is a thread running through this Section. This Section is built for clarity of reading and understanding, as well as for memorizing. The central chiastic structure 1-5C5-1 is used twice more in this Gospel: in the setting out of the genealogy (with seven names per line) and in the Gospel’s sectional structure.

We may choose to be joyful today that we can now understand the structure and style of Luke’s Gospel. (The writer’s style echoes Homeric dactylic, as found in the Iliad, which can be represented by ABB’ where A is the introductory piece, B is the first development and B’ is the second, paralleling and concluding development.) Or we may choose to deplore the fact that New Testament scholars have not bothered themselves to pursue a purely literary analysis of the text and to read it in the light of the rules and practices of Hellenist first century writing. (Some, of course, may choose both!)

David G Palmer, 04.07.2022

Forty years of research persuades us that there is more to the Greek texts than is generally known:

18/05/2022

The attached summary chart of John’s Gospel, the Church’s Easter/Eastertide Lectionary Gospel, can be viewed as a reading scheme which exposes the writer’s discipline in classical writing, shaped by the Hellenist rules of Invention, Structure, Style, Memory and Delivery.
I am prompted to share this here and now because:
1) it is Eastertide; and
2) I would honour Burton L Mack who died recently - his research for Rhetoric and the New Testament stirred me to develop a fruitful method for analysing Greek texts, as initially for my PhD research into Mark.

26/04/2022

David G Palmer’s Review of Helen K Bond’s
The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel

This is a scholarly work. It is the fruit of much scholarly research and it sits well within the currents and consensuses of New Testament gospel research today. But it is not the ground-breaker that it might have been. To start with, there is a missing final chapter which might have demonstrated ‘the profound difference’ in reading and understanding Mark’s Gospel, which is promised on the inside book cover, for knowing that the Gospel is bios. Further to this, Helen herself, at many points in her book, admits deficiencies in the Gospel’s representation of bios: on p.11, we read, Mark does not set out his credentials at the beginning; on p.115, there is no strong authorial voice; on p.125, there is a lack of interest in Jesus’ early years, no ancestry (Helen may think that Matthew and Luke in turn add such to Mark’s gospel, to improve Mark’s Gospel as bios, but it does not prove that they viewed his work already as bios); on pp.161, 164, there is no physical description of the text’s primary character (Mark’s reluctance to give it is noteworthy); on p.178, Mark does not offer any formal comparisons of people and situations, because, says Helen, he cannot have had the kind of rhetorical training that would have enabled him to do this (it is a concerning deduction which does not recognise the dangers of tautological argument); and on p.251, reading Mark as bios does not solve the problem of Mark’s ending.

On genre itself, Helen and those who preceded her appear to think that ‘genre’ is of greater importance than ‘structure’ for interpreting a script. Rather, see Augustine who argued that literary form and meaning were inseparable (On Christian Doctrine, IV.6-7). To him, there was no understanding a text without first understanding its structure. It is unhelpful, therefore, that Helen’s contribution on ‘Structure’ is the least developed of her whole presentation; it takes us back forty years to Ernest Best’s reading of Mark and fails to discuss the developments of the ‘nineties’ and the ‘noughties’ and everything since.

Most importantly, I think, Helen fails to give consideration to the nearest alternative to bios, which is drama. In the case of Mark, I think, the drama is a Greek Tragedy. Examples of such are many which include: a Prologue (Prologos, for the setting of the scene), Parados (entry of characters), Episodia (three or more episodes or series) interspersed with Stasima (explanations, commentaries on the developing situation) and the Exodos (Epilogos, the concluding of the story). [Consider here, Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica for what it teaches on the Epilogue, that its sentences are not to begin with KAI (with this form of ‘and’). If scholars had known this rule they would not have been so quick to judge un-Markan the parts of Mark’s ‘longer ending’ because the sentences did not begin with his normal ‘And…’]. Drama, we note, gets an audience to reflect on its social, political and religious values. Good drama maintains unity of the plot and is a tightly organised sequence of ‘necessary and probable’ events, with the hero going from happiness to misery. Drama is performance more than it is recital, with up to three actors, in addition to a chorus usually. My 1998 PhD literary analysis of Mark’s Gospel reveals four episodes of seven parts, Four Series in the chiastic arrangement of ABB’A’, each of Seven Days, with days in the arrangement of ABB’XABB’, the arrangement of Days in Homer’s Iliad, where X is the middle turning point and the sub-Series, ABB’, each side of it consist of an introductory piece, followed by two parallel pieces, the first and the second developments.

Helen further fails to give any space to the responsibilities of all writers to their readers, reciters, performers and audience. In the context of the first century when an oral/aural form of communication prevailed, because approximately 95% of the population were unable to read, all were able to benefit when the writer kept to the rules of Invention, Structure, Style, Memory and Performance, whereby the reader would be enabled to interpret the text’s columns of capital letters, without gaps between words and with no punctuation other than edentations. It is through Style (and dualities and repeating opening words, etc.) that the Structure is revealed and through Structure that the purpose of the text (the writer’s Invention) is revealed. And it is through Style and Structure that memorable arrangement is revealed and the text set to Memory for its Performance, or of course for helping non-readers memorise it.

Helen considers how material from Paul’s letters may have influenced Mark’s compositional approach. In Paul’s (seven) letters is much material suitable to the telling of a life of Jesus, the re-telling of some of his teachings, as well as the reportings of events in which Jesus was involved as viewed by Paul as ‘church tradition’ and ‘passed on’ by him to his church in Corinth, notably: 1) of a last supper ‘on the night he was betrayed’ (though not a Passover Supper and not a betrayal by one of the twelve, for which see 1 Cor. 11.23-26; 15.5) and 2) on Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection (with appearances, for which see 1 Cor. 15.3-8). To add a further two letters to the possible list of Paul’s original letters raises also the possibility of an ‘ascension’ as well as further ‘descriptions’ of Jesus. Helen begins to reflect on Paul’s metaphorical description of Jesus as the ‘paschal lamb’, but nothing is developed as it might have been. In my analysis of Mark, I find in Mark’s final episodium, that the writer balances Jesus’ clearing of the Temple of sellers, money-changers and sacrificial animals and birds (through which people were made right with God) with Jesus as the new Temple dying on the cross (through which people are now made right with God). Central to these two parallel scenes are the plotting of Jesus’ betrayal and the fragrancing of him for his burial. Mark gives events their first datings as he re-interprets with action stories Paul’s understanding of Jesus’ dying as ‘a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God’ (see both Phil. 4.18 and Eph. 5.2). Mark’s Gospel is ‘eternal truth’ set to story. On this point alone and, maybe, in this way to some extent, Helen and I might want to agree with each other.

How will Helen’s book be received? It will be well received as a help to scholars who do not have the time, or inclination, to read as widely as she has been able to do. Who will it help? Scholars, principally! It is difficult imagining her work, without a seventh chapter, helping preachers and teachers in church groups. What will her book be appreciated for? It will be appreciated for its attention to detail, especially as regards to the characters portrayed in the Gospel. It will not set New Testament Studies alight, or set a new agenda of research! Already other books are doing that, which show that the Gospel of Mark is not only Greco-Roman writing as it had to be in the first century, but also an epic which fulfils the rules of the drama of a Greek Tragedy - with Title, Prologue, Four Series of Seven Days and an Epilogue which not only mirrors the Prologue for structure, style (ABB’) and content, but which also completes the writer’s supply of information for his reader so that he can check he has read the text in the way the writer intended: where the last frame of the Prologue reveals ‘two brothers’ plus ‘two more brothers’ (where the two middle Series parallel each other and the two outer ‘Series’ parallel each other); and where the first frame of the Epilogue reveals the number ‘seven’ (which is indicative of the ‘seven’ Days in each Series).

Finally, we reflect on Helen’s primary thesis, that Mark’s Gospel was written ‘to extend Christ-following proclamation (the “gospel”) from an earlier narrow focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus so that it now included the way of life of its founding figure’ (p.253). But what does the Gospel’s structure actually disclose? Most impressively, in Mark’s Gospel, on the First Day of the opening episode we read that the sun sets on the Sabbath of the Old Covenant, and on the Last Day of the closing episode the sun rises on the Sabbath of the New Covenant (16.1-8 is no Epilogue). The purpose of Mark’s drama, therefore, is to establish what God had been doing, how Jesus had been bringing the Old Covenant to its completion, to its end. With the Fall of Judea and Jerusalem in AD 70 (in the Prologue, see who goes out to John: it is the Judeans and the Jerusalemites), God had been bringing his people to judgement, under the Romans this time, as he did in the past under the Assyrians in 722 BC and the Babylonians in 586 BC. And God had been bringing the New Covenant to its beginning, through his Son. (In the first three-day sub-Series of each Series, Jesus is fulfilling and completing the Old Covenant: in the last three-day sub-Series in each, he is founding and establishing the New.) As the likely original Epilogue (a reduced longer ending, Mk. 16.9-16,19-20a) informs: those believing and being baptised were to be saved (gathered up out of the war, at Jesus’ return, by his angels, Mk. 13.26-27); whereas those disbelieving were to be condemned. According to the text’s title (Mk.1.1 and Codex Sinaiticus) Mk. 1.2-16.20a is the ‘Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ’.

The text is our judge in such matters as these. It judges our capacity for subjective thought as we read it in the ways we think best, but declares its own objective truths about itself and its purposes as we read it in the way its writer always intended.