I have tried to examine the gospels in light of the limited experience-fields of humans as individuals. We are born and exist within frames of reference, and we act upon--and are acted upon by--our environments. In short, our lives are referential and interactional. Referential, in that we are thrust into surroundings with which we must reckon, even in the most rudimentary understandings of infants. Interactional, in that our actualizations must rely on interplay with our environments.
Our lives, both in total and in fragments (from decades-long phases to instants of processed experience) can be understood as arcs, which I have understood in our commonplace notions of beginning, middle, and end. From this I have gotten this blog's theme of "Roused, Readied, Reaped." Insofar as there is generalized commonality in human experience, it is worth considering whether or not the structure itself of experience ("referential" and "interactional") is more important to understanding of existence than is a framework of dimensions (time, place, sequence of occurrence or placement, and the like.)
Moreover, if experience-type is what characterizes existence, then the display of experience-type is what would be expected in any recounting of events, in preference to particulars of individuals. This phenomenon is replete in the scriptures, in which an experience will be described with little or no concern for logically-defensible constraint of experiences within the bounds of concrete entities. I will try to show (as a beginning endeavor) how this mode of analysis makes accessible the Gospel of Mark, and I will start (instead of at the beginning) at a crucial juncture in the book.
"And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives. And Jesus saith unto them, All ye shall be offended because of me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered" (14:26-27, KJV). Conventionally, this is understood as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, but the bar of such a pronouncement is set very low. It would be as defensible to claim that Jesus was simply using an evocative figure of speech. (Incidentally, this reference from Zechariah 13--if such it is--shares an embarrassing characteristic with the "By the rivers of Babylon" Psalm 137: ostensibly righteous violence against the innocent young.)
What is more, the overall passage from Zechariah does not pass without a reference to "the house of David" and "the inhabitants of Jerusalem" rendered by the New Jerusalem Bible as "I shall say, 'He is my people,' and he will say, 'Yahweh is my God!'" It is small wonder that the messiah has often been taken by Jewish commentators to be a personification of a conceptualized Israel. "Experience" as a phenomenon throughout the Bible is treated as such an overriding element of existence as to challenge every notion of dimension. It is in such a light that Mark needs to be examined.
And so we have, "And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives." This is the prelude to the Arrest and all that follows. This is when Jesus tells a protesting Peter that "thou shalt deny me thrice"--a rather interesting prediction, in that there would seem scarcely to be conceptual room for Peter to rally himself otherwise without defying the woeful determination of God. Nonetheless, Peter and all the others declare that they will not deny Jesus. In common parlance, it would be reckoned that the matter is not settled, and it would be reckoned that yet enough give-and-take existed between Jesus and his disciples so that his disciples might wholesomely strive to "make a liar out of" Jesus.
Jesus then goes and prays three times to be relieved of his burden of suffering. What Jesus is praying for is an impossibility, and yet it would be an impossibility for him not to pray so--this is all honesty, and yet it can be recognized that honesty in conception relies not on pure logic. What we must remember is that an entire universe of experience is entailed in Jesus' agonized almost-understanding of his plight. (And this is not meant as an impiety, when the very text of Mark has Jesus declare that he himself as the Son knows not all that is known by the Father.)
It would be odd indeed if the same phenomenon of almost-understanding was not seen in the challenges presented to the disciples. They are told that they will abandon Jesus, and yet it is implicit in their relationship to Jesus that they will not do so (and we do well to remember that the punishment for them aligning themselves straightforwardly with Jesus before the authorities would be to suffer a version of his fate.) It would be scarcely reasonable to imagine that the disciples (that is, Peter, James, and John in this given moment) would know what to pray for. Would it not be reasonable, given time and space to consider the matter, to say that the disciples should have prayed along with Jesus for his deliverance? And yet Peter is shown in Mark's gospel being upbraided most severely for attempting to dissuade Jesus in his fatal mission.
In the garden, Jesus tells the disciples to pray (as the NJB has it) "not to be put to the test," and yet is it not implicit in their attempt to stand by Jesus that they would be put to the test? After all, they are told by Jesus in chapter 10 that "Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized." The disciples are doomed to failure, and Peter's failure is just the most dramatic (unless we count the failure of Judas, though it might well be said that all the disciples "betrayed" Jesus.)
The failure of the disciples is sealed in the narrative by Jesus saying woefully, "Sleep on now, and take your rest: it is enough, the hour is come" and one cannot wonder if the same woeful tone is not implicit in his chosen non-specific statement, "he that betrayeth me is at hand." For no real necessity, the next verse tells us that Judas is "one of the twelve," and he is called thereafter, "he that betrayeth him." Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mark's gospel has none of the notion, presented belatedly in John, that Peter drew a sword and cut off anyone's ear. The disciples were thoroughly defeated men the moment Jesus walked out of their sight in the garden.
If it be reckoned that there is a "gospel story" to be told, then certainly from the moment of the Arrest onward, the Gospel of Mark is a masterwork of brevity. (Even the ending of the gospel that is almost universally thought an addition is relatively sparse.) What matters for us here is the set-up in Mark for the ending. Mark presents concepts and the human experience-types that attend those concepts. Even the brief set of passages we have covered have dealt with petitioning and testing and betrayal as aspects of human experience, not as labels associated with particular characters. The post-Arrest parts of the gospel can be dealt with in short order.
What will take more doing, however, is tracing backward from the Arrest to the beginning of Mark. If that seems an odd route to take, I would submit that almost all of the treatments of Mark in lay experience are essentially backward, in that they make this (presumably) first of the gospels subject to concepts and conventions that are drawn from the others. We must try to take that apart.
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