A Critical Review Of James M Robinson's The Problem Of History In Mark
Submitted by DEFord on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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A Critical Review Of James M Robinson's The Problem Of History In Mark
The first issue of New Testament Studies began with an article by Rudolf Bultmann where he wrote: "history is swallowed up by eschatology
the history of man as person can no longer be understood as a function of world-history, but is set beyond world-history." James Robinson's study , for which he received a Princeton doctorate in 1955 , was sponsored by the Christian Research Association, and is a response to the 1950s debate about the relationship of Christianity to history. After also writing A New Quest of the Historical Jesus; Robinson was to receive a fair degree of depreciative dubbing. He reflected:
Although one never is happy to be labelled, one should seek to accept with good grace the inevitability of such procedures, and hope that this human proclivity will lead to as little distortion as possible.
The aim of this essay is to evaluate as fairly as possible The Problem of Mark in History.
Robinson devotes 75% of his monograph to a detailing from Mark of the cosmic struggle between: "the Spirit and Satan; the Son of God and demoniacs, Jesus and his opponents". His thesis is that by engaging in the cosmic struggle Jesus is inaugurating an aeon of history which will continue until the struggle reaches its concluding point at the parousia after which the final era will be non-historical. The history which Jesus inaugurates is that where the eschatological is present: "the truth of history is rooted in the affirmation of the presence of eschatology in history."
Such history is then extended to the readers of the gospel:
This existentialist form of universality
is rooted in the fact that Mark envisages the cosmic struggle as extending to all peoples and continuing to the culmination of history.
Following the parousia events are described in terms "which are of a clearly non-historical nature" . Although Robinson does not explain...
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