301 - Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

Mark: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary

By C.S. Mann

Anchor Bible 27. Garden City, Doubleday, 1986. 715 Pp. $20.00.

C. S. Mann, dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary's Seminary and University in Baltimore and co-author of the Anchor Bible commentary on Matthew, has now produced a commentary on Mark in the same series. A long introductory section (190 pp.) summarizes the state of the art in Gospel studies in general and Markan studies in particular. Mann, opposing the scholarly consensus, embraces the Griesbach hypothesis, according to which Mark is not the earliest Gospel but a later conflation of Matthew and Luke. This is a defensible position, but the payoff is not overwhelming, especially in the commentary section itself. Here relatively more attention is paid to technical questions of historical detail in the life of Jesus than to discussions of the significance of the individual passages for Mark, his community, and contemporary Christians. The reader is left, overall, with a disappointing impression of theological thinness in the commentary.

Joel Marcus, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J.