A Beautiful Failure : The Event of Death and Rhetorical Disorder in the Gospel according to Mark

Sammanfattning: Is there beauty in rhetorical failure? This study is an exploration of disorder and death in the Gospel according to Mark (Mk). With a surviving fragment from the second-century theologian Papias of Hierapolis, the early reception of Mk locates insights into the composition of Jesus’s death, especially through the concepts of ataxia and rhetorical failure. Papias launches an early and influential defense of its unsystematic presentation (Hist. eccl. 3.39.1–17), understood to be a kind of failure (hamartêma). By exploring this Papian doxa and heuristically accepting “disorderly failure” as a characteristic of Mk in general and 15:6–39 in particular, the present study seeks to determine a sense of Jesus’s death, directly linking an articulation of the shameful event of Jesus’s execution on a suspension-pole to the methodological and theoretical appreciation of disorder in a rhetorical composition.The study first investigates the structural (in)coherency in Mk. Going as far back as the school of Formgeschichte in the 1920s, a widespread scholarly opinion finds the content of the passion narrative (Mk 14:1–16:8) to resist its otherwise largely incoherent narrative structure. Thus, I ask: What does a progymnastic analysis reveal about the episodic order, style, and thought of Jesus’s death in Mk 15:6–39? With a methodological perspective informed by Aelius Theon’s Progymnasmata (first century CE) and the concepts of order (τάξις: taxis), style (λέξις: lexis), and thought (διανοία: dianoia), the passion narrative unfolds with a series of basic narrational episodes of “short stories” (διηγήματα: diêgêmata) and “anecdotes” (χρεῖαι: chreiai). In relation to these episodes’ inner organization and the organization of the narrational elements of person (πρόσωπον: prosôpon) and happening (πρᾶγμα; πρᾶξις: pragma; praxis), Jesus’s death scene is a particularly troubled section. Yet its rhetorical idiosyncrasies are not limited to a presentation of “persons-in-action.” The passage is filled with aspects of humiliation, obscurity, secrecy, and a paradoxical rendition of the protagonist’s final hours, while also investing its story with apocalyptic imagery and a declaration of Jesus as “a son of God,” post-mortem. The Papian doxa therefore adequately summarize the acme of this ancient narrative.With the Papian belief in truth subsisting in ataxia, failure does not need to be an end of sense and beauty. I therefore also ask: what sense and rhetorical meaning of Jesus’s death result from a progymnastic-like composition of disorder in Mk 15:6–39? In light of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Franz Kafka, the exploration of Joseph K.’s execution in The Trial (Der Prozeß) underlines similarities to the symbolically loaded, yet obscure, death-event in Mk 15:6–39. An analysis of K.’s demise points toward an effectual rhetoric, dedicated to expressing a de-humanizing process of dying and its final actualization through a metamorphosis into an animal-like state. The prose of K.’s end rearticulates central features found in Jesus’s death, not least a “becoming-animal” of social death. Further, while Theon’s Progymnasmata and the rhetoric of the Greco-Roman antiquity helped identify disorder and failure in Mk, the same perspective nonetheless struggles with the task of attributing the ataxia in Mk 15:6–39 with meaning. Turning to the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the concept of the “event” in his Logic of Sense in particular, disorderly failure is allowed to speak on its own terms. Building especially upon the results from the methodological and progymnastic analysis, Logic of Sense and the concept of event underline signs of novelty of thought and literary innovation in the ancient rhetoric of Jesus’s death. Logic of Sense assists in an evaluation of the failure of disorder in Mk 15:6–39, drawing attention to its ability to express the sense of an event. As event, I argue, the ataxia of Jesus’s death finds theoretical resources for constructing a “rhetoric of failure,” and thereby affirms the literary potential of the Papian doxa and adamant belief in the truth and perhaps even a divine beauty of failure. Lastly, imagining the sense and “sensation” of Jesus’s death, Deleuze’s exegesis of painter Francis Bacon and the motif of “crucifixion” in his art becomes crucial. Extending the line of argument found in Logic of Sense, Bacon’s vision of suspended and decaying bodies, the grotesque and creative event at play in Mk 15:6–39 gains even more determination.