Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:724 (Oct 2024)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Joseph W. Lee

BSac 181:724 (October-December 2024) p. 495

Periodical Reviews

By The Faculty and Staff of Dallas Theological Seminary

Joseph W. Lee,

Editor

“Mark as Ritual Narrative: Anointing, Memorial, and Genre Signifiers in Mark 14:3–9,” by Paul D. Wheatley, CBQ 85.3 (2023): 465–84.

Wheatley is an assistant professor of New Testament at Nashotah House Theological Seminary in Nashotah, Wisconsin. In this article he contends that interpreters are right to recognize “eucharistic and burial rites in Mark 14:3–9” but that they have typically overlooked “a larger narrative framework in which ritual symbolism, and baptismal symbolism more specifically, resonates” (466). He concludes that this passage locates Mark “as a narrative that interweaves the proclamation of the kerygma of Jesus’s death and resurrection with his ongoing presence in the ritual practices of the community” (484).

In part 1 Wheatley engages Bultmann’s designation of the Synoptics as “expanded cult legends” (468). His focus is not on Bultmann’s position that the Gospels are ahistorical but on the idea that Gospel pericopae are meant to inform early Christian rituals, especially the Eucharist and baptism. He then proposes an underlying “metaphorical and structural role” for baptism (469), marking eight passages that model or reference baptism throughout the Gospel of Mark. Narrowing the scope, he compares 14:3–9 to Jesus’s baptism in 1:9–11, underlining the symbolic relationship between baptism and death (469).

Part 2 consists of word studies on μύρον (aromatic ointment) and νάρδος (oil of nard), both as Mark employs the terms (14:3) and as they were used in the Septuagint, specifically in Song of Songs and Psalms. Wheatley’s intertextual work elicits a strong connection between this passage and “royal anointing imagery” (472). Within Mark’s Gospel, he notes, the theme of anointing begins in 1:1 with Mark’s designation of Jesus as Χριστός (anointed one).

Wheatley traces the connection between anointing and deliverance through death in part 3. These connections are apparent in contemporaneous writings, including Origen and Hippolytus, as well as early Jewish interpretations of Song of Songs (473–74). He also briefly considers Pauline passages on baptism. In this literary context, Wheatley suggests that Jesus’s submission to anointing symbolizes his “submission to death in hope of divine deliverance” (474).