A World without Mark: an Experiment in Erasure History

Abstract

Erasure History is a subset of the discipline of counter-factual history, an exploration in imagining history without a work that scholars see as pivotal. Erasing Mark’s gospel provides a fruitful thought experiment about the key role it plays in current scholarly reflections on Christian origins. This article imagines the erasure of Mark under three different headings. First, Mark is erased from the surviving manuscript record, imagining that Mark was indeed written and that it was a source for Matthew and Luke, but that no witness to it survived antiquity. Second, Mark is erased from history only to resurface in a handful of manuscript fragments in the 1890s and 1900s, and a more complete textual witness in 1945. Finally, and most drastically, the article imagines that the boy who grew up to be the author of Mark’s gospel did not survive childhood and that his gospel never existed.