{"id":28796,"date":"2014-01-28T06:11:11","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T11:11:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=28796"},"modified":"2014-01-28T11:03:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T16:03:12","slug":"a-seven-participle-pile-up-in-mark-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2014\/01\/a-seven-participle-pile-up-in-mark-5\/","title":{"rendered":"A Seven-Participle Pile Up in Mark 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark’s writing style is characterized by\u00a0parataxis, which means that he writes really short, simple sentences and then joins them together with the word “and.” (It’s the kind of thing your elementary school teachers were always trying to get you to stop doing.)<\/p>\n

There’s one really spectacular exception to Mark’s tendency, however. \u00a0It occurs when we are introduced to the woman who had been menstruating unceasingly for twelve years. One sentence spans Mark 5:25-27 and has seven participles (=a form of a verb used to modify a noun) before the main verb. It looks like this:<\/p>\n

And a woman having (1st participle) a flow of blood for twelve years, suffering (2nd) many things under many doctors, spending (3rd) all that she had, not improving (4th), but getting (5th) worse, hearing (6th) stories about Jesus, and coming (7th) after him in the crowd, touched (finally: the main verb!) his clothes. (my translation;\u00a0KJV\u00a0here<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This description of the woman has a pronounced effect on the audience, partially because it is so unusual for Mark. It also stretches the sentence out in an almost unendurable way, mirroring the endless suffering of the woman. It builds suspense for the audience as they anticipate the main action but are denied it again and again. The woman’s touch thus becomes an enormous release of pent-up feeling, serving as the perfect metaphor for her situation as all of her trial and faith is concentrated on Jesus. It also invites Mark’s audience to adopt the perspective of the bleeding woman and to view the touch as the culmination of everything that she has endured. Finally, it is almost painful for the audience to read this long, drawn-out account when they were already on the edge of their seats waiting for Jesus to heal a little girl who was at the very brink of death before this woman ever showed up.<\/p>\n

In recent decades, scholars have spent a lot of time thinking about Mark’s Gospel as an oral performance–that is, as a work originally designed to be performed for an audience who would hear it, not read it. It is easy for me to imagine a speaker running out of breath as he [1] wends through Mark 5:25-27, and with only a last gasp left, announces that she touched his cloak. Whew. Just in time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] Yes, it was almost certainly a “he.” (But at least he’s telling a story that would make all of the men in the room cringe, right? \u00a0I quote Bamberger: “Ancient man reacted to the phenomena of menstruation with a horror that seems to us grotesque and hysterical.” Has anything changed? I think not.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark’s writing style is characterized by\u00a0parataxis, which means that he writes really short, simple sentences and then joins them together with the word “and.” (It’s the kind of thing your elementary school teachers were always trying to get you to stop doing.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28796"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28907,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28796\/revisions\/28907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}