Joel Williams on Robert Stein’s Mark Commentary

I just received the most recent email from the Review of Biblical Literature and in it Joel Williams provides a helpful review of Bob Stein’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark in the BECNT Series. Overall the review is positive, and while Williams shares many of the same evangelical presuppositions as Stein, he reserves his most pointed critiques for Stein’s rejection of reader-oriented approaches. (Stein uses a cautious redaction criticism.) Williams writes:

Still, Stein’s general reliance on redaction criticism has implications. At times, one loses the sense that  Mark’s Gospel is a narrative, a story that may have shifts and turns in the plot or in the portrayal of people. Stein’s interpretations are perhaps a bit too uniform. One example involves his outline for Mark. After the prologue (1:1–13), Stein divides Mark’s Gospel into six parts. The first two parts (1:14–3:6; 3:7–6:6a) have the exact same title “Who is this Jesus?” (35). Major sections of Mark’s Gospel seem to be identified by structural patterns alone rather than by any significant development in the story (67). The third part receives a new title “Mission and Misunderstanding” (6:6b–8:21), which draws attention to the efforts and failures of the disciples. However, Stein hastens to point out that the section is not primarily about the disciples but about answering the question “Who then is this?” (4:41; see 288). For Stein, this section, like every section in Mark, is about Jesus, the Son of God (288; cf. 737). Therefore, the outline communicates well that Mark’s Gospel throughout is first and foremost about Jesus, but it leaves little reason for making any divisions in the text.

I have always found it quite strange that many (if not most) evangelicals, who have as high a regard for the biblical text as any confessional group, generally reject literary approaches in favor of strictly historical-critical methods. One would think that those who have a great desire to preach the biblical narratives about Jesus would embrace any method that allows them to draw out the story’s meaning. In his scholarship Joel Williams has been blazing a trail for other evangelicals to engage in narrative and reader-response criticisms. Here’s hoping that others will follow.