The Bible Story of Mark 5 Will Leave You SHOCKED And Speechless!
The Bible Story of Mark 5 Will Leave You SHOCKED And Speechless!
Every once in a while, something incredible comes our way that we cannot wait to share. It is a good thing I have this YouTube channel, right? Not too long ago, I had the privilege of discussing with Dr. D.C. Allison Jr. what counts as historical fact in the Gospels. A particular standout was the odd scene in Mark 5, where Jesus’s actions seem more fictional than remembered. But here is where it gets really interesting: Dr. Dennis R. MacDonald pointed out that this story might just be imitating classics like Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, with a heavier lean on the Odyssey. This imitation, or mimesis, isn’t just copying; it’s about adapting these famous tales for a new audience.
Through my time with MythVision, I have seen many scholars suggest such influences on Luke-Acts, but suggestions for Mark’s Gospel have been scarce. Yet, there are exceptions, like Dr. Robin Faith Walsh, who sees echoes of Virgil’s Aeneid in Mark. Then there is Chris Rosser from Oklahoma Christian University; his insightful piece not only bridges the gap between believers and skeptics but also demonstrates a deep understanding of Mark’s intentions using both Jewish and non-Jewish sources. This has sparked hope for more fruitful dialogues across beliefs. If Mark is layering his narrative this way, what more could we be missing in the New Testament? Ready to dive into a world where Cyclops, witches, cave monsters, and demigod heroes mingle? Let us embark on the epic quest to uncover how deep these ancient influences run and perhaps see Jesus in a new light as he triumphs in mythical battles. Who is with me?
Professor McMillan concluded class that day with an insightful observation: “The odd ‘we’ passages of Acts, where narrative perspective awkwardly shifts from third person to first person plural—those odd ‘we’ passages seem to coincide with stories in and around the city of Troas. I’m not sure why, but it’s interesting to note.” Yes, it was an interesting observation, similar to others I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Lynn McMillan share during the two semesters we co-taught Bible and classical literature for honor students at Oklahoma Christian University. Indeed, his comment was the first time I had heard a connection made between the mysterious “we” passages and the ancient city of Troy. Since Troas was proximate to Old Troy and conveyed association between Aeneas of Troy and epic stories about the origins of Roman power, Lynn’s observation opened my eyes and ears to a possibility that the “we” passages of Acts might be understood literarily and not historically.
Perhaps that shift in language, proximate with stories in and around Troas—a shift in language most akin to Odysseus’s narration of his own travels after the sack of Troy—might signal an intentional intertextuality and not simply indicate that Luke joined Paul’s company at Troas, as has been widely assumed. Lynn became for me an unwitting muse, or more likely, as a masterful teacher, Lynn intentionally ignites imagination with questions so that students might make associations that yield new insights and bring to light possible but undiscovered meanings. Lynn may have been an unwitting muse, but he has been my muse nonetheless.
The following is offered in honor of distinguished Professor Lynn McMillan in hopes that attending to imitation and inversion of unfamiliar story might yield new insight and bring to light possible but undiscovered meaning out of Mark’s telling of Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac. We will explore the possibility that the odd Latin loanword legio (or legion) signals intertextuality with Virgil’s Aeneid, specifically hearing Hercules rend open the cavern of Cacus—groans and cracks of rock, roots snapping as a stony precipice is heaved into churning waters, summoning unexpected daylight to transform the darkness of a deathly monster’s lair. Hearing Hercules in Mark 5 confirms the meaning and trajectory of the Gospel as it unfolds in Mark’s telling of the story of Jesus. Gospel writers like Mark are clever, masterful storytellers, and story itself is a profound delivery device for truth.
This essay offers an opportunity to listen, see, discover, and learn from the imitation and inversion of unfamiliar story. Such was the aim of our classes together, helping students encounter biblical narratives alongside stories from the ancient and classical worlds. Such is also the aim of this essay dedicated to Dr. Lynn McMillan, because an epic Festschrift, or celebrated writing, is also a bearer of heroic kleos (fame/glory). This project playfully applies Dennis MacDonald’s mimesis criticism—playfully applies because MacDonald also plays the muse, igniting minds and sparking debate about Homer’s lurking presence in the Gospels and Acts—and my hope here is to playfully imitate his approach.
My aim is not to show that Mark intended Aeneid 8 as a hypotext or model for the episode of Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac. Rather, I want to ask what we might learn if we assume the name “Legion” signals Virgil’s story of Hercules and the monster Cacus. Indeed, MacDonald himself asserts that the authors of the Gospels did not imitate Virgil’s Latin epic, at least not as profoundly as Mark and Luke imitated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Hence, from the outset, I am being playful, bullish, willfully transgressing the bounds of the muse’s approach. We plunge straight to the center, where the smoke surges highest, to discern what might be discovered between the Gerasene tomb and the Pallantine cavern.
MacDonald argues that Gospel writers, especially Mark, Luke, and John, intentionally imitate Greek and Roman story to present Jesus as a superior rival to the gods and heroes of familiar story. Mimesis is imitation, and the imitation of earlier story is a hallmark of ancient literary practices. Essentially, the New Testament can, and perhaps should, be read as not only continuous with the Hebrew Bible but also as ancient Mediterranean literature that mirrors and mimics Greek and Roman story. As MacDonald describes, Greek education largely involved imitation of the epics; what Greeks called mimesis, Romans called imitatio. Homeric influence thus appears in many genres of ancient composition—poetry, of course, but also histories, biographies, and novels. One must not confuse such imitations with plagiarism, willful misrepresentation, or pitiful gullibility. Rather, by evoking literary antecedents, authors sought to impress the reader with the superiority of the imitation in literary style, philosophical insights, or ethical values.
Literary mimesis often promoted a sophisticated rivalry between the esteemed models and their innovating successors. Certainly, this is the case between Virgil’s Aeneid and the Homeric epics. The Aeneid represents Virgil’s resourceful adaptation and appropriation of the Greek epic tradition, newly transformed so as to celebrate Rome’s divine election and elevate romanitas (the Roman way) to ascendency as the universal human ideal for a new millennium of Roman power. The story of Aeneas exists as both imitation and invention, continuous and discontinuous with familiar epic; and through Virgil’s ingenious literary invention, the Aeneid became the surprising fulfillment of its revered Greek predecessor at a time when the Homeric epics continued to enjoy the status of sacred texts throughout the Hellenized world.
Virgil’s imitation of Homer is evident and easily detectable. Mark and mimesis is, to be sure, another story. MacDonald admits clearly that the Gospel of Mark does not advertise its Homeric hypertextuality and transvaluation as transparently as the Aeneid. Nevertheless, Mark does incorporate mimetic markers that signal epic literature—aspects of Mark’s project to embed traditions about Jesus within a narrative that would present him as superior to heroes of Greek mythology, just as he presented him as superior to Moses, Jonah, and Elijah, also through imitation of familiar Jewish story. As an example, he suggests that modern readers have been blind to many of Mark’s most significant mimetic markers. Significant personal and place names, in large part, have had this blindness caused by modern translations that transliterate names without translating them. MacDonald suggests that Mark not only created significant names but also frequently uses them to evoke antecedents in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Mark, as an inventor of names, positions himself squarely within the poetic, literary, and rhetorical conventions of the day.
Here, we might compare approaches to the Gospel by evaluating the fruits of two sense-making strategies related to Mark as an inventor of names. In Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham acknowledges that names in the Gospels are a phenomenon that has never been satisfactorily explained and raises the question as to why Matthew and Luke omit certain names in their redaction of Mark, making a historical argument that by the time Matthew and Luke wrote, certain figures had been forgotten or had become too obscure to include by name. For example, Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52), a blind man encountered and healed near Jericho, is not mentioned by name in Matthew and Luke. As an explanation of the omission, Bauckham posits: “With Bartimaeus, we encounter the phenomenon of a character named by Mark, presumably because he was well-known in the early Christian movement, but whose name was dropped by one or both of the later Synoptic evangelists, presumably because he was not well-known when or where the evangelist wrote.”
Mark could expect his readers to know of Bartimaeus as a kind of living miracle who made Jesus’s act of healing still so to speak visible to all who encountered him, as a well-known figure in the churches of Jerusalem and Judea. But after his death and after the fall of Jerusalem, which removed the Jewish Christians of Palestine, Bartimaeus was presumably no longer a figure of wide repute, and so Matthew and Luke omitted his name. The tendency of Matthew and Luke to omit some of the names we find in Mark would be explained if these people had become, by the time Matthew and Luke wrote, too obscure for them to wish to retain the names when they were engaged in abbreviating Mark’s narrative.
This seems stretched when, in the paragraph immediately following, Bauckham offers Cleopas as an example, since Cleopas is only named in Luke’s Gospel, not Mark’s. In Luke 24:18, Cleopas and a companion encounter Jesus returned from the dead but divinely disguised so that they could not recognize him, and they show hospitality to the stranger. Bauckham acknowledges that there seems no plausible reason for naming him Cleopas other than to indicate that he was the source of this tradition.
MacDonald offers something different. MacDonald posits that Mark’s Bartimaeus and Luke’s Cleopas are invented names, each signaling a story from the Odyssey. Cleopas is a rare name, appearing only here in the New Testament. The name is derived from kleos or klos, depending on your pronunciation of the Greek, and translates as “all fame” or “all renown.” In Book 19 of the Odyssey, the hero Odysseus, presumed dead, returns to his home but is divinely disguised as a beggar. He is shown hospitality, especially by the beloved nurse Eurycleia, whose name translates as “far-flung fame” or “far and wide renown.” As the nurse bathes the beggar, her hand encounters a prominent scar well-known to her, who had cared for and bathed Odysseus in the years before his departure to Troy. Consider her touching reaction as the woman suddenly recognizes her long-lost lord: “The old slave woman holding his leg and rubbing with flat palms came to that place and recognized the scar. She let his leg fall down into the basin; it clattered, tilted over, and the water spilled out across the floor. Both joy and grief took hold of her; her eyes were filled with tears, her voice was choked. She touched his beard and said, ‘You are Odysseus, my darling child, my master! I did not know it was you until I touched you all around your leg.'”
Considering the salient theme of recognition, as disguised lords presumed dead are revealed alive and confirmed by unmistakable scars, Luke 24 and Odyssey 19 clearly resonate. The invented name Cleopas signals the Odyssey so that those who have ears to hear might listen for imitation and inversion of familiar story. Similarly, MacDonald hears echoes of the blind prophet Teiresias in Mark 10:46–52, signaled by the name Bartimaeus. In Odyssey 11, Odysseus travels to the edge of the ocean, a land of perpetual darkness where the shining sun god never looks on them with his bright beams, where destructive night blankets the world—the Land of the Dead. Odysseus prepares to summon the seer: “As readers consider the horror of the scene, I promised for Teiresias as well a pure black sheep, the best in all my flock. So with these vows I called upon the dead, took the sheep, and slit their throats above the pit. Black blood flowed out. The spirits came up out of Erebus and gathered around—teenagers, girls and boys, the old who suffered for many years, and fresh young brides whom labor destroyed in youth, and many men cut down in battle by bronze spears, still dressed in armor.”
Around the pit, with eerie cries, pale fear took hold of me. I roused my men and told them to flay the sheep that I had killed and burn them and pray to Hades and Persephone. I drew my sword and sat on ground, preventing the spirits of the dead from coming near the blood till I had met Teiresias. Odysseus then encounters the ghost of a recently and tragically departed shipmate, Elpenor. He then sees the ghost of his own mother and pitifully weeps. Finally, the spirit of the unseeing seer approaches, recognizing and calling to the hero by name: “Zeus-born son of Laertes, Odysseus of many devices.” After conversing and receiving from the prophet insight for his journey and foresight about his own death, Odysseus says: “I saw the spirit of my mother. She was dead, and I did not know how. Three times I tried, longing to touch her, but three times her ghost flew from my arms like shadows or like dreams. Sharp pain pierced deeper in me as I cried: ‘No, mother, why do you not stay for me and let me hold you even here in Hades?'”
Grief overwhelms the scene. Teiresias himself turns and departs again to the House of Hades. But outside Jericho, “City of the Moon,” a blind man recognizes the one who approaches and cries out: “David’s son Jesus, have mercy on me!” Jesus opens the blind man’s eyes. He follows Jesus on the road—presumably a road that leads away from or out of Jericho, the City of the Moon. If the name Bartimaeus signals Odyssey 11, those who anticipate imitation and inversion discern an expectation for the afterlife overturned; whereas the soul of Teiresias returned to Hades, Bartimaeus left Jericho to travel with Jesus. Herein lies the emulation: Odysseus in the underworld, blind; Jesus and Bartimaeus, according to MacDonald, the name Bartimaeus may be significant. This is the only name given to a recipient of a miracle in the Synoptic Gospels. Both Matthew and Luke omit it in their accounts. It is quite clear that the names of the beneficiaries do not belong to the genre of Gospel miracle stories, so an explanation of those names that do occur is certainly required.
Bauckham does not seem to make room for the possibility that Mark and the other Gospel writers invented names as a literary or rhetorical technique, a mimetic device for signaling some other story. His recovery of the Gospels as testimony presents a reputable historiographic category for reading the Gospels as history and also a theological model for understanding the Gospels as the entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus and for realizing the disclosure of God in the history of Jesus. This project is laudable, and the fruit of his efforts have benefited the academy and church alike. But by our comparison of Bauckham and MacDonald, scholarly work flayed open—ink like black blood spilling—a gibbering question approaches, a shade summoned from beyond the pall, crying at the top of its voice: “What about me and you, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” A monstrous question!
We moderns have come to associate truth with the facts of crystallized history. A story is “true” if it is historically reliable, if it actually happened as is depicted by the facts of historical presentation. But might we not be better to consider a story true as it communicates truth? This question should not imply that the Bible is ahistorical; rather, the Bible as story more profoundly delivers truth than the Bible as history. To read the Bible primarily as history diminishes sacred scripture; it reduces it to something hard and unbending—facts to be learned, dogma and doctrine chiseled out from historical text. Reading the Bible as sacred story moves in and among us. Different: Dogma is crystal, story is water. Mythos moves like water, shaping and reshaping the landscapes we inhabit. Myth is a formational power, story that communicates significant meaning and truth for a particular culture. Myth shapes shared identity, or we might say Mythos becomes ethos, as the stories we tell translate to the values, ethics, and norms of community, shaping cultural identity.
Mythos shapes ethos. The stories we tell follow us out, become the realities we inhabit, and telling a good story is the first step in creating, shaping cultural identity. Through story is precisely what we discover by attending to mimesis: imitation or emulation of ancient story. Perhaps ancient epic is a better delivery device for the Gospel because epic delivers the moral, the ethical, the political, the theological, and the universal Mythos that profoundly shapes ethos. History as a telling of historical events, and historiography—history that attempts to convey the truth or meaning of a historical event—and even biography bias are not sufficient to do what epic can do. As we discern in what the Aeneid is and what it became for Rome, as with the Aeneid, it is not how the imitated story is similar, but where the imitation diverges—or the stories become different. When imitation becomes inversion, that reveals the meaning of mimesis. Mimesis of Greek and Roman epic story become playful imitation, profoundly communicative of a Gospel that turns the world on end.
In our own contemporary storied worlds, it is typically villains who monologue. So we return to our exploration of the meaning of mimesis in Mark 5. Gospel writers like Mark conveyed truth that transcends historicity and lives as story. Mimetic markers in Mark are less clear than in the Aeneid, but it is also possible that what is sometimes heard as mimesis is an echo of words or images that live, move, and have their being as poetic memory—an idea that language itself, and especially literary or poetic language, already contains within it the memory of previous texts. The echoes we hear may be intended or unintended, and we need to think of the relation between the Gospels and Greek lore more as dynamic cultural interaction: the complex, random, conscious, and unconscious events of learning that occur when people interact and engage in practices of socialization. Mimesis is a means for creating shared cultural identity, but we modern readers are culturally cut off from the storied worlds of sacred story.
As MacDonald observes, “Today we read these texts with a cultural competence radically different from those for whom they were written. Ancient readers could detect allusions invisible to all but the best-trained classicist.” Even though the detection of mimesis is difficult, it is one of the most valuable contributions a critic can make for understanding a text. To be sure, one may profitably read a mimetic text for its own sake, but awareness of its model or models allows one to interpret it more comprehensively, more dialogically. In The New Moses, Dale Allison comments: “Our historically conditioned deafness to oblique allusions in the Bible can sometimes lead us to doubt their very existence.” Hearing mimesis is profoundly difficult, and endeavors are complicated by the possibility that we may be hearing what our itching ears want to hear. Potential pitfalls are legion, to be sure. MacDonald has his critics, and mimesis criticism is not mainstream, yet the prophetic challenge echoes: “Let the one who has ears to hear, listen.”
The following attempt at discerning mimesis offers an opportunity to listen, see, discover, and learn from the imitation and inversion of familiar or unfamiliar story. What follows is a less rigorous, more playful attempt to discern and make sense of possible mimesis in Mark as described in the introduction. The loanword for legio, “Legion,” from the Latin leo or lio, signals an emulation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 8, which relates the story of Hercules overcoming the monster Cacus to bring relief and rescue to the people. Hearing Hercules in Mark 5 confirms the trajectory of the Gospel as it unfolds in Mark’s telling of Jesus’s story. This play proceeds in three moves. First, MacDonald’s seven criteria for detecting dependence on an antecedent text guides and grounds thinking about the possibility of imitation and inversion. Second, the narrative immediately preceding Jesus and the Gerasene demoniac—Jesus calming a storm—reveals the presence of mimesis in familiar story: the tale of Jonah. And third, we read between texts to discern what we might learn if we assume the name “Legion” signals Virgil’s story of Hercules and the monster Cacus. Since boat imagery pervades all three stories—Mark 4–5, Jonah 1, and Aeneid 8—why not unfurl the metaphor? We begin by assembling ribs and keel.
Move One: Discerning Mimesis
MacDonald proffers seven criteria for guiding mimesis criticism, by which texts are assessed for evidence that they are direct, extensive, advertised, and hermeneutically freighted imitations of earlier writings. The criteria are noted as follows, with some evidence offered to better justify imitation of Aeneid 8:
Accessibility: Was the source text likely available or known? Did the author likely have access to the model text? Virgil’s masterful yet unfinished epic, the Aeneid, was published after the poet’s death in 19 BCE. Copies of the Latin text disseminated throughout the Empire, so that by the end of the 1st Century CE, the epic’s pervasive popularity and influence was undeniable, inspiring artistic representation and widespread celebration of Rome’s founding epic. Concerning Hercules (Heracles): The hero-god was the quintessential Greek hero in antiquity. He featured in more stories and was represented more frequently in art than any other hero or god. He was worshiped by Greeks and Romans, and although the rise of Christianity ultimately meant the demise of his cult, the hero himself continued to fascinate writers and artists, who even proclaimed him as a prototype of Christ. Of importance for this project is the writing of Diodorus Siculus, and specifically Book Four of his Bibliotheca historica, in which he recounts the labors or trials of Heracles. This work was likely published in the mid-1st Century BCE, not too distant in time from the publication of the Aeneid. Scholars are divided over the date of the composition of Mark, most arguing for a date between the late 60s and early 70s of the 1st Century CE.
Analogy: Do others imitate the source text? Consider first the works previously cited that discern Luke’s imitation of the Aeneid. Concerning Hercules, MacDonald offers these observations in his book Christianizing Homer: “The careers of Heracles and Christ display tantalizing parallels. Both heroes had divine fathers—Zeus/God or Yahweh—and mortal mothers—Alcmene or Mary—whose actual husbands, Amphitryon/Joseph, were from royal stock and accepted the boys as their own sons. Villains—Hera or Herod—tried to slay the babies in their cradles by serpents or by swords, but both were spared by precautious flight. Early in life, both youths traveled to a desolate place to be tempted with a choice between easy vice and arduous virtue. Both chose (or choose) virtue. The careers of both heroes consisted largely of extraordinary ordeals that they overcame through supernatural means. Having acceded to the wills of their divine fathers, both died violent deaths. The bodies of neither could be found. Both became gods. Both appeared to mortals after their deaths, and both ascended to heaven in a cloud. Just as Heracles conquered wild beasts, including the hound Cerberus whom he fetched from Hades, Jesus conquered demons and preached in hell.” Greek philosophical schools transformed Heracles, the giant brute, into a paragon of virtue because he had endured his trials stoically. So many additional details exist between the two heroes that one probably should relate both Heracles and Christ to a common hero-etiology.
Density: Are there sufficient parallels to demonstrate mimesis as likely? Certainly, clear parallels exist between Mark 4–5 and the Odyssey, while parallels between Mark 5 and the Aeneid 8 exist; they are less dense than between Mark and Homer. These details will be more fully described below.
Order: Is the sequencing of events similar enough to signify likely mimesis? As with criterion three, stronger parallels exist between Mark 4–5 and the Odyssey.
Distinctive Traits: Do texts share anything distinctive? Yes, a chain presents a distinctive trait between Mark 5 and Aeneid 8. You will see the chain.
Interpretability: Why does this author imitate the source text? Is it to rival it, etc.? This is the strongest link: Mark signals the story of Hercules and Cacus to clarify the meaning and trajectory of the Gospel, as described soon to come.
Recognition: Are there ancient or Byzantine recognitions of mimesis? According to Shea, one of the most compelling reasons to explore the works of Virgil in conjunction with the works of early Christianity is because the early Christians canonized him, regarding him as one of the pagan saints or prophets whom Jesus rescues from Satan and the harrowing of hell, common before the Reformation. Fascinatingly, in the Via Latina catacomb, Hercules is present as a figure in funerary depictions alongside Jesus and Lazarus. You could see the images; they are quite fascinating in ancient art.
Mark 4:35 to 5:20 offers story as deliverable to children as to wise adults. The story captivates by its power and simplicity, by its provocative and familiar figures, and by the recognizable message it communicates. A hot man asleep in a boat while all the others fear for life rouses to command wind and wave: “Be still!” and calm is restored. Those traveling with the God-man wonder, “Who is this that even the wind and wave obey him?” Arriving at a strange land, their wonderment is enlarged and answered by an unexpected character: a monster-man, tormented and inhabited by a legion of unclean spirits, who lives with the dead, who cannot be chained, who howls, who somehow knows the answer to the question, “Who is this?” With a shout, the monster-man names the stranger: “Jesus, Son of the Most High God!” And he then names himself: “Legion,” and he says, “for we are many.” The Son of the Most High God commands the legion of unclean spirits to leave the man, to enter a herd of swine—pigs who rush down an embankment and plunge into the sea; all drowned. As for the monster-man, his humanity is restored: no longer a monster but a man, a witness to the Lord’s mercy.
Such a story captivates wide-eyed youths but has also been equally and extensively contemplated by academically minded adults, some of whom have determined that the section of Mark in which we discover these stories reflects mimesis—imitation that signals the epic story of Homer’s Odyssey. Here, I suggest that Virgil’s Aeneid is also in view. After all, as MacDonald puts it, “Apparently Mark wished to do for the early church what Virgil did for the early Empire: to provide a compelling narrative about a founding hero.” Like Virgil, Mark used the Homeric epics among his models, in addition to the Jewish Bible. I am suggesting that Mark 4:35 to Mark 5:20 reverberate with echoes of both the Odyssey (Books 9–10) and the Aeneid (Book 8). Not only these, but Mark clearly imitates the story of Jonah—a fishtail more easily swallowed—as an example of mimesis.
To demonstrate mimesis, let us begin with the fishtail. In Hades, when Odysseus encounters the spectre of famed Achilles, he comments on how good the ghost must have it, worshiped as a god in life, perhaps seemingly revered as one who lords over the dead in spectral power. Achilles will have none of it. He sharply responds: “No willing words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By God, I’d rather slave on earth for another man, some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive, than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” The words and fate of Achilles leave little hope for good expectation in life after death. (See conversation in Homer, The Odyssey, translation by Robert Fagles). Achilles asked Odysseus how this man, living and matchlessly clever though he is, had contrived to enter the House of Death, where the senseless burnout wraiths of mortals make their home.
Interestingly, Odysseus’s words with dead heroes culminate in meeting Heracles (Hercules), who relates how he had dragged the great beast Cerberus, the hound who guards the dead, up from the underworld to earth and into the light of day. Heroes like Odysseus entering death’s realm and returning with a boon is a centerpiece of epic story and myth. As has been widely acknowledged and discussed, as an example, consider Joseph Campbell’s capture of the story of Heracles and Hesione of Troy. The Greek hero Heracles, pausing at Troy on his way homeward with the belt of the queen of the Amazon, found that the city was being harassed by a monster sent against it by the sea god Poseidon. The beast would come ashore and devour people as they moved about on the plain. Beautiful Hesione, the daughter of the king, had just been bound by her father to the sea rocks as a propitiatory sacrifice, and the great visiting hero agreed to rescue her for a price. The monster, in due time, broke to the surface of the water and opened its enormous maw. Heracles took a dive into the throat, cut his way out through the belly, and left the monster dead.
Campbell describes this descent into death as “entering the belly of the whale,” from which the hero re-emerges reborn, as it were. Heracles willingly enters death’s maw, but then opens a womb out of which he is born again, and others like Hesione share in the salvation or boon afforded by the hero’s escape or rebirth out of death. Likely, those familiar with biblical stories immediately associate “belly of the whale” imagery with Jonah, a reluctant prophet who spent three days ruminating in a fish—cut time out. The story of Jonah is a Bible story, indeed. In each of their Gospels, Matthew and Luke explicitly reference the prophet and seem to assume familiarity with the story among their readers. Mark’s Gospel does not explicitly refer to Jonah. However, the story of Jonah functions intertextually by the obvious allusion to the Jonah story and the story of Jesus stilling the storm in all three Synoptic Gospels, and specifically in Mark, who implicitly makes reference to not only the story of Jonah but also to Moses and Elijah, both of whom are alluded to in Jonah as well.
To be sure, the story of Jonah offers a compelling narrative and provocative themes that invert expectation: the prophet as reluctant salvation, not from, but by a monster; salvation extended to unexpected others like Gentiles or Ninevites. If you are using the Gospels, comparing it to Jonah’s story, a rich subtext from which meaning and insight percolate into Gospel stories as writers and readers make sense of Jesus, Jonah is indeed a familiar story. Readers familiar with the story are unlikely to be disturbed by discerning the prophet as an intertextual figure in Mark’s Gospel. Consider the clear allusions to Jonah presented by Mark 4:35–41, the stilling of the storm.
Is there anything else you would like to explore regarding these ancient literary connections?
