Quick Thoughts on a New Fragment of GMK

Just wanted to say one or two things about P.Oxy. 5072:

http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2011/110726.html

Tony Burke has a bit more here:

http://www.tonyburke.ca/apocryphicity/2011/09/19/new-unknown-gospel-from-oxyrhynchus/

Roger Viklund has a couple of pieces here (if you use Chrome, you can tell it to translate with a single click):

http://rogerviklund.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/ett-nytt-evangelium-patraffat/

http://rogerviklund.wordpress.com/2011/09/29/overlaps-between-secret-mark-the-raising-of-lazarus-in-john-and-the-gerasene-swine-episode-in-mark/

My own thoughts:




First, the presence of Thomasine logia on a papyrus with Markan material doesn't surprise me, of course.

Second, Michael Turton did find a chiasm for this pericope, and it works reasonably well:

http://www.michaelturton.com/Mark/GMark05.html#5.p.1.20

I might modify the center of Turton's chiasm, however, as follows:

G A And Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"
    B He replied, "My name is Legion, for we are many."
    C And he begged him eagerly not to send him out of the country.

G' A Now a great heard of swine was feeding there on the hillside;
     B and they begged him, "Send us to the swine, let us enter them."
     C So he gave them leave.

Markan chiasms usually end with a command or action by Jesus (since that is their point, after all), and this one should be no exception.  If we divide the center bracket into the three-fold structure above, the parallels line up nicely: in G A, Jesus says what is your name, and G' A provides a hint: they are a herd (AGELH) of swine.  Turton points out in his commentary that Ched Myers (Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, Maryknoll: Orbis Press, 1988) notes that AGELH was often used to referer to a group of new military recruits.  Turton also notes that this pericope is often seen as symbolically related to the occupation of Judea and the Decapolis c. 70CE by the Tenth Legion, in the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War.  So G'A answers G A's question: the demon Legion's name is "herd", i.e. herd of swine.

This would, however, break the parallel that Turton had between Legion's "begging" not to be driven from the country, and its "begging" to be sent into the swine instead.  So it's not clear this bracket works.  Turton's bracket, on the other hand, shifts Jesus' command out of the center of the chiasm, which feels wrong.  Turton's other brackets have some impressive parallels, so clearly there is a chiasm here, but it's not always clear where the line divisions should fall.  In Turton's D' bracket (he seems to have left the apostrophes off his ascending bracket labels, in this particular study, no doubt merely a typo) the people come to Jesus twice, clearly breaking Turton's own rules of bracket-formation.  I've tried to construct a chiasm out of this pericope by strictly following Turton's rules, but it's very difficult, and it feels as though some compromise is necessary.

So one wonders if an original Markan pericope has been tampered with here.  The evidence is currently ambiguous at best, so I will be very interested to see what sort of text this new fragment of GMk presents us with.  Will it provide us with something that might be more primitive than canonical GMk?  If so, will the more primitive text fall into a chiasm more easily here than the canonical text?  Or will it just be a late and clearly derivative summary of a complicated Markan pericope?