high contrast in an ancient text

Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy is the book form of his Norton Lectures in 1977-78. He says in the lectures that he is not a man of faith, but he takes up the gospels of Christ for an extended meditation of the work of the translator and interpreter of ancient texts. Here he is below on Mark’s gospel; Kermode sees this widely recognized first and source text as underrated, literarily speaking, compared to Luke or John:

“Here already [in Mark] strong thematic oppositions are forming. John [the Baptist] is associated with public baptism, the public fulfillment of his type, Elijah; Jesus with private epiphany and the private fulfillment of his type, Messiah. Moreover, Jesus accepts a baptism of repentance (suggesting prior uncleanness) and at the same time is called the son of God. The paradoxes continue: unmistakable public recognitions alternate with demands for and withdrawals into silence. Demons infallibly recognize him, disciples do not. The Law is now kept and now broken. The canons of purity are challenged; a purity which is itself accused of uncleanliness opposes and purges the unclean. If the general sense that there is a moment of special force in the eighth chapter is well founded, it must be so because so many of these paradoxes come together there in a great knot. But there are many knots; they occur in the riddling parables, in the frequent collocation of perceptive demons and imperceptive saints, in the delight and gratitude of the outsider who is cured, and the astonishment, fear, and dismay of the insiders."

C.S. Lewis writes in his short essay “Myth Became Fact,” that “a man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.” I think about this all the time. What I would give for more erudite critics like Kermode to simply take up the text with the kind of devotion to ancient literature that is its due.

[Thanks to Alan Jacobs for the Kermode rec.]