HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies ISSN: (Online) 2072-8050, (Print) 0259-9422 Page 1 of 13 Review Article Mark the Evangelist: His African memory Author: Mark is the author of the oldest gospel in the Christian Bible. Not much is known about him 1 Willem Oliver or his family except for a few references in the Bible. The general assumption, originating in Affiliation: the West, is that Mark was born and bred in Palestine. One of the main proponents of the 1Department of Philosophy, Western view is Walter Bauer, a German theologian of the first half of the 20th century. His Practical and Systematic views rely heavily on the argument from silence, as Africa had – and to a great extent still has – Theology, University of an oral culture. Contrary to the Western view, Thomas Oden, an American theologian, did South Africa, Pretoria research on the oral culture and investigated the African memory of Mark. This article presents Corresponding author: a critical discussion and a review of the book written by Oden in 2011 titled The African memory Willem Oliver, of Mark. Oden seems to be very subjective in his remarks in favour of Africa, as is also clear
[email protected] from his book titled How Africa shaped the Christian mind, written in 2007, and the question is if Dates: he really has enough grounds for his postulations. Received: 07 Mar. 2016 Accepted: 08 June 2016 Published: 28 Oct. 2016 Introduction How to cite this article: Thomas Clark Oden is a distinguished world scholar with almost 200 publications to his name.1 Oliver, W., 2016, ‘Mark the In 2011 he wrote a second ground-breaking work in a series of three on the history of Africa, titled Evangelist: His African 2 memory’, HTS Teologiese The African memory of Mark: Reassessing early church tradition.