Book Review: "The Memoirs of Saint Peter"

I purchased this book from Eighth Day Books in 2019 but did not start reading it until last month, since the liturgical Year B for Sunday Cycle in 2020-2021 (November to November) uses the Gospel of St. Mark, supplemented with readings from the other Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of St. Mark is the shortest Gospel, with only 16 chapters. The timing seemed to be just right.

According to the publisher, Regnery:

The Gospel as You Have Never Heard It Before...

At a distance of twenty centuries, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth can seem impossibly obscure—indeed, some skeptics even question whether he existed. And yet we have an eyewitness account of his life, death, and resurrection from one of his closest companions, the fisherman Simon Bar-Jona, better known as the Apostle Peter.

Writers from the earliest days of the Church tell us that Peter's disciple Mark wrote down the apostle's account of the life of Jesus as he told it to the first Christians in Rome. The vivid, detailed, unadorned prose of the Gospel of Mark conveys the unmistakable immediacy of a first-hand account.

For most readers, however, this immediacy is hidden behind a veil of Greek, the language of the New Testament writers. Four centuries of English translations have achieved nobility of cadence or, more recently, idiomatic accessibility, but the voice of Peter himself has never fully emerged. Until now.

In this strikingly original translation, attentive to Peter's concern to show what it was like to be there, Michael Pakaluk captures the tone and texture of the fisherman’s evocative account, leading the reader to a bracing new encounter with Jesus. The accompanying verse-by-verse commentary—less theological than historical—will equip you to experience Mark’s Gospel as the narrative of an eyewitness, drawing you into its scenes, where you will come to know Jesus of Nazareth with new intimacy.

A stunning work of scholarship readily accessible to the layman, The Memoirs of St. Peter belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Christian.

The author, again according to Regnery, is:

a professor of ethics and social philosophy in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard and studied as a Marshall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. An expert in ancient philosophy, he has published widely on Aristotelian ethics and the philosophy of friendship and done groundbreaking work in business ethics. His previous books include Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship, The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God, and most recently The Memoirs of St. Peter: A New Translation of the Gospel according to Mark. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife, Catherine Pakaluk, a professor of economics, and their eight children.

Regnery has now published Professor Pakaluk's new translation of another Gospel: Mary's Voice in the Gospel According to John.

I would disagree with some aspects of this comment by the publisher in the blurb above:

The accompanying verse-by-verse commentary—less theological than historical—will equip you to experience Mark’s Gospel as the narrative of an eyewitness, drawing you into its scenes, where you will come to know Jesus of Nazareth with new intimacy.

The commentary is not really verse-by-verse with each verse of the Gospel included, but Pakaluk comments on aspects of many verses, explaining his translation and the significance of certain word choices, especially the various verb tenses (historical present, imperfect, aorist) and why sometimes as Mark narrates an event, he uses different tenses, because he is recounting Peter's memory of an event. For example, from chapter 15, verses 20-24, Mark describes the Crucifix as if it is happening right now, before Peter's eyes:

So now they are leading him out to affix him to a cross. They press into service a certain man who is passing by, coming in from the country, Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to take his cross. They lead him to the Golgotha area, which means "Area of the Skull". (They gave him wine mixed with gall, which he did not take.) They affix him to the cross. They divide his garments, casting dice, to see who will take them. (p. 266)

Also, his commentary is theological: Pakaluk explains the literal theological meaning of many verses in his translation. Since his thesis is that Mark recorded Peter's memories of the three years he spent with Jesus (a thesis supported by early testimony in the Church) based upon how Peter had taught in Rome, Pakaluk often highlights Peter's intent in recounting certain events. He told certain stories--remember that St. John's Gospel states that many books would have to be written to tell everything that Jesus did and said)--because they were important to his preaching of the Gospel. So when Pakaluk explains the literal meaning of these stories and how Mark/Peter told them, he's explaining the theology, doctrinal, pastoral, and sometimes even moral, meaning and significance behind them. He does not explore the moral or practical, allegorical, or anagogical interpretation of most verses, but focuses on the literal. (For instance in chapter 10, when Jesus teaches against divorce, adultery, and remarriage, Pakaluk cannot help but offer commentary on the moral significance of that passage.)

I agree that this translation makes the narrative vivid, immediate, and fresh. Pakaluk's word choices, like not using the common "Crucify him", instead choosing "Put him on a cross" (or instead of "they crucify him" choosing "they affix him to the cross"), made me stop as I read familiar lines. 

The passage that really impressed me came in chapter 6, verses 39-40:

So he told them to have everyone sit down and form as it were dinner parties, side by side, on the green grass. And they sat down in groups of a hundred and groups of fifty, looking like flower beds sat side to side. (pp. 97-98)

This imagery of "dinner parties" and "flower beds", Pakaluk explains in his commentary, is how Peter remembers it looked that day when Jesus miraculously fed the vast crowd. That's a beautiful detail of a wonderful day.

Image Credit: the publisher Regnery Gateway (fair use for a book review) St. Mark Writing Under the Dictation of St. Peter, attributed to Giuseppe Vermiglio, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France. (Also attributed to Pasquale Ottino)