Reading Mark S Gospel As A Text From Collective Memory

How did the Gospel of Mark come to exist? And how was the memory of Jesus shaped by the experiences of the earliest Christians? For centuries, biblical scholars examined texts as history, literature, theology, or even as story. Curiously absent, however, has been attention to processes of collective memory in the creation of biblical texts. Drawing on modern explorations of social memory, Sandra Huebenthal presents a model for reading biblical texts as collective memories. She demonstrates that the Gospel of Mark is a text evolving from collective narrative memory based on recollections of Jesus’s life and teachings. Huebenthal investigates the principles and structures of how groups remember and how their memory is structured and presented. In the case of Mark’s Gospel, this includes examining which image of Jesus, as well as which authorial self-image, this text as memory constructs. Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory serves less as a key to unlock questions about the historical Jesus and more as an examination of memory about him within a particular community, providing a new and important framework for interpreting the earliest canonical gospel in context.

A culmination of contemporary scholarship on the Gospel of Mark. A preeminent scholar of the Gospel of Mark, C. Clifton Black has been studying and publishing on the Gospel for over thirty years. This new collection brings together his most pivotal work and fresh investigations to constitute an all-in-one compendium of contemporary Markan scholarship and exegesis. The essays included cover scriptural commentary, historical studies, literary analysis, theological argument, and pastoral considerations. Among other topics Black explores: • the Gospel’s provenance, authorship, and attribution • the significance of redaction criticism in Markan studies • recent approaches to the Gospel’s interpretation • literary and rhetorical analyses of the Gospel’s narrative • the kingdom of God and its revelation in Jesus • Mark’s theology of creation, suffering, and discipleship • the Gospel of Mark’s relationship to the Gospel of John and Paul’s letters • the passion in Mark as the Gospel’s recapitulation Scholars, advanced students, and clergy alike will consider this book an indispensable resource for understanding the foundational Gospel.

The essays, excerpts, homilies, and personal reflections in this collection have all been published previously, publicly presented, or both. These selections, however, are not merely being republished, but rather recontextualized and resituated with the expectation that they will become more than the sum of their individual parts, that they will be mutually informing. In most cases, a period of time has elapsed since they were first written or spoken, and that has given time, with the help of reflective memory, to think about how these various selections might relate to each other and to the larger body of James W. Aageson’s professional work as a teacher and scholar. These relationships and connections in most cases have only become apparent in retrospect, as Aageson has been able to see the larger mosaic of his own work and thinking. In some cases, he has changed his mind. In other cases, Aageson’s thinking has only been reinforced and expanded. But are there conceptual threads that run through the selections in each of the book’s three sections? Indeed there are. For these reasons, Aageson is presenting them together here to a new set of readers.

The short story that we now know as the Gospel according to Mark was written in Greek twenty centuries ago in the context of an agrarian society that had been developing its own characteristics in the circum-Mediterranean region. Mark's account presupposes the values, institutions, and relationships of the culture in which Jesus and his first followers lived. Modern readers of the Gospels, however, especially those born and raised in the North Atlantic postindustrial societies, have other values and institutions, and relate to each other according to other cultural codes. This temporal and cultural distance between the ancient texts and their present-day readers makes necessary an exegetical effort whose purpose is to recover, as far as possible, the reading scenarios presupposed by these texts. In order to reconstruct these scenarios, exegesis has turned in recent years to the social sciences, whose models permit us to imagine and describe the situations presupposed by these ancient texts. This book aims to show how the use of these scenarios elaborated with the help of the social sciences can contribute to a more considered and respectful reading of Mark's story.

Reflections on the relationship between research and teaching Using Mark as a test case, scholars address questions like: How should my research and my approach to the text play out in the classroom? What differences should my academic context and my students' expectations make? How should new approaches and innovations inform interpretation and teaching? This resource enables biblical studies instructors to explore various interpretative approaches and to begin to engage pedagogical issues in our changing world. Features: Ideas that may be adapted for teaching any biblical text Diverse perspectives from nine experts in their fields Essays include tips, ideas, and lesson plans for the classroom

A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyses the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus. A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the beginnings of Christianity.

Performance creates a unique space for audience experience and influences how traditions, like the Gospels, are received and interpreted.

The concepts of social memory and social identity have been increasingly used in the study of ancient Jewish and Christian sources. In this collection of articles, international specialists apply interdisciplinary methodology related to these concepts to early Jewish and Christian sources. The volume offers an up-to-date presentation of how social memory studies and socio-psychological identity approach have been used in the study of Biblical and related literature. The articles examine how Jewish and Christian sources participate in the processes of collective recollection and in this way contribute to the construction of distinctive social identities. The writers demonstrate the benefits of the use of interdisciplinary methodologies in the study of early Judaism and Christianity but also discuss potential problems that have emerged when modern theories have been applied to ancient material.In the first part of the book, scholars apply social, collective and cultural memory approaches to early Christian sources. The articles discuss philosophical aspects of memory, the formation of gospel traditions in the light of memory studies, the role of eyewitness testimony in canonical and non-canonical Christian sources and the oral delivery of New Testament writings in relation to ancient delivery practices. Part two applies the social identity approach to various Dead Sea Scrolls and New Testament writings. The writers analyse the role marriage, deviant behaviour, and wisdom traditions in the construction of identity in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other topics include forgiveness in the Gospel of Matthew, the imagined community in the Gospel John, the use of the past in Paul's Epistles and the relationship between the covenant and collective identity in the Epistle to the Hebrews and the First Epistle of Clement.