Reading Mark

One of the leading scholars on the Gospel of Mark utilizes a variety of methods to plumb the depths of this earliest story of Jesus. From new forms of literary criticism, social-scientific explorations, and reader-response criticism, Rhoads brings fresh insights to gospel studies.

The NIV is the world's best-selling modern translation, with over 150 million copies in print since its first full publication in 1978. This highly accurate and smooth-reading version of the Bible in modern English has the largest library of printed and electronic support material of any modern translation.

How Baptism and the Eucharist Shaped Early Christian Understandings of Jesus Long before the Gospel writers put pen to papyrus, the earliest Christians participated in the powerful rituals of baptism and the Lord's Supper, which fundamentally shaped their understanding of God, Christ, and the world in which they lived. In this volume, a respected biblical scholar and teacher explores how cultural anthropology and ritual studies elucidate ancient texts. Charles Bobertz offers a liturgical reading of the Gospel of Mark, arguing that the Gospel is a narrative interpretation of early Christian ritual. This fresh, responsible, and creative proposal will benefit scholars, professors, and students. Its ecclesial and pastoral ramifications will also be of interest to church leaders and pastors.

Dowd examines the Gospel of Mark from literary and theological perspectives, suggesting what the text may have meant to its first-century audience of Gentile and Jewish Christians. Mark is a Greco-Roman biography of Jesus written in an apocalyptic mode. Its theology is based on the message of the prophet Isaiah- the proclamation of release from bondage and a march toward freedom along the "way of the Lord."

Combining phenomenological ideals with rigorous close reading and antithetical criticism, this study assesses the career evolution of the Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate, while providing a methodology for analyzing other poetic careers.

The Gospel of Mark has been studied from multiple angles using many methods. But often there remains a sense that something is wanting, that the full picture of Mark's Gospel lacks some background circuitry that would light up the whole. Adam Winn finds a clue in the cataclysmic destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. For Jews and Christians it was an apocalyptic moment. The gods of Rome seemed to have conquered the God of the Jews. Could it be that Mark wrote his Gospel in response to Roman imperial propaganda surrounding this event? Could a messiah crucified by Rome really be God’s Son appointed to rule the world? Winn considers how Mark might have been read by Christians in Rome in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem. He introduces us to the propaganda of the Flavian emperors and excavates the Markan text for themes that address the Roman imperial setting. We discover an intriguing first-century response to the question “Christ or Caesar?"

Over the last several decades, the Jewishness of Jesus has been at the forefront of scholarship and students of the New Testament are more than ever aware of the importance of understanding Jesus and the Gospels in their Jewish context. Reading Mark in Context helps students see the contour and texture of Jesus' engagement with his Jewish environment. It brings together a series of accessible essays that compare and contrast viewpoints, theologies, and hermeneutical practices of Mark and his various Jewish contemporaries. Going beyond an introduction that merely surveys historical events and theological themes, this textbook examines individual passages in Second Temple Jewish literature in order to illuminate the context of Mark's theology and the nuances of his thinking. Following the narrative progression of Mark's Gospel, each chapter in this textbook (1) pairs a major unit of the Gospel with one or more sections of a thematically-related Jewish text, (2) introduces and explores the historical and theological nuances of the comparative text, and (3) shows how the ideas in the comparative text illuminate those expressed in Mark.

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.