'[W]hen they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost
(phantasma), and cried out; for they all saw him, and were
terrified' (Mark 6:49, RSV). There is a growing awareness among
biblical scholars and others of the potential value of modern and
postmodern fantasy theory for the study of biblical texts.
Following theorists such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and
Gilles Deleuze (among others), we understand the fantastic as the
deconstruction of literary realism. The fantastic arises from the
text's resistance to understanding; the "meaning" of the fantastic
text is not its reference to the primary world of consensus reality
but rather a fundamental undecidability of reference. The fantastic
is also a point at which ancient and contemporary texts (including
books, movies, and TV shows) resonate with one another, sometimes
in surprising ways, and this resonance plays a large part in my
argument. Mark and its afterlives "translate" one another, in the
sense that Walter Benjamin speaks of the tangential point at which
the original text and its translation touch one another, not a
transfer of understood meaning but rather a point at which what
Benjamin called "pure language" becomes apparent. Mark has always
been the most "difficult" of the canonical gospels, the one that
requires the greatest amount of hermeneutical gymnastics from its
commentators. Its beginning in media res, its disconcerting ending
at 16:8, its multiple endings, the "messianic secret," Jesus's
tensions with his disciples and family - these are just some of the
more obvious of the and many troublesome features that distinguish
Mark from the other biblical gospels. If there had not been two
other gospels (Matthew and Luke) that were clearly similar to Mark
but also much more attractive to Christian belief, it seems likely
that Mark, like the gospels of Thomas and Peter, would not have
been accepted into the canon. Reading Mark as fantasy does not
"solve" any of these problems, but it does place them in a very
different context, one in which they are no longer "problems," but
in which there are different problems. A fantastical reading of the
gospel of Mark is not the only correct understanding of this text,
but rather one possibility that may have considerable appeal and
value in the contemporary world. This fantastic reading is a
"reading from the outside," inspired by the parable "theory" of
Isaiah 6:9-10 and Mark 4:11-12: "for those outside everything is in
parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may
indeed hear but not understand." Reading from the outside counters
a widespread belief that only those within the faith community can
properly understand the scriptures. It is the "stupid" reading of
those who do not share institutionalized understandings passed down
through catechisms and creeds, i.e., through the dominant ideology
of the churches.
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