Exile and Re-Constructing Social Identity in the Gospel of Mark.

Abstract

The aim of this project is to add to the scholarly interpretive discourses surrounding the Gospel of Mark. This dissertation argues that the author of Mark attempts to re-construct social identity. Specifically, Mark deploys Jesus as a narrative method for a socio-cultural identity rectification after the Second Temple’s demise. After the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple, Mark was faced with new social incongruities, namely exile, alienation, and lost socio-communal institutions. I will argue that he was a displaced urban intellectual who mourns his lost social identification markers. However, Mark does not merely lament. Additionally, he provides a means to reconcile and rectify his social identity. Chapter 1 delivers an investigation into the possible dates and locations of Mark’s composition. Examining the social, cultural, and political settings of first-century Palestine, supplies the necessary background of Mark’s socio-historical context. Chapter 2 analyzes theories regarding the concepts of nationality, identity, and exile. I propose that Mark is an example of exilic literature, which can be understood through the larger umbrella of post-colonial literature. Chapter 3 will examine the textual evidence of Mark’s lamentation sentiments. I argue that Mark questions his self-identity through sentiments of social alienation and that he expresses these emotions through lamenting lost socio-cultural institutions. Chapter 4 investigates Mark’s creative intellectual attempts to reconcile his lost social-cultural identifiers. I emphasize that Mark replaces the lost “there” sacred space with a “universal/anywhere” one. Overall, I demonstrate that Mark, as an exilic author, simultaneously laments and reconciles his social incongruities through re-establishing, remoulding, and reconfiguring lost socio-cultural institutions and redefining institutional space.