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

• Author / Creator

  Wright, Allan EC

• 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.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Gospel of Mark
  • Social Identity
  • Exile

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-jvmg-a643

• License

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