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While scholars generally acknowledge the influence of the book of Daniel in various loci in the Gospel of Mark, there has yet to be a systematic study that combines these references to determine their cumulative effect. Previous examinations of Mark’s use of Daniel have been piece-meal, exploring a particular Danielic theme or looking at a particular Markan text. Other studies focus on determining whether a certain Markan text contains a reference to Daniel. These studies serve to illuminate Mark’s use of Daniel considerably, but leave many important questions unanswered. What is Mark’s modus operandi in referencing the book of Daniel in particular? What is the shape—the contours and distribution—of Danielic usage in Mark? What can the references together, in toto, reveal about Mark’s usage of Daniel? This dissertation will explore these questions and clarify Mark’s use of Daniel through careful analysis and exegetical study of ten verses with suggested Danielic references (Mark 1:15; 4:11, 32; 9:3; 13:7,13-14, 19, 26; 14:62) so as to observe Mark’s overall pattern of usage. This dissertation will survey the issues surrounding Mark’s usage of Daniel and review the secondary literature related the use of the Old Testament in Mark—more specifically the use of Daniel in Mark (Ch. 1). A survey of the use of Daniel in early Jewish literature demonstrates the popularity and the widespread use of Daniel across different Jewish groups—and therefore its availability to Mark (Ch. 2). This survey also provides the cultural and theological background in which to understand Mark’s use of Daniel. Each reference to the book of Daniel in the Gospel of Mark, which is noted by the editors of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament (4th ed.) and the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (27th ed.), will be examined in order to trace the contours of Mark’s usage of Daniel, explore the nature of the literary relationship, and determine the literary function of each reference (Ch. 3). The characteristics and patterns that can be observed when the Danielic references in Mark are seen side by side will be closely examined (Ch. 4). The book of Daniel is found to be even more significant for Mark than it has been acknowledged because Mark’s concept of the kingdom of God is profoundly influenced by the visions of God’s kingdom in Dan 7 and Dan 2. The influence of the Danielic notion of the kingdom of God permeates Mark’s gospel, from Jesus’ introductory proclamation in Mark 1:15 to his parables about the kingdom of God in Mark 4, his apocalyptic discourse in Mark 13, and finally his passion in Mark 14. In addition to the kingdom of God, several themes and images in Mark’s view of eschatology are also influenced by the Danielic text. Consequently, by looking at the Danielic references in Mark in toto, it can be seen that Mark draws upon Daniel primarily for inspiration pertaining to the kingdom of God and its eschatological significance. It is clear that many parts of the book of Daniel were familiar to Mark, and that they played an integral part in shaping his portrayal of the good news of Jesus.

Thesis advisor: Daniel J. Harrington / After studying the Gospel of Mark mostly from a historical approach, focusing on the world behind the text, scholars have turned more recently to the text as it is available for us today, taking into consideration the development of the Gospel narrative, how the story is told, and making use of literary theories to unlock the message of the Gospel. This approach, however, usually ends up with a strikingly negative view of the disciples who fail to understand Jesus and abandon him during his arrest, trial, and death. Is the author’s view of the disciples hopelessly negative? How is the reader/listener expected to respond to the challenges posed by Mark’s Gospel regarding discipleship? This thesis argues that, by presenting two contrasting responses to Jesus’ call to discipleship, namely the rich man’s and the disciples’, Mark gives the reader/listener a rather positive image of discipleship in 10:17-31, juxtaposing it to an overall negative view of the disciples developed in much of the narrative, and stresses renunciation of possessions as an essential requirement for true discipleship. / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

This thesis argues that the Gospel of Mark reflects a social location within the social boundaries of the Jewish ethnos and outlines relevant features of Mark’s configuration of Jewishness. It is divided into two parts. Part one provides a flexible definition of Jewishness in antiquity in order to assess what it meant to be Jewish and what characterized the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews. It makes an independent contribution to the study of Jewishness in antiquity by using a recent sociological model that explains how and why ethnicity matters in certain societies and contexts to map changes and features of Jewishness during the Hasmonean and Early Roman periods (129 BCE–132 CE) in the Southern Levant. It also addresses the relevant methodological issues for locating texts in relation to a social category such as “Jewish.” Part two addresses the Gospel of Mark through the same methodological lens and in light of the re-conceptualization of Jewishness. It both argues that Mark should be read as a Jewish text and addresses how Mark configures Jewishness. It shows that the categorical boundaries in the text reflect a common Jewish way of categorizing and ranking people. In particular, Mark’s narrative assumes a hierarchical relation between the Jews and other people groups (i.e., “gentiles” or “the nations”) in which Jews are to the nations as children are to dogs. In addition, Mark’s narrative employs the concept of the kingdom of God to remake the boundary system of Roman Judea in two ways. First, Mark attempts to overturn the hierarchical Roman/Jew boundary by presenting the kingdom of God as imminent, earthly, and entailing the end of Roman power. Second, Mark subdivides the Jewish ethnos by limiting kingdom membership to “righteous” members of the Jewish ethnos, a strategy shared with the majority of Jewish texts examined in part one. The concluding section addresses the configuration of Jewishness in Mark’s narrative in terms of six common features of ethnic identity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis argues that the Gospel of Mark should be read as Jewish literature and examines how Mark configures Jewishness. Part one provides a flexible definition of Jewishness in the Southern Levant during the Hasmonean and Early Roman periods (129 BCE–132 CE). Part two shows that the categorical boundaries in the Gospel of Mark reflect a common Jewish way of categorizing and ranking people groups. It then examines how Mark uses the concepts of the kingdom of God and Torah observance to overturn the hierarchical Roman/Jew boundary and limit kingdom membership to the righteous ones among the Jewish people. While Mark may assume that non-Jews participate in the expected kingdom, the absence of direct evidence highlights the Jewish-centric perspective of Mark’s Gospel.

This thesis examines the relationship between Jesus and God in the Gospel of Mark. Against the predominant view since the early 1970’s, it argues that the Markan Jesus is considerably more than a merely human Messiah; he is a divine figure. But he is not placed in a general, Hellenistic category of superhuman or divine beings, nor ascribed only a general transcendent status. Instead, Mark links Jesus directly and closely to YHWH, the one God of Israel. In contrast to many earlier studies of the christology of Mark, which focus on christological titles, this study is primarily concerned with Mark’s narrative and the author’s portrayal of Jesus. Assuming that Mark’s audience were familiar to varying degrees with different traditions of the Hellenistic world, the text is interpreted in its wider Old Testament/Jewish, Greco- Roman, and early Christian context, all the while remaining sensitive to intra-textual links. It appears that the Markan Jesus assumes divine attributes and acts in exclusively divine roles, that he fulfils Old Testament promises about God’s own intervention and coming, and that his relationship to people is analogous to God’s relationship to Israel. It is of particular significance that Jesus in several cases takes on roles which were used to demonstrate someone’s deity or, YHWH’s sovereignty above all other gods. The result is a surprising overlap between Mark’s portrait of Jesus and the presentation of Israel’s God in the biblical and early Jewish traditions and, in some cases, the divine beings of the Greco-Roman world. While early Jewish literature occasionally can ascribe divine roles to a few exalted figures, the Markan description of Jesus is unique in two respects: the majority of the divine prerogatives ascribed to Jesus are without parallel in any of the aforementioned texts, and the number of these is unrivalled. Such a portrait of Jesus may call into question both the true humanity of Jesus (Jesus is not fully human) and the monotheistic faith of Israel (Jesus is a second divine being alongside God), but it is clear that Mark maintains both. The christology of Mark represents a paradox in which Jesus is fully human and, at the same time, in a mysterious way placed on the divine side of the God-creation divide.

In this thesis, I argue that Mark undergirds his high view of Jesus by characterizing him as an autonomous miracle-worker. In chapter one, I provide a history of literature regarding miracles, Mark, and the identity of Jesus. In chapter two, I demonstrate that the inclusion of deferment in miracle-narratives ranging from the Old Testament to Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, is nearly ubiquitous. That is, human miracle-workers that appear in narratives do not act autonomously: rather, they show clear and explicit dependence on God to perform their miracles. In chapter three, I demonstrate that deferment is not only an essential charactersitic of miracles in narratives, but also in non-narrative texts from Qumran to the great many extant magical materials. In chapter four, I show that Jesus’ miracle-working in Mark, unlike the miracle-working surveyed in chapters two and three, is autonoumous. Additionally, I suggest that Mark uses this autonomous miracle-working, at crucial places in the gospel, to illustrate his high view of Jesus. In chapter five I draw a distinction between Mark’s characterization of Jesus and other miracle-workers he depicts in the narrative. In this final chapter, I argue that Jesus’ autonomous miracle-working is not an idiosyncratic feature of Mark’s writing style, but integral to his characterization of Jesus. Mark portrays other miracle-workers in the Gospel as dependent on either God or Jesus to perform miracles which further supports his high view of Jesus.

<p> Perhaps since its composition, the Gospel of Mark has troubled scholarship with regard to its content and genre. In it, a number of anomalies appear: Jesus' use of secrecy, Jesus' use of the "son of man" title, how the miracles and exorcisms function with regard to plot, and why Jesus never convinces his listeners of his message. In this study, I argue that these anomalies can be explained by considering Mark's Gospel in light of the tragic genre. Mark's Gospel does not simply contain motifs or modes from tragedy; Mark's Gospel is a tragedy. Through the examination of extant Greek Tragedy and an application of Hegel's theory of tragic Kollision, this study illustrates the ways in which the plot of Mark's Gospel is built upon a tragic foundation. Kollision describes how Jesus is in conflict as the tragic hero. Conflict becomes central to this study, in which Jesus is the antagonist to the Temple and the cultural ethos it creates. This antagonism defines Jesus as the Messiah and concealed Son of God, and it produces the suffering and death common to all of tragedy. What is more, this study critically engages with several tragic theories, ranging from ancient to modern. It specifically analyzes Aristotle's Poetics-the standard description of tragic genre-and ask whether Aristotle's categories really do provide an exhaustive definition of ancient tragedy.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis advisor: Angela K. Harkins / Thesis advisor: Giovanni B. Bazzana / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

The messiahship of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark has figured prominently in modern New Testament scholarship. With the increasing awareness of the Jewish context from which the gospel traditions emerged, scholars have also paid close attention to the way Mark portrays Jesus in relation to the temple. Within these discussions, it is not uncommon to find claims that the Markan Jesus regards the Jerusalem institution as completely obsolete, some maintaining that the message of the kingdom of God in Mark is fundamentally opposed to the ancient Levitical system. Yet, there is not a single full-length monograph grappling with the question of how Mark presents Jesus as royal messiah on the one hand, and his interaction with the Jerusalem priests on the other. Such a project is now imperative, not least given the recent advancement in our understanding both of messianic expectations in the late Second Temple period and of the role of the high priesthood in Jewish polity at the turn of the Christian era. In this thesis, I argue that Jewish messianism from the mid-second century BCE to the late first-century CE anticipated the culmination of the Jerusalem priestly institution under the rule of the royal messiah. In portraying Jesus as the end-time king, Mark in turn assumes a similar expectation. However, contrary to the majority scholarly view, the earliest Gospel does not repudiate the Israelite worship as such. Rather, Mark depicts Jesus’s stance towards the priests in terms of a call to allegiance and warning of judgement. And it is in the light of its cumulative narrative context that Jesus’s criticism of the Jerusalem shrine should be read. To Mark, that is, the temple will be destroyed because the priests have rejected Israel’s end-time king, placing themselves outside the messianic kingdom. Nevertheless, Jesus will be vindicated over against his enemies as God’s messianic son. Chapter one examines important passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and chapter two focuses on texts from the Pseudepigrapha. In chapter three, I argue, against recent critics, that the Markan Jesus is indeed a royal figure. Then, chapter four looks at the relevant passages in Mark 1–10 in which the Jerusalem priests are in view. Finally, chapter five investigates the climactic clash between Jesus and the temple rulers in Mark 11–16 in comparison to my findings in the previous chapters.