BEN: Your chapter on the death of Jesus does an excellent job of showing how a Roman audience might well hear the story of Jesus’ death, in light of Greco-Roman accounts of the death of notable figures such as philosophers. I noticed however that you didn’t deal with the irony in the Mark account, and its function. Since Mark is in the business of presenting a counter-cultural Jesus and his life, more could have been said about not only the... Read more
BEN: Granting the limited role that disciples and others play in a biography of Jesus, nevertheless, we could at least say that sometimes some of these figures do provide a glimpse of positive discipleship for the audience to follow, so while Jesus is overwhelmingly the main paradigm in this Gospel, we should not neglect the others. Is this a fair reading on your view? I ask because, as you say, Jesus cannot be entirely followed as an example. He’s the... Read more
BEN: While I am quite dubious in regard to claims of large chiastic structures in Mark, not least because that is a ‘visual’ device, one that has to be seen by a reader of a text, and Mark’s Gospel is largely meant to be heard by the majority audience, I think you have a good point about the use of synkrisis in Mark. This makes good rhetorical sense of various passages. What do you see as the main thing Mark... Read more
BEN: Granting that ancient biographies sometime involve fiction (e.g. in the Gospel parables are clear examples), I wonder what you see as the dangers of using a methodology applied to novels to analyze ancient biographies. I am referring, among other things, to complaints about lack of character development, or even calling the persons mentioned in the narratives characters, as though they were actors in a play or created characters in a work of fiction? It does not seem to me... Read more
BEN: I am one of those utterly unconvinced that Mark 16.8 was the original ending of Mark’s Gospel. ‘Ephobounto gar’ certainly doesn’t work as the ending of a book, or even a normal Greek paragraph. And to judge from the 3 different endings added to the text in the 2nd-3rd century, early Christians who knew about ancient biographies didn’t think so either. What sort of evangelist would want to end the story of Jesus with fright and flight of disciples... Read more
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