(Part 2 of The Beginning of Birth Pains)
Today, scholars argue over whether Mark’s gospel was written after the Jewish-Roman War or immediately before it. I’m of the opinion that that Mark was written after the fact as an explanation for world-upheaving events. Either way, Mark’s gospel aims to provide answers for a Jewish Jesus-following community that is either having their world turned upside down or have just had it overturned.
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(Read this series from its beginning here.)
Our reading this week aligns with Josephus’ descriptions of the events leading up to the Jewish Roman War in 66-69 C.E. (see Josephus’ The Jewish War). He describes famine, false prophets, and events leading up to the razing of the Temple itself.
In his account, Mark uses the hyperbolic language of apocalyptic writings of the time and the kind of language the prophets of old used to describe destruction brought on their nation by conquering foreign empires:
“The floodgates of the heavens are opened, the foundations of the earth shake. The earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth is violently shaken. The earth reels like a drunkard, it sways like a hut in the wind; so heavy upon it is the guilt of its rebellion that it falls—never to rise again.” (Isaiah 24:18-20)
We must not underestimate the trauma that the Jewish community at large and the Jesus-following Jewish community specifically was enduring at this time.
Looking for answers, it was only natural for the Jesus community to look back to Jesus’ calls for economic justice and his critical statements toward the Temple State to explain the devastation Rome had just wrought on Jerusalem and the surrounding regions.
Economic exploitation had reached a pivotal moment in the mid 60’s C.E., and the poor people revolted. The officials of the Temple State were driven out of Jerusalem. Revolutionaries and liberationists burned the Temple State’s debt records. This revolt then quickly evolved into an all-out assault on Rome itself as poor people tried to free themselves not just from local leaders but also from Roman occupation itself. This led to the Jewish Roman War of 66-69 C.E. and the Roman destruction of the Temple itself in 70 C.E. This pattern repeated in the second century when Rome banished the Jews from Jerusalem and Palestine and destroyed the entire city of Jerusalem in 135 C.E.
Mark’s gospel’s hyperbolic language in our reading this week is best understood against the back drop of this tremendous societal trauma.
(Read Part 3)
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