Text, Community and Christian Origins (Searching the Rhetoric of Identity Description in the Markan Gospel)

This book tries to reread the ideological and theological dimensions intrinsic to the Markan Gospel, presupposing that such understanding of the image of Christian identity in its origin would facilitate one to understand further the socio- historical situations of the Markan community. This work, for this purpose, enables one to journey through a brief survey of Markan scholarship regarding the Markan community and to taste the use of social-scientific models and narrative approach to the text in its interpretation. Hence this book offers a methodological contribution to the Markan scholarship. The illustration of the social identity description of the Markan gospel by way of treating the theme of discipleship and decoding the Markan characterization in a simple and intelligible language, indeed respect the popular readership and their passion for living an authentic Christian life in today's turbulent world. In this way, this book serves both the ordinary Christian believers as an attitudinal guide to get their lives transformed as authentic disciples of Jesus and for any serious student of the Markan gospel as motivational guide in her/his inquisitiveness.

Dr. Cyprian E. Fernandez holds Master's Degree and Doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Salamanca, Spain. He also holds Master's Degree in Psychology (M.Sc.) from the Madras University. He is the author of Identity in Conflict: A Socio-rhetorical Reading of the Markan Story of Jesus. He is teacher of the New Testament in the Pontifical Institute of Alwaye, Kerala. He is a catholic priest of the Diocese of Quilon.

Dr. Cyprian E. Fernandez, in his recent book Text, Community and Christian Origins, makes a commendable effort to articulate the identity of the audience of the gospel of Mark or the first readers of the gospel of Mark. In order to arrive at a convincing conclusion regarding the community addressed by Mark in his gospel, he puts to use various methodological tools. Hence, his research and the conclusions deserve honest appreciation and polite evaluation from the scholars of the Markan studies.

Nevertheless, ever since I started my specialization on the gospel of Mark, the question that bothered me was regarding the ineptness of some of our researches. Can we reach a conclusion with some kind of a certitude regarding the first readers or the audience or the community of the gospel of Mark? The current state of research that Fernandez presents in the first chapter and the conclusions he summarises at the end, do not encourage a positive answer to this question. Hence, I intend to approach the whole matter, viz., the Markan readers/audience/ community, from a different angle.

Gospel, at first, was not just read, but rather proclaimed. One person proclaims the gospel and others listen to the proclamation. The written gospel of Mark, at first, might probably have been a tool to facilitate the act of proclamation of the same.

The purpose of such proclamation was to bring about conversion (Mk 1:15) in the listener and thereby to transform his/her life. In other words, the objective of the gospel proclamation was to generate apt responses in the listener, because of the attentive listening to the proclaimed gospel story. In that spectacle of the proclamation of the gospel story, the characters of the gospel turn out to be sheer ploys by whom the reader is provoked to respond, in the process of listening to the gospel. In other words, the listener is invited to respond to the characters of the story, at each moment of the development of the gospel story.

An active quest for the Markan community has been commenced ever since the Gospel of Mark was begun to be read critically and scientifically. By the advent of redaction criticism, a good deal of New Testament Scholarship has tried to explain the historical and socio-temporal settings of the Markan Gospel. A few of those studies have shed much light on the nature of the Markan Community from the sociological and ideological perspective.

It could be said in preview that the scholars are unanimous on the opinion that the knowledge of the real historical audience of Mark is an important base for any kind of interpretation of the Markan text. However, among them there is "...no consensus on the setting of Mark, nor is there a method agreed upon for describing the social makeup of a given community on the basis of a text." They admit the insufficiency of the search in this area of scholarship. W. R. Telford after treating the same topic so briefly, referring to the similar mind of J. R. Donahue, opines that the "features such as these are not sufficient of course, to provide a definitive clue to the identity of the Markan community. This, like the provenance, still remains an open question." This statement itself is enough and more to give an impetus to dedicate a study in this area.

**Contents and Sample Pages**