The Phantom Messiah Postmodern Fantasy and the Gospel of Mark [Hardcover]

[W]hen they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost (phantasma), and cried out; for they all saw him, and were terrified (Mark 6:49, RSV)

There
is a growing awareness among biblical scholars and others of the
potential value of modern and postmodern fantasy theory for the study
of biblical texts. Following
theorists such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gilles Deleuze
(among others), we understand the fantastic as the deconstruction of
literary realism. The fantastic arises from the text's resistance to
understanding; the meaning of the fantastic text is not its reference
to the primary world of consensus reality but rather a fundamental
undecidability of reference. The fantastic is also a point at which
ancient and contemporary texts (including books, movies, and TV shows)
resonate with one another, sometimes in surprising ways, and this
resonance plays a large part in my argument. Mark and its afterlives
translate one another, in the sense that Walter Benjamin speaks of
the tangential point at which the original text and its translation
touch one another, not a transfer of understood meaning but rather a
point at which what Benjamin called pure language becomes apparent.

Mark has always
been the most difficult of the canonical gospels, the one that
requires the greatest amount of hermeneutical gymnastics from its
commentators. Its beginningin media res, its disconcerting
ending at 16:8, its multiple endings, the messianic secret, Jesus's
tensions with his disciples and family - these are just some of the
more obvious of the and many troublesome features that distinguish Mark
from the other biblical gospels. If there had not been two other
gospels (Matthew and Luke) that were clearly similar to Mark but also
much more attractive to Christian belief, it seems likely that Mark,
like the gospels of Thomas and Peter, would nl£