Exile, Identity, and Reconstructing Belonging in the Gospel of Mark

This volume adds to the scholarly interpretive discourses surrounding the Gospel of Mark and argues that the author of Mark attempts to re-construct social identity after the Second Temple’s demise. After the destruction of the Temple, Mark questioned his self-identity through sentiments of social alienation and expressed these emotions through lamenting lost socio-cultural institutions, utilizing creative intellectual attempts to reconcile his lost social-cultural identifiers. The volume analyzes theories regarding the concepts of nationality, identity, and exile, and proposes that Mark is an example of exilic literature, which can be understood through the larger umbrella of post-colonial literature. Readers gain a new understanding of the Gospel of Mark and a new way of dissecting it within a theoretical lens of exilic literature. Exile, Identity, and Reconstructing Belonging in the Gospel of Mark is of interest to students and scholars of Mark and the Gospels, as well as those working on exilic literature and post-colonial theories in the Bible more broadly.