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Jesus the Oracle: Reading Mark 9:33-11:19 as an Oracular Procession in Second/Third Century Roman Egypt
Moeser, Annelies Gisela
Moeser, Annelies Gisela
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2019
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This project explores the question of how non-elite women and men may have understood the Gospel of Mark within the cultural and historical context of second to third century Roman Egypt. It does so by reading a section of Mark's Gospel wherein Jesus travels from Capernaum to the Temple in Jerusalem in light of the Egyptian phenomenon of oracular processions. These processions were religious rituals performed to seek the renewal of life, fertility and to support the established world-order. As a means of oracular communication, the procession allowed people to ask questions about their lives and receive divine responses. Reading Mark with this perspective creates a portrait of Jesus that both supports and subverts this model of processions. In alignment with this model, Jesus is shown to promote the renewal of life, including the health of individuals Jesus encounters, and to uphold families and the fertility thereof, for example in extending blessings upon the next generation, the family¿s children. However, the Marcan Jesus does not always secure and undergird the existing world-order of the narrative¿s construction of Roman-occupied Palestine and their provincial elite allies, including the Jerusalem-based hierarchy of the Temple. Instead, Jesus often proclaims an alternate world-order, the kingdom or empire of G*d, a just and peaceful social order which Jesus, as an oracular priest or agent of G*d, announces based on his supernatural knowledge of the divine plan.
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Brite Divinity School