Phantom Messiah

<p>[W]hen they saw him walking on the sea they thought it was a ghost (<i>phantasma</i>) and cried out; for they all saw him and were terrified (Mark 6:49 RSV) <p/> There<br>is a growing awareness among biblical scholars and others of the<br>potential value of modern and postmodern fantasy theory for the study<br>of biblical texts. Following<br>theorists such as Roland Barthes Tzvetan Todorov and Gilles Deleuze<br>(among others) we understand the fantastic as the deconstruction of<br>literary realism. The fantastic arises from the text's resistance to<br>understanding; the meaning of the fantastic text is not its reference<br>to the primary world of consensus reality but rather a fundamental<br>undecidability of reference. The fantastic is also a point at which<br>ancient and contemporary texts (including books movies and TV shows)<br>resonate with one another sometimes in surprising ways and this<br>resonance plays a large part in my argument. Mark and its afterlives<br>translate one another in the sense that Walter Benjamin speaks of<br>the tangential point at which the original text and its translation<br>touch one another not a transfer of understood meaning but rather a<br>point at which what Benjamin called pure language becomes apparent. <p/><br>Mark has always<br>been the most difficult of the canonical gospels the one that<br>requires the greatest amount of hermeneutical gymnastics from its<br>commentators. Its beginning <i>in media res</i> its disconcerting<br>ending at 16:8 its multiple endings the messianic secret Jesus's<br>tensions with his disciples and family - these are just some of the<br>more obvious of the and many troublesome features that distinguish Mark<br>from the other biblical gospels. If there had not been two other<br>gospels (Matthew and Luke) that were clearly similar to Mark but also<br>much more attractive to Christian belief it seems likely that Mark <br>like the gospels of Thomas and Peter would not have been accepted into<br>the canon. Reading Mark as fantasy does not solve any of these<br>problems but it does place them in a very different context one in<br>which they are no longer problems but in which there are different<br>problems. A fantastical reading of the gospel of<br>Mark is not the only correct understanding of this text but rather one<br>possibility that may have considerable appeal and value in the<br>contemporary world. <p/> <p/>This fantastic<br>reading is a reading from the outside inspired by the parable<br>theory of Isaiah 6:9-10 and Mark 4:11-12: for those outside<br>everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not<br>perceive and may indeed hear but not understand. Reading<br>from the outside counters a widespread belief that only those within<br>the faith community can properly understand the scriptures. It is the<br>stupid reading of those who do not share institutionalized<br>understandings passed down through catechisms and creeds i.e. through<br>the dominant ideology of the churches.</p>