Phantom Messiah

[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)<br/> <br/> 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.<br/><br/><br/><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. <br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>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.