Abstract
The story of Mark is littered with broken bodies—bleeding, beaten, and murdered figures, and nameless women whose illness or social shame seems to be their defining quality. As it turns out, Jesus is only one of numerous figures whose pain is recounted, even foregrounded, in the gospel. While Jesus’ torture and pain is perhaps the thread that ties so many of the otherwise disjointed scenes of Mark together, his crucifixion is hardly a singular moment of suffering, especially given that he is hung next to two other men. However at odds with prevailing Christian assumptions (though perhaps not at odds with Christian tendencies to identify with Jesus’ pain), it may be that the critical condition of Mark’s story is not that Jesus’s pain is somehow exceptional, but rather that it is a heart-breakingly mundane part of a world of illness and bodily vulnerability, untimely deaths and self-inflicted injury, torture, and government-ordered murders.
The subject of pain is the business I am in…to give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.
—Louise Bourgeois1
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Notes
Sarah Ahmed illustrates this point in beautifully delicate detail in a chapter entitled “The Contingency of Pain,” in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). More will be said of this point and Ahmed’s work in this chapter.
Judith Butler has made this formulation central to her recent work. See particularly “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), and Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
An intercalation is a literary structure that begins one story and interrupts it with another complete story before completing the first story. Very often the enfolding of two such stories allows the reader to complicate or draw new meanings from them by letting one interpret the other. These intercalations occur nine times, at 3:20–35, 4:1–20, 5:21–34, 6:7–30, 11:12–21, 14:1–11, 14:17–31, 14:53–72, and 15:40–58. See, for instance, James R. Edwards, “Markan Sandwiches: The Significance of Interpolations in Markan Narratives,” Novum Testamentum 31 Fasc. 3 (1989): 193–216.
John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus: Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanfrancisco, 1995), 101.
For a description to what is generally implied by the term “colonization” and an introduction to postcolonial theory, the branch of criticism that thinks about the history and effects of colonization, see Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998).
Biblical scholar Ched Myers applies Fanon’s work to this episode, writing: “What Fanon called the ‘colonization of the mind’ in which the community’s anguish over its subjugation is repressed and then turned in on itself, is perhaps implied by Mark’s report that the man inficts violence on himself (5:5). The formidable grip by which the powers hold the community is vividly portrayed in the opening lines (5:3–5).” Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988), 193.
See also Frantz Fanon’s now renowned book Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
Stephen Moore “‘My Name Is Legion, For We Are Many’: Representing Empire in Mark,” in Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffeld: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).
Along these lines, Judith Butler has written on grief observing that “It could be that in this experience [of grief] something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have with others, that show us that those ties constitute a sense of self, compose who we are, and that when we lose them, we lose our composure in some fundamental sense: we do not know who we are or what to do…. Grief displays the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others that we cannot always recount or explain, that often interrupts the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control.” “Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 18–19.
The term “son of Adam” or “son of humanity” is associated with divine messengers in what are called “apocalyptic” texts such as Daniel or the Similtudes of Enoch. The meaning of the term in The New Testament literature is more varied, and does not always or necessarily suggest an apocalyptic meaning. A summary of the history of this term can be found in John J. Collins’ Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1998), 101–104,
or in Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Origin of the Designation of Jesus as ‘Son of Man,’” The Harvard Theological Review 80, (1987): 391–407. While Jesus only speaks of his suffering through this son of Adam/humanity figure, this son of Adam/humanity figure is also evoked as one who “returns again,” cf. Mark 8:38. Though here too there is a reference to suffering embedded in Jesus’ response.
One of the most familiar phrases of Mark’s narrative is Jesus’ repeated call to “follow me,” and more troublingly, “Pick up your cross and follow me.” These instructions are, among other things, a function of martyrological traditions. As Stephen Patterson writes, the martyr’s death “provides an example of faithfulness for others to emulate,” and he finds the instruction to follow to be “supremely illustrative of martyrological thinking.” Picking up on David Seeley’s work on Noble Death traditions, Patterson writes, “The martyr’s death is vicarious insofar as it sets an example to be emulated by others. Its benefits are experienced through imitation.” See Stephen J. Patterson, Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 39–60.
For an in-depth discussion of this point, see Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 353–376.
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© 2013 Maia Kotrosits and Hal Taussig
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Kotrosits, M., Taussig, H. (2013). Blood Relations: Pain and the Social Body. In: Re-reading the Gospel of Mark Amidst Loss and Trauma. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342645_4
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