This will be a summarization of Craig Evan’s article on Mark[1]. You can find the original here.
On the third page of the article, he notes that “Mark appears deliberately to highlight parallels between Jesus’ behavior and his treatment at the hands of the Romans, on the one hand, and Roman traditions and practices concerning the Ruler Cult, on the other. “ He then goes on to enumerate several of those parallels, but I will use a few for my purposes. For one, (his number two on the list), is the use of omens and prophecies. As we have discovered with McCasland, omens were often times a Roman tool, although employed by Josephus and of course, Mark. Here, he notes that the omens are around the transfiguration, a historical referent which I will explore later. Further, he notes the Roman Triumph and associates this with Mark 11.1-11. There is the divine terms used of Jesus and the healings. Here, he notes the ratio of healings to the length of the story (8).
He assigns the date of writing to the mid to late 60s, although he thinks that a different social backdrop would have been present had Mark’s Gospel been written in 68 or 69 (12-14).
So, pretty short, but there is the connection between Mark’s Gospel and Rome, something Adam Winn explores in his book, The Purpose of Mark’s Gospel.
[1] Evans, Craig A. “Mark’s Incipit and the Priene Calendar Inscription: From Jewish Gospel to Greco-Roman Gospel .” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 1 (2000): 67-81.
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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