Festivals, cultural intertextuality, and the Gospel of John’s rhetoric of distance

Imperial and civic-religious festivals pervaded the late first-century city of Ephesus where John’s Gospel was, if not written, at least read or heard. How did Jesus-believers as likely members of somewhat participationist synagogue communities negotiate such pervasive and public celebration of festivals? Did they participate in, ignore, or oppose such festivals? And how might John’s Gospel have encouraged them to respond? This article engages these questions by focusing on the narrative presentation of festivals in John’s Gospel (some 42 times) as, amongst other things, occasions of conflict and condemnation. Employing Sjef van Tilborg’s notion of ‘interference’, which prioritises the Ephesian civic interface of the Gospel’s audience, the article argues that the cultural intertextuality between the Gospel and an Ephesian context destabilises and problematises Ephesian civic festivals and shows there to be fundamental incompatibilities between Jesus’ work and Ephesian society, thereby seeking Jesus-believers to absent themselves from festivals. The Gospel’s presentation of festivals belongs to the gospel’s rhetoric of distance vis-à-vis societal structures

The things of Caesar : Mark-ing the plural (Mk 12:13–17)

This article observes the rarely-discussed phenomenon that the Marcan paying-the-tax scene refers to tax in the singular, whilst the concluding saying uses the plural ‘the things of Caesar and of God’. The article accounts for this phenomenon by means of developing traditions. The section under the heading ‘Mark’s scene and saying about taxes (12:13–17)’ counters the common claim that scene and saying originated as a unit from the historical Jesus. It proposes that whilst the saying may have originated with Jesus, the scene as we have it did not. The section under the heading ‘Social memory, orality, and a multi-referential saying?’ suggests some contexts that the saying about the things of Caesar addressed pre-Mark. And under the section ‘Trauma and Mark’s scene’ it is argued that Mark created a unit comprising scene and saying to negotiate the ‘trauma’ of the 66–70 war. The unit evaluates freshlyasserted Roman power as idolatrous and blasphemous whilst simultaneously authorising the continued involvement of Jesus-believers in imperial society.http://www.hts.org.zaam201