Since his name has come up a few times in my review of the scholarly literature on Markan christology, some readers may be interested in checking out Michael Peppard’s latest article “Powerful Sons were Adopted Sons: A Roman Imperial Perspective” at the website The Bible and Interpretation (thanks to Ekaterini G. Tsalampouni for calling it to my attention). Enjoy.
Very nice. Michael Peppard continues to impress me with his work, now only if we can have somebody synthesize his work with James McGrath’s as well as Sanders and Allison.
Anyway your post a few entries down got me thinking about the enigmatic nature of Mark’s audience. I suspect that if Peppard is right in saying that Mark is sticking it to Caesar by applying imperial ideology to Jesus than the gospel could likely be written in a very urban setting in which such imperial imagery would have been prelevant and possibly threatening to Christian identity. I’m reluctant however to suggest that the Christian community in Rome was the addressee of the gospel but only because I don’t find the reasons for doing so to be unique, that is to say that Christians in Rome did not uniquely face persecution or were threatened by imperial propaganda, many urban Christians through out the empire faced similar situations [I would think].
Anywho with that aside, I have a feeling that where ever the second gospel was addressed, it was addressed in part to a Jewish [with Gentile members] community that was familiar with the motifs and beliefs of first century Judaism. The aside comments in Mark could have been for the benefit of the Gentiles in the community, and it is not unlikely that Mark engaged in good old fashioned stereotyping like many did both then and now.
I think my theory allows us to have the best of both worlds in which Mark tells a narrative using tropes that resonated with both worlds.
Thanks Brian. Although Peppard prefers the Roman provenance, I think he makes a good case that the imperial cult could have been felt all over the Empire including Palestine (e.g., his point that the location of Peter’s confession in Caesarea Philippi also included a temple to the imperial cult). So I tend to prefer a Syria-Palestine provenance and a mixed audience of Jews and Gentiles.