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Dandy Discipleship: A Queering of Mark’s Male Disciples
Abstract
While conventional readings of the Bible unambiguously presume the normativity of heterosexuality and binary categories of gender, this article challenges such modern assumptions by purposefully and strategically re-reading three Markan discipleship texts “sexually.” By combining a socio-rhetorical approach with queer and gender criticism as informed primarily by the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid, the re-readings attempt to penetrate through existing homophobic and erotophobic interpretations. Particular attention is also given to the ways in which the gender and sexuality of the male disciples has been constructed and can be problematized in both the world behind the text and the world in front of the text.
This article provides a bibliography of historical Jesus research from 2000 to 2023 in German and English language publications. In addition to the bibliography, a brief introductory essay identifies trends in historical Jesus research.
This article strengthens the relationship between childhood studies and biblical studies by introducing the field of childist biblical criticism to other child‐focused disciplines. A brief overview explains why studying children in the Bible is critical for understanding this ancient text and its world. Most of the article focuses on the tools used for gathering evidence and the methodologies used in childist scholarship. Discussion of the terms ‘childist’ and ‘childism’ then urges adoption of both terms as conveying positive meaning. Throughout the discussion and explicitly in the conclusion, this article shows what childist biblical studies contribute to the wider movement of childism and securing children's rights.
Most characters in the Bible are men, yet they are hardly analysed as such. Masculinity and the Bible provides the first comprehensive survey of approaches that remedy this situation. These are studies that utilize insights from the field of masculinity studies to further biblical studies. The volume offers a representative overview of both fields and presents a new exegesis of a well-known biblical text (Mark 6) to show how this approach leads to new insights.
By presenting the field of masculinity studies, the volume performs a service for those working in biblical studies and related disciplines, but do not have explored this approach yet. At the same time, the volume shows, by surveying the past two decades of publications in the field, what results have been achieved so far and where open questions remain. In the exegesis of Mark 6, it becomes clear that one of these challenges, the often very specific and intersectional character of masculinity, can be addressed successfully when consciously combining approaches such as narrative and ritual analyses.
Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism analyses the ideology underpinning contemporary scholarly and popular quests for the historical Jesus. Focusing on cultural and political issues, the book examines postmodernism, multiculturalism and the liberal masking of power. The study ranges across diverse topics: the dubious periodisation of the quest for the historical Jesus; 'biblioblogging'; Jesus the 'Great Man' and western individualism; image-conscious Jesus scholarship; the 'Jewishness' of Jesus and the multicultural Other; evangelical and 'mythical' Jesuses; and the contradictions between personal beliefs and dominant ideological trends in the construction of historical Jesuses. Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism offers readers a radical revisioning of contemporary biblical studies.
This book contains studies of the social, cultural, and religious history of the Jews in the Graeco-Roman world. Some of the sixteen contributors are specialists in Jewish history, others in classics. They tackle from different angles the extent to which Jews in this period differed from other peoples in the Mediterranean region, and how much Jewish evidence can be used for the history of the wider classical world. The authors make extensive use not only of types of evidence familiar to classicists, such as inscriptions and the writing of Josephus, but also Jewish religious literature, including rabbinic texts. The various studies demonstrate that, although Jews lived to some extent apart from others and with distinctive customs, in many ways this showed the cultural presuppositions and preoccupations of their gentile contemporaries. The book aims to encourage wider use of the Jewish evidence by classicists and will be important for all students of the classical world.
A partir de la question du regne et du service dans Marc 10,41-45, l'A. montre que l'idee du roi ideal dans la tradition philosophique grecque et hellenistique et sa transmission par la conception cynique du philosophe sont des traditions importantes dans la composition de la pericope
This comprehensive study of Roman sexuality and the ideologies of masculinity discusses a wide range of ancient texts, arguing that native Roman concepts of masculinity did not rely on the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality, but were instead structured around such antitheses as free versus slave, dominant versus subordinate, and masculine versus effeminate.
What does it mean “to be a man”? Whereas in most societies at most times the determination of “maleness” is straightforward (does he have male genitalia? what is his chromosomal make-up?), locating the cultural constructions of “manhood” is far more difficult. Many anthropologists have noted that in contrast to models that postulate a common psychology for all men, everywhere, all the time, constructions of manhood are varied and culturally dependent. For example, the highly aggressive behavior necessary for retention of manhood for a male resident of Andalusian Spain can be contrasted to the sanctioned behavior of males of Tahiti. Unifying these diverse constructions of masculinity, however, is the common idea that manhood is an acquired state that males must fight both to attain and maintain. Because manhood is an achieved state, it can never be taken for granted: a male must be constantly proving that he is a man. “[T]he state of being a ‘real man’ or ‘true man’ [is] uncertain or precarious, a prize to be won or wrested through struggle.” Similar constructions of manhood are evident today throughout the circum-Mediterranean.
Despite the growing body of gay scholarship in religious studies, there is a dearth of responses by heterosexual scholars in the field of men's studies in religion. Gay theology can still count more predictably on the ire of a conservative public than on a nuanced, non-homophobic critique by their heterosexual colleagues. What contributes to disregarding gay scholarly voices? Paradoxically, their voices are marginalized to the point of invisibility and yet are also in the center of public discourse. This article sifts through some reasons of why heterosexual men shy away from a public debate of the merits of gay scholarship. Besides methodological reservations, heterosexual male anxieties cause such weariness. Autobiographical insertions by gay scholars combined with discipline-transgressions may lead to ‘homosexual panic’ even among non-homophobic scholars. The article argues that heterosexual men's studies in religion need to overcome their silence and engage the scholarship of gay theology.
There are those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms. Others enter churches with love letters hidden in their bags, because their need for God and their need for love refuse to fit into different compartments. But what goodness and righteousness can prevail if you are in love with someone whom you are ecclesiastically not supposed to love? Where is God in a salsa bar? The Queer God introduces a new theology from the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion. Its chapters on Bisexual Theology, Sadean holiness, gay worship in Brazil and Queer sainthood mark the search for a different face of God - the Queer God who challenges the oppressive powers of heterosexual orthodoxy, whiteness and global capitalism. Inspired by the transgressive spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with Queer interpretations of grace and holiness, The Queer God seeks to liberate God from the closet of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God's part in the lives of gays, lesbians and the poor. Only a theology that dares to be radical can show us the presence of God in our times. The Queer God creates a concept of holiness that overcomes sexual and colonial prejudices and shows how Queer Theology is ultimately the search for God's own deliverance. Using Liberation Theology and Queer Theory, it exposes the sexual roots that underlie all theology, and takes the search for God to new depths of social and sexual exclusion.
Discussions of Bible and homosexuality, and discussions of postmodern biblical interpretation, have often taken place in isolation from one another. However, Judith Butler's “queer” approach to sex, gender and performativity may allow biblical scholars to rethink their objects and procedures in a manner that brings such discussions together. Grounded in a reading of speech act theory, Butler's work explores the possibility that gender, rather than being conceived in a modernist fashion as the social interpretation of stable sexed bodies, is best understood in terms of collective practices that produce perceptions of fixed sexes and genders as performative effects. So too the Bible, often conceived as a fixed object, may be reconceptualized in terms of the collective practices, including conventional modes of scholarly and popular analysis, that produce perceptions of a single, stable Bible as performative effects. Postmodern queer theory's appreciation of complexity and pluralism as resources rather than threats can thus be extended from bodies to bibles. Just as Butler examines processes whereby bodies come to “matter” (in both senses of that term), biblical scholars can examine processes—including those associated with biblical theology and those associated with sexuality debates—whereby bibles, too, “matter.”
A tale of two disciplines, this article critically surveys the ways in which New Testament scholars have adopted and adapted major developments in literary studies of the past two decades, notably poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, queer theory, and masculinity studies. Cultural studies, the article argues, is the literary studies phenomenon that most tellingly sets the fox among the chickens; likewise in biblical studies, cultural studies constitutes the most serious (and salutary) threat to the inherited identity of the discipline. More broadly, the article contends that all of the major recent developments in literary studies are post-methodological in thrust, and thus constitute a timely challenge to biblical scholars to acknowledge their own fetish for methodology, understand what impels it, and move beyond it.
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