Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory

“This translation of Sandra Huebenthal’s important work offers the English-language reader the chance to engage with her groundbreaking work on Mark as an artifact of collective memory, a narrative of commemoration and testimony that strengthened its readers’ sense of self-identity. Written with clarity and perception, this is a book that no Markan scholar will want to ignore.”
— Helen K. Bond
University of Edinburgh

“In Reading Mark’s Gospel as a Text from Collective Memory, Sandra Huebenthal turns her focus from Jesus as a figure from the past to the Gospel of Mark as a commemorative text, a product and example of collective memory. She recalibrates factors that are too often treated as mutually exclusive options (collective or individual, story or history, diachronic or synchronic, etc.) and situates Mark within the creative tension between these and other poles.”
— Rafael Rodríguez
Johnson University

“In this book Professor Huebenthal demonstrates her exceptional theoretical awareness and brings scholarship a significant step forward by challenging the bewildering outburst of memory studies to develop a more precise terminology and ideology of memory. In her own way, she paves the way for liberating contemporary memory studies from its occupation with the historical Jesus and opens up new possibilities for grasping the significance of what it meant to commemorate narratively the image of Jesus from the past. Needless to say, this study raises crucial hermeneutical issues concerning how to understand the presence of the past in early Christianity.”
— Samuel Byrskog
Lund University, Sweden

“Huebenthal’s (re)introduction of memory and orality rewards readers with a host of fresh insights into the history of gospel studies, the Gospel of Mark, and the gospel’s social environment and formation, and it invites them to raise entirely new questions.”
— Werner H. Kelber
from the foreword