Mark and literary materialism: towards a liberative reading for (post)apartheid South Africa

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)The interpretation of the New Testament as a resource for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa followed several hermeneutic paths. The contextual urgency of resisting oppression pressed anti-apartheid biblical scholars to reclaim liberative strands within Christian theology, historical critical biblical scholarship and Marxism. After the end of apartheid in 1994, however, attention to liberation in South African biblical studies became less focused. In this dissertation, I use the hermeneutical framework of literary materialism to survey and critique anti-apartheid biblical scholarship in the work of Allan Boesak, Itumeleng Mosala and Albert Nolan. I begin with the “text-epistemology” of post-structural intertextuality, demonstrating the rhetorical and political characteristics of textual production and collapsing the interpretive distinction between historical and artistic representation. From this, I develop a self-conscious and materially-focussed dialectic for “fusing the horizons” between the authoritative texts of anti-apartheid biblical scholarship and the contextual demands of resisting apartheid. In particular, I identify hermeneutical coherences around a heightened attention to the context of the interpreter, the role of Jesus as an exemplar for resistance, and attention to material consequence in resistant practice. I go on to exegete key sections of the gospel of Mark in order to extend upon the trajectories laid out by these scholars. In particular, I demonstrate that the Sabbath contentions in Mark 1-3 can be fruitfully read through the literary trope of utopianism, where Jesus synthesises an ambivalent Sabbath tradition for the sake of the hungry and oppressed. I explore the parameters of resistant action against political institutions with reference to the conflict over Caesar’s coin in Mark 12, and the temple and fig tree episodes in Mark 11. In contrast to the trajectory of Western Christian pacifism, I interpret these passages to underscore a more complex and nuanced understanding of permissible action and consequential violence. Finally, I read the “call” and “sending” narratives of Mark 1, 2:13-17 and 6:1-13, 30 to demonstrate how liberative praxis is constituted communally around material purpose and received authority. Finally, I “fuse horizons” between the world of Mark and that of apartheid South Africa towards developing a theo-political framework for analysing and resisting oppression