Re-Placing the Galilean Jesus: Local Geography, Mark, Miracle, and the Quest for Jesus of Capernaum

In a discourse notorious for disagreement, the extent to which scholars agree on placing the historical Jesus in and around Capernaum is remarkable: it is his centre (E. P. Sanders; G. Theissen), hub (J. Reed), and headquarters (R. Horsley), emblematic of his kingdom (J. D. Crossan) and constitutive of his career (S. Freyne). Nonetheless, reconstructions of Jesus routinely privilege other sorts of place (especially religious, political and cultural) at the expense of local geography. In other words, the historiographical conviction that Capernaum and environs matter for an historical description of Jesus has yet to be translated methodologically, or made to ‘count’ exegetically, in such a way as to occasion a reading strategy correspondingly sensitive to geographical place. My project is an attempt to address this lacuna. On the basis of G. Theissen’s attempt to prioritize for purposes of the historical enterprise those texts in the Synoptic tradition which bear the mark of local perspective (Lokalkolorit), I suggest that we select similarly for the purpose of an historical description of Jesus those traditions which are ‘marked’ first, by the place names and, also, by the local perspective of Capernaum and environs, otherwise known as the Lake Region of Galilee, which is where scholarship has been wont to locate the man. Such a geographical criterion indicates a set of data clustered in Mark 4:35-8:26 as the most logical textual site at which to begin a closer analysis, or to dig deeper, if and when we take seriously the historiographical wager that Jesus’ local place matters. It is true that much of this material can be explained, subsequently, in the name of the Evangelist “Mark.” But it is also true that this explanation only goes so far vis-à-vis the local memory of Jesus as regional holy man and local thaumaturge of the Valley, possessed of the dunamis to manage single-handedly the various, locally experienced contingencies of life lived precisely there. Another, more exacting explanation is required, which I supply, by way of conclusion, in the name of the historical Jesus of Capernaum.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD