{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028519195612431443, 'fraction_numerical': 0.015722120658135285, 'mean_word_length': 4.7478991596638656, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: The Case Against Q

Studies addressing the purpose of Mark’s gospel and the location of the community for which it was written have been legion since the mid-twentieth century. Such voluminous writing makes one wonder if anything fresh can be said on this topic. However, Hendrika N. Roskam in her monograph The Purpose of the Gospel of Mark in its Historical and Social Context (Leiden: Brill, 2004. 90/$129. pp. xv + 286. ISBN 90–04–14052–2) does not only offer new suggestions, but discusses the problem in a particularly engaging manner. Although, perhaps, individually few of the points suggested by Roskam are entirely new, it is her synthesis of the data that forges new possibilities for understanding the Markan community. After surveying recent scholarship, including a highly convincing rebuttal of Bauckham’s thesis that Mark’s gospel was written for a universal rather than a specific audience (17–22), Roskam sets about her own reconstruction of the community behind the gospel. In the first part of her work, it is argued that the Markan community is a persecuted entity that existed in Galilee and that the gospel was written in the aftermath of the Jewish War. She argues that geographical knowledge related by the author and assumed on the part of the audience makes a Galilean location likely. Similarly she suggests that features in the narrative, such as Mark 12:1–12, support a post-70 ce date. Building on the conclusions from part one, it is argued that the Markan community lived under the threat of persecution by Jewish leaders and the concomitant fear of being delivered to the Romans as rebels. To countermand this picture, Roskam depicts the purpose of the gospel as presenting, in the form of an ancient bios, a portrait of a Jesus stripped of any political overtones. Thus, the gospel is part of a survival strategy for a liminal and persecuted community. This reconstruction does raise a number of questions. Firstly, although it is highly plausible that the gospel was written for a specific group of believers-in-Jesus, the degree of transparency in seeing the community behind the gospel is limited. Therefore the conclusions are perhaps more tentative than Roskam allows. Second, is the Markan Jesus as non-political as Roskam would have one believe? The confrontation with Legion (Mk 5:1–20) and the portrayal of the Triumphal Procession (Mk 15:16–20) may in fact be attempts to subvert Roman Imperial claims. Also as a minor point, in the bibliography the Greek formatting has gone astray in the second work listed for J. K. Elliott. These criticisms aside, Roskam has written a work that is both readable and highly stimulating. This is a significant contribution to Markan studies.