Joel Kuhlin delves into the themes of disorder and failure in the Gospel according to Mark in this open access book, focusing on the rhetorical texture of Jesus's death as depicted in Mark 15:6–39. By examining the views of the 2nd-century theologian Papias of Hierapolis and employing Aelius Theon's Progymnasmata (“preliminary exercises”), he argues that the narrative's disordered presentation corresponds to a rhetorical strategy, employed through a composition struggling to come to terms with a socially dead Jewish messiah-figure.

Kuhlin first analyses the research of rhetorical Mark, emphasising the neglect of the passion narrative, before turning to the progymnasmata for a concrete tools and method for investigating the scope of Papias's potential insight into “failure”. He consequently discusses the chief concepts of order (taxis), style (lexis) and thought (dianoia) argued by Aristotle to define a piece of rhetoric; concluding that instead of a clear idea of what happened when Jesus died, the stoic concept of a failed thought, or phantasma, adequately represents the execution of the Messiah in Mark, from an ancient rhetorical perspective.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Lund University.