Beyond Fear and Silence: A Feminist-Literary Approach to the Gospel of Mark

Elisabeth Sch ssler-Fiorenza's ""hermeneutic of suspicion"" is possibly the most formative idea to emerge from the feminist biblical scholarship of the late 1990s. As one of Sch ssler-Fiorenza's former students, Mitchell is heir to this tradition, applying it here to the Gospel of Mark. But Mitchell goes beyond the hermeneutic of suspicion to employ literary and narrative approaches to the text, suggesting an alternative interpretation of its unsatisfactory original ending. (The ""first draft"" of Mark has women fleeing Jesus' empty tomb in fear.) The motifs of fear and silence, Mitchell argues, ""are essential to the story, a necessary part of a literary whole,"" and they are present throughout the Gospel. Those with little experience with the jargon of the feminist hermeneutics of liberation should learn the lingo elsewhere before mining this book for its considerable fruits. (Nov.)