Risen Indeed?: Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark (Early Christianity and Its Literature Book 31)

Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark traces the literary dynamics and explores the theological dimensions of the Gospel of Mark’s thematization of skepticism regarding resurrection. In every place where it seems to depict resurrection—Jesus’s and others’—Mark evades the issue of whether resurrection actually occurs. Austin Busch argues that, despite Mark’s abbreviated and ambiguous conclusion, this gospel does not downplay resurrection but rather foregrounds it, imagining Jesus’s death and restoration to life as a divine plot to overcome Satan through cunning deception. Risen Indeed? constitutes a careful literary reading of Mark’s Gospel, as well as an assessment of Mark’s impact on the traditions of Christian literature and theology that emerged in its wake.Austin Busch is Associate Professor of Early World Literature in SUNY Brockport’s English department and Director of the school’s Honors College. Busch has published articles on Paul, Mark, and gnostic literature, as well as on Roman imperial literature. He is coeditor of the Norton English Bible: New Testament and Apocrypha. Read more