Please email cjlearning@bc.edu if you would like to attend.

Since World War II there have been sweeping changes in the field of New Testament studies. The last half of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first have witnessed a revolution in how scholars, and laypeople as well, view the Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers. While a greater continuity with Judaism was found in one New Testament text after another, there was one very important exception: The Gospel of Mark. This talk will set forth the arguments for recognizing the Jewishness of the Second Gospel through a close reading of Mark 1:40–45, 5:25–34, and 7:1–30.

Prof. Lawrence Wills will be speaking in Prof. Angela Harkins’ “Gospel of Mark” Class.

Professor Lawrence Wills (Th.D., 1987 and M.T.S., 1980 from Harvard Divinity School; A.B., 1976 from Harvard College) was the Ethelbert Talbot Professor of Biblical Studies at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, from 2000-2017. He is presently the Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies and Religious Studies at Brown University. He is the past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, New England and Eastern Canada Region. His research and writing is in the area of Hellenistic Jewish literature, NT studies, and women and gender in ancient religion. Professor Wills’s monographs include The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Cornell University Press, 1995); The Quest of the Historical Gospel: Mark, John, and the Origins of the Gospel Genre (Routledge, 1997); Not God’s People: Insiders and Outsiders in the Biblical World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).