Introduction
The Gospel of Mark, I would like to argue, is the product of double displacement. Although this Gospel was long thought to be written in the city of Rome, there is an increasing agreement that Mark was not only composed in Galilee, but written by a refugee of the Jewish War. This paper will discuss how such deterritorialization occurs in Mark, with its resonances found throughout the Gospel, particularly in the author’s depiction of Jesus as beckoning early Jewish Christians out of Jerusalem and into Galilee. Others, particularly William Arnal, make a compelling case that Mark’s language of displacement is best understood as rhetoric of legitimation : that Mark is an early Jewish-Christian attempt to make sense of a strange new homeland in Galilee, claiming it as a site of greater authenticity than Jerusalem had been (hence, for instance, Mark’s consistent denigrations of the temple cult).
The second way Mark articulates a form of displacement is in its configuration of t...
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