The Body of Creation: God’S Kenotic Economy of Space in the Gospel of Mark

In the modern period, space has predominately been conceived of as a mere setting for human action, ontologically separate from the body. In Markan studies, the result has been the multiplication of textual geographies that hide the spatiality of Jesus’s narrativized and, thus, living body. Rather than representing Jesus’s body as replicating the spatial configurations of dominant scribal cartographic practice (including imperial practice), James B. Pendleton shows that Mark portrays Jesus’s body as a living production of space that troubles dominant maps. Against readings of Mark that argue that Jesus is either an imperial or an anti-imperial figure, Pendleton argues that Mark presents Jesus’s body, and thus his spatiality, as both inside (as an insider) and outside (as an outsider) simultaneously, in what has more commonly been theorized recently as third spatiality, or thirdspace. Rather than an imperial or anti-imperial economy of spatial production, Pendleton argues, Mark presents Jesus’s body within a both-and and more economy that is kenotic, revealing God’s own royal yet “emptying” body.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Biblical Narrative and Cartographic Temporalism 1. Space and the Gospel of Mark: A Critical Review 2. Theorizing Space as an Embodied Production 3. The Temple in Galilee? Centralizing Sacred Space in Mark’s Narrative World (3:20-35) 4. No Space for Figs? Temple-World Economυ (οικονομια) in Mark 11:1-25 5. Behind the Veil? Kenotic Spatiality and the Intercalated Body of God(’s Son) in Mark 15:37-39

About the Author :
James B. Pendleton teaches courses in New Testament and Greek at Azusa Pacific University and Fuller Theological Seminary.

Review :
James B. Pendleton’s TheBody of Creation advances Biblical studies by paying attention to “sacred space”. This concept, alien to Western culture, has significant ramifications for understanding Mark’s Gospel as well as the historical Jesus. Jesus not only appropriated sacred space but made space for service and suffering within it. Hence, he created a “third-space” in which humility became honor, suffering became power, or, in Greek terms, kenosis became ktisis. His concept of kenotic economy of space has nuclear implications for Christians and churches orienting ministries around Jesus’s paradoxical demonstration of power through service and suffering. The relationship of Jesus and the Jerusalem temple in Mark’s Gospel has attracted significant scholarly attention, typically leading to agonistic conclusions: Jesus against temple, Jesus replaces temple. By means of careful attention to Jesus’s “spatial practice,” Pendleton presses the conversation forward largely by reshaping it in a creative direction that undercuts binary conceptualizations.