Tag: Carroll: The Existential Jesus

Mark’s Greek according to John Carroll (The Existential Jesus):

(pics nicked from here. Two faces or one vase?)

This is how Mark’s Greek works — surface text vs subtext — according to John Carroll: Continue reading “John Carroll on the Existential Jesus (live this time) — (podcast/transcript)”

The Age has published an extract from The Existential Jesus by John Carroll. See Judging Pilate.

I have said a few things I like and don’t like about this book, but what I do like the most is that the ideas expressed in it are the result of years of collaborative discussion and study of the Gospel of Mark. I can’t resist exploring the insights of anyone else who has made that type of study and comparing notes. Only wish his Jesus wasn’t so much what I suspect John Carroll himself is, an existentialist. But what else should I have expected from the title! :-/

youngalexander has alerted me/the iidb list to a new review of John Carroll’s book.

It’s in The Age, a review by another sociology professor, Gary Bouma. Promising an extract next week. Continue reading “Existential Jesus — another review”

Someone asked me what I found “daring and original” about “The Existential Jesus” by John Carroll. My replies, based on a reading of only 3/4 of the book, follow: Continue reading “A few of the intriguing thoughts provoked by The Existential Jesus”

This review that was published in the Brisbane Anglican newspaper, in John Carroll’s words, “quite brilliantly catches the flavour of what I have attempted to do” (email correspondence: 13/03/07)

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Picked up John Carroll’s “The Existential Jesus” today. It is written more for those with a philosophical or religious mind. This book is John Carroll’s philosophical journey through Mark’s Jesus. An existential interpretation of Mark’s Jesus. It is not a verse by verse study analyzing the historical literary or religious background evidenced in the text. Will write more later.

Disappointed in the Australian review of Carroll’s Existential Jesus. Have tried to track down a little on the reviewer, Andrew Rutherford, and closest I can find is that he’s “a Melbourne based reviewer”. His review does not demonstrate deep awareness of the issues involved. He says, for example, that Crossan has “shown” how a Galilean peasant like Jesus might become the focus of a religion. Well, Crossan has certainly attempted to show as much (that his Jesus is a fellow Irish freedom-advocate), but only from the basis of so many questionable assumptions and being content to leave so many inevitable questions unaddressed — check out Doherty’s review for starters. Rutherford’s review seems to be saying little more than Carroll is up the creek because he does not conform to respectable scholarly questions and established scholarly conclusions.

I have still to read the book, but pending its arrival I have to confess to some parting of ways at John Carroll’s own commentary. It goes further than the impressions I was left with over his Religion Report interview. I can handle Mark as an historical and literary document, but I feel less comfortable with seekers of “truths” behind human existence. I find nothing fearful at all, and everything richly meaningful, in base biological and physical explanations for everything. That, to me, is the only foundation of human cooperation that I can see holding when all else has failed, as fearful dreaming and searching for other “Truths Out There” always will.

Anyone who is a fan of Mark’s gospel will be absolutely mad if they don’t catch up with the podcast or transcript of interview with author of a new book (The Existential Jesus) on Mark’s gospel, John Carroll (yep, he’s a sociologist, “out of his field” and all that) at the Religion Report program site.

He argues that “Mark is one of the pinnacles of Western literature” (Vork, we’re not alone!), “I don’t think there’s anything like it in Western culture”, he’s a fan of Frank Kermode’s “Genesis of Secrecy” (I’ve already referred again to my notes on that, and how its a story that works on its sub text.)

Carroll says Matthew and Luke are boring by comparison — they want to tie Christianity in with the OT (missing Mark’s point entirely, or rejecting it), but that John was the only one who came close to understanding what Mark was saying.

Mark’s Jesus is not a teacher of morals and ethics, he gives up on trying to teach his disciples anything, Simon was named Peter to caricature him as the rocky ground (always jumping in with enthusiasm then withering at the first problem) — nice to find someone else who agrees with Tolbert on that, too! — Peter wants to build a church but Mark is anti-church, a fascinating interpretation of the transfiguration! He’s solitary, alone, angry, those closest to understanding him are Pilate and Judas. He’s not anti-Jewish and takes Jewish religion as a “prototype” for all religion, but is anti the whole Jewish culture that had to end. And his end is alone, without God, on a stake prefigured by the withered fig tree.

I’m sure I’m not going to agree with everything but I won’t be reading it to “agree” or “disagree” but to explore another perspective and think afresh!