Review I The Godman and the Sea: The Empty Tomb, the Trauma of the Jews, and the Gospel of Mark

Michael J. Thate. The Godman and the Sea: The Empty Tomb, the Trauma of the Jews, and the Gospel of Mark. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Michael Thate’s newest book, The Godman and the Sea, contributes to the growing body of scholarship on Mark and trauma. Thate successfully demonstrates that the sea scenes in Mark’s Gospel are neither triumphant nor hopeful, but rather haunted by the trauma and ecstasy of the empty tomb; the loss of Jesus’ body was experienced by the Markan assemblages as “the originary trauma” (30-34). Through exploring the traumatic recurrence in the sea scenes of Mark (stilling the storm in 4:35-41, traversing upon sea in 6:45-52, etc.), he contends that “the sea” is a symbolic hanger for Nihil—the persistance of the fundamental reality of nothing. It not only separates “a traumatized body from its founding desire,” but also “suspends life, ruptures space, and breaks time, as its threatening fluids fill the boat of assembly adrift in social abeyance” (1). Concentrating on the interplay between the sea scenes and the empty tomb, Thate’s work—divided into seven chapters—is unapologetically nihilist, which sees nothingness as a “speculative opportunity” that is beyond discourses of revised hope (10).

In Chapter One, Thate adopts Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of “dis-enclosure” in order to demonstrate that the sea scenes serve as the hermeneutical key of Mark’s Gospel (7-10). To be “located” is to be within the bureaucratic security of enclosure; to be “enclosed” by the disciplinary techniques of sovereignty that determine the “distribution of space, ordering of time, and production of force” (29-32). In his book, Thate uses the themes of enclosure and dis-enclosure/opening to interpret the Markan Jesus’ voyages between enclosed harbors and chaotic bodies of water that do not necessarily fit into our modern geographic imaginations. Thate posits that Mark’s Gospel speaks for a traumatized community of loss—an assemblage haunted by not only the crucifixion of its Christ, but also its Christ’s empty tomb. Jesus’ missing body, Thate writes, left the assemblage “with no body to mourn” and in a position of dis-enclosure (28-30). For him, the sea and the empty tomb represent symbolic lacerations that refuse the enclosure of ancient sovereignties. Without an assured resurrection at the end, the Markan assemblage of loss is adrift beyond the security of harbours, and abandoned at the chaotic seas with a slumbering/dead body of Jesus.

Thate turns to questions of genre in Chapter Two. Rather than reducing Gospels to movements within a given genre, Thate deploys a Deleuzian “zone of intensity” to argue that gospel texts occupy “different zones of intensities with respect to the originary trauma” (44). In this sense, the unfinished Markan text cannot be reduced to a genre—either as autonomous spheres or fixed costellations, but a literary flow haunted by the originary trauma distinct from later gospel attempts to undo it. Moving from genre to sentiment, Thate focuses instead on responses to the originary trauma. In light of this approach, Thate proposes a new model for Mark and its relationship to Second Temple Judaisms: The Markan community 1) did not separate themselves from surrounding Judaisms; and 2) experienced traumatic ruptures that introduced radically new therapeutic needs. So, while agreeing with Daniel Boyarin that Mark does not constitute a break with Judaism, Thate argues that different zones of intensity—a dynamic undifferentiated multiplicity—towards the originary trauma induced “a rupture within the relationship with the Judaisms of the Markan assemblies” (66).[1]

In Chapter Three, Thate turns to the sea of Galilee. He reinterprets the sea as representative of an “unfinished, unformed, and demonic space” because they point to a world beyond sovereignty’s enclosure (106). By this, Thate means that the Markan sea—outside the calming of the storm and walking on the sea—is a complex and indeterminate space in antiquity. Thate points out that the sea was not only a socially contested space shaped by colonial powers and mythic memory, but also the site for the arrival of the Kingdom of God leading to the resocialization and reimagination of space. In his interpretation of in Mark 8:14-21, Thate focuses on the insecurity of the disciples, who find themselves in the boat with only one loaf of bread. Thate draws a connection between the disciples’ and the loss of Jesus’ body in 14:21-25. The social body of the ship is haunted — “loosed from fissures caused by the trauma of an absent body” (104). In sum, he argues that the sea could be seen as a space that participated in the traumatization of history (106).

In Chapter Four, Thate examines the significance of silence in Mark 4:35-41, in order to provide a non-triumphant reading of the sea-calming pericope. Generally speaking, Jesus’ calming of the storm was interpreted as divine triumph over the “wider cultural script’s pantheon of sea powers” (114-115). Instead, Thate emphasizes the boat as a vulnerable and traumatized social body imperiled by demonic forces, while Jesus lay asleep (118-120). Based on this tragic vision, Thate suggests that the recurrence of an “eerie calm” does not necessarily indicate triumph but temporary “monstrous retreats” because the demonic returns after each calming scene (128-129). As an alternative, Thate proposes that the silencing of the sea could be understood as a prelude of divine judgement in both Greek and Jewish literature (128-129).

Chapter Five addresses the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac (Mk 5:1-20). Thate carefully avoids the conventional impulse to overstate the anti-colonial implications. Contrasting his interpretation with that of Rene Girard,[2] Thate contends that Jesus’s exorcism did not break the cycle of mimetic violence, considering the removal of demonic stain remained an unfinished project throughout Mark’s gospel (147-153). From Thate’s perspective, Jesus’ exorcism ended in the trauma of rejection and failures to reintegrate (152). Through detailing the similarities between the living corpses of Gerasene demoniac and Jesus, Thate argues that both of them were situated “in a similar spatial position of social abeyance” (154). In this sense, Jesus could be perceived as demonic in many ways—“matters and bodies out of place—because even his death cry was “unheard and unheeded, mocked by his enemies, placed outside space and time, and abandoned by those whom he had desired” (156).

In Chapter Six, Thate provides a tragic reinterpretation of the Markan depiction of Jesus walking on water (Mk 6:45-52). Thate suggests that the isolated social body of disciples could be seen as demonic because the sea winds were portrayed as “socializing the disciples against Jesus and the Kingdom” (167). Through applying Derridean notion of “hauntology”—the ghostly return/persistence of elements from the past—to interpret disciples’ misrecognition of Jesus, Thate contends that the language of phantasma denotes a hauntology of somatic insecurity, which “refracts the felt exposure, alienation, and traumatic separation of the disciple from the body of Jesus” (177). In this sense, even though Jesus entered the social body of the boat, his body was not recognized or incorporated (180). The lack of integration in this case could be attributed to the traumatic disorientation of desire, space, and time on the chaotic sea (182).

In the last chapter, Thate reads Mark alongside modern novelists, such as Kafka, Proust, and Hemingway, in order to support a tragic bending by connecting all Markan sea scenes. Finally addressing the title’s homage to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Thate points out that the fisherman’s condition of loss—“there has never been such fish”—cannot be overcome by returning to the symbolic enclosure of the harbor because his “return from the beyond is rather a recurrence of the very condition of loss” (194, 201). Similarly, for Mark, there is no return after the originary trauma of the empty tomb; instead, there is recurrence of loss on the chaotic sea of ruins (203). This tragic vision gives way to a politics of dis-enclosure. It reveals the overwhelming truth of nihilism by pointing out “nothing is all there is,” which “challenges any distinction or categories by which life is made meaningful or enclosed” (193, 203).

Echoing the atomsphere of Mark, Thate left his book intentionally unfinished. As a whole, The Godman and the Sea covers a wide range of scholarly debates surrounding the Markan narrative. In this ambitious project, Thate applies his theoretical dexterity to crafting an argument for reading the gospel of Mark through a tragic and nihilistic lens. Instead of privileging triumphant Christologies to support theological arguments, Thate models how New Testament scholars could reconstruct the early Christ-followers as assemblages of traumatized bodies with different therapeutical needs. Perhaps more could be said about the afterlife of ruins in the gospel of Mark, considering there are many demonic landscapes beside the sea. And familiarity with contemporary theory is necessary for engaging Thate’s innovative approach. Nevertheless, the theoretical depth renders this book both innovative and challenging. Scholars of New Testament and early Christian literature will applaud Thate’s interdisciplinary appeal, detailed citations, and close-knitted structure, especially doctoral students and those interested in theoretically-informed historical inquiry.

Rene Guo is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh.

[1] See Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: the Story of the Jewish Christ. (New York, NY: The New Press, 2013).

[2] See René Girard, The Scapegoat. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).