Abstract
This contribution proposes that the canonical gospels of the New Testament should be placed in direct conversation with paradoxographical writing. With their accounts of Jesus’ miraculous conception and birth, healings, and depictions of the peoples and traditions of Judea—a conceptually “foreign” territory in the imperial imagination—the gospel writers engage in the same ethnographic, aetiological, and paradoxographical project as their literary
contemporaries. This brand of literary engagement is evident in the Gospel of Mark’s presentation of Jesus as a literary thauma or “wonder” in the tradition of paradoxography and epic, demonstrating that theological concepts like the “Messianic Secret” are better understood as a topos designed to be both didactic and tantalizing to Roman audiences.
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