Mark's Jesus, Jonah, and Foreign Neighbors

Abstract

The Book of Jonah includes the tale of a sea voyage on the Mediterranean; the Gospel of Mark recounts three boat trips across the Sea of Galilee. A cluster of verbal parallels, the same words being used in the Greek of Mark 4 as in the Septuagint of Jonah 1, signal the audience to keep the Jonah story in mind when hearing the Jesus story. But it is the broader narrative parallels or contrasts in the two texts, that is, similar or opposite actions or events in each story, that give the audience—ancient or modern—a clearer understanding of what the Markan storyteller is hoping we will “get” with these biblical allusions.