The Social Location of the Marcan Audience

Abstract

There have been many attempts to characterize the Marcan audience in recent years, though most of these have concentrated on various ethnic, geographical, or religious aspects of the group's identity. By contrast, the interest here is in understanding the social location of those for whom Mark wrote. Assuming recent work which places Mark in rural Syria-Palestine, the article first addresses the crucial issues of social stratification and literacy in the rural areas. It then seeks to locate the characters in Mark's story on a social map using a model drawn from macro-sociological studies of agrarian societies. Finally, it suggests ways in which the readers/hearers would see in the drama being played out by the characters in Mark's story a mirror of their own lives. The conclusion is that Mark's story had a special plausibility for peasants, the degraded, the unclean, and expendables.