The Body of Creation

The Body of Creation offers a space-critical reading of Mark’s Gospel that focuses on Jesus’s spatial practice. As a production of space within a larger divine economy of space, James B. Pendleton shows that Jesus’s spatiality is characterized as a kenotic Thirdspace that reveals God’s own royal yet “emptying” body.

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In the modern period, the space we inhabit and through which we move has predominately been conceived as the mere setting for human action, ontologically separate from the body. In Markan studies, the result has been the multiplication of textual geographies that hide the spatiality of Jesus’s narrativized and, thus, living body. Rather than representing Jesus’s body as replicating the spatial configurations of dominant scribal cartographic practice (including imperial practice), James B. Pendleton shows that Mark portrays Jesus’s body as a living production of space that troubles dominant maps. Against readings of Mark that argue that Jesus is either an imperial or an anti-imperial figure, Pendleton argues that Mark presents Jesus’s body, and thus his spatiality, as both inside (as an insider) and outside (as an outsider) simultaneously, in what has more commonly being theorized recently as third spatiality, or Thirdspace. Rather than an imperial or anti-imperial economy of spatial production, Pendleton argues, Mark presents Jesus’s body within a both-and, and more economy that is kenotic, revealing God’s own royal yet “emptying” body.