From Wounds to Scars: The Embodiment of a Forwarded Past through the Body Marks of Jesus in John 20

Abstract

This article draws attention to the narrative development of the body marks of the resurrected Johannine Jesus and explores what these marks might signify about John’s reappropriation of Jesus’s suffering. Drawing on the work of Candida R. Moss, who has argued that the resurrection body marks of the Johannine Jesus should be understood as closed scars rather than open wounds, this article re-envisages the implications of Jesus’s textured skin in Jn 20 and examines how John’s gospel mediates and ascribes meaning to Jesus’s body as an inscription surface in response to the crucifixion. By discussing how marked skins serve as privileged facilities to convey meanings and interacting with an exemplary ancient scar narrative from Homer’s Odyssey, I argue that the crucifixion wounds of the Johannine Jesus undergo a narrative transformation in Jn 20 in which the forming of the scars signifies a process of ‘working through’ the trauma and violence of the cross.