'Imagine There's No Canon'

Abstract

For thirty plus years George Aichele has been articulating and practicing a fantastic hermeneutic that rejects canonical certainties about biblical texts in order to concentrate on the text’s resistance to ideology and on the biblical texts’ recurrence outside the controls of the institution(s) that lays (lay) claim to them. The process has enriched the reading of moribund Mark. To explicate Aichele’s hermeneutic, I read Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Gospel According to Mark’ vis-a-vis Mark and Aichele’s work. The result calls attention to Mark’s inevitably new meanings in its translations, to the violence implicit in the canonical ascription of redemptive meaning to Jesus’s death, to the Markan Jesus’s ambiguous, non-unique identity, and to the non-redemptive character of the Markan Jesus’s death. The process makes it possible to read Mark as if it were written by a number of different authors – including Mel Gibson, Denys Arcand, Pier Paolo Pasolini, James Frazer, H. P. Lovecraft, William Peter Blatty, Jorge Borges, and George Aichele.