Precious, powerful, and pernicious

Abstract

This chapter explores the diversity of meanings of water in the Gospel of Mark, and shows how in this text the meaning of water is constructed intersectionally in relation to topics such as religion/purification, transportation, creation and chaos, death/danger, human basic need (and ethics), gender, and geography. This both shows that water is never “just water” and that the idea of the intersectional construction of meaning, as developed in the field of gender studies, can also be used fruitfully for other phenomena. Water thus also emerges as a deeply ambiguous phenomenon, which becomes apparent especially in the case of the ritual/symbolic uses of water, such as in the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1. In fact, it can be argued that precisely studying the use of water in symbolic acts is a good way of accessing its various layers of meaning, especially in cases of ritual failure, such as in Mark 7. The chapter thus combines exegetical/narrative insights and ritual theory, and it borrows conceptually from the field of gender studies.