What is your thesis?
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Are you finishing your MA or PhD or ThD thesis this semester? If so, share the news in the comments. Don't be shy. Share your joy with the rest of us and let us know what your academic passion has been (or: is)!
Please include your name, the title, the university, the advisor, and a brief description.
Please include your name, the title, the university, the advisor, and a brief description.
Trey Gilliam,Update 5-1-07: I began moving the descriptions from the comments to the main blog.
"The Gospel of Mark and The Gospel of John: Complementary Christological Compositions"
M.A. thesis at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Under the supervision of Dr. James Tabor.
I am on my way to the University of Edinburgh to write a PhD dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Larry Hurtado.
Abstract. The scholarly consensus holds that the Christology of the Gospel of Mark is fundamentally different from the Christology of the Gospel of John. This thesis argues against that consensus. I argue that the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John contain complementary Christological compositions. My argument falls within a larger Christological debate. This debate is: when and how did early Christians come to reverence Jesus as divine and worthy of worship alongside God? My thesis builds on the work of Larry Hurtado and other scholars who contend that the understanding of Jesus as a divine figure who is to receive the worship of the gathered community developed within the earliest phases of the burgeoning Christian movement. My goal is to strike the same point with the earliest Christian narratives – the New Testament Gospels – that Hurtado and others have struck with the even earlier Pauline letters. In other words, I demonstrate that there is no major Christological evolutionary development between Mark’s gospel (dated sometime around 70 C.E.) and John’s gospel (dated sometime around 90-100 C.E.). After making this demonstration, I then ask: if the presentation of Jesus in Mark’s gospel and John’s gospel is complementary then why do many scholars continue to view John’s Christology as significantly more exalted than Mark’s Christology? I show how this manner of reading John’s gospel developed during the debates surrounding the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. I contend that this legacy of Nicaea continues in modern scholarship.