Mark 2.15 in Even Broader Context: A Reflection

My original article on the referent of ‘his house’ in Mark 2.15 was published in 1985 as ‘TH OIKIA AYTOY: Mark 2.15 in Context’ in NTS 31: 282–92. This brief essay is both a look back to that short article and its original context and a look forward to where I went from there and to this present volume. That is, this reflection is putting Mk 2.15 into an even broader context. My own research trajectory was from Lévi-Straussian structuralism to narrative criticism and from narrative space to narrative characterization. The consistent thread has been appreciating relationships—and relationships between relationships: how parts relate within the whole, how individual elements of Mark’s narrative contribute to its overall meaning, and how that overall meaning is tensive, challenging, surprising, and open-ended.