Jesus’ death and resurrection as cultural trauma

Abstract

In her recent book, The Case for Mark Composed in Performance (2012), Antoinette Wire proposes that Mark's gospel was composed of accounts from people who retold Jesus' story over the decades, and not from scattered fragments by a single man. It seems that the first-century Jesus followers were well-acquainted with the death and resurrection story, because all four gospel traditions cover it, albeit with different emphases. Most previous scholarly discussions focused on the context, development, and oral circulation of the story (cf. Aitken 2004, 11). In my view, while these approaches are worthwhile, they do not address what I believe is the fundamental question, namely, how this story became a community story. In this article I use the cultural trauma theory to raise a different set of questions. Cultural trauma theory explores processes through which a story moves from being a particular incident to a point whereby it is represented as a collective trauma story. The theory focuses on social processes used to make listeners feel that they were attacked in a similar way. I adopted this theory after realising that Jesus' story began as a single event among many other similar stories. Thus, using cultural trauma theory, I explore how Jesus' tragic event became an experience that resonated with, or was felt as replicating, the experiences of many first-century Jesus followers.