Harrowing The Field: Towards A Postagrarian Analysis Of The Gospels Of Matthew And Mark

Abstract

Despite the growth in archaeology in the Galilee and sustained interest in the economic background of the Jesus movement, agriculture and agrarian life remain under theorized in the study of the Gospels. This study seeks to situate itself in the gaps shown in attention to agriculture in research on Jesus and the Gospels and to interrogate their constructions of ethnography, economy and ethnicity through the tools of postcolonial analysis, especially ambivalence and mimicry. As an inquiry into ethnography, I reread interpretations of the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds in order to show the limits of the data that sources, both ancient and modern provide. On the economic level, I delve into the Parable of the Tenants and the logion of the Easy Yoke to argue that scholars have obscured ancient slaves and invested peasants with their own modern values. Finally, as an inquiry into ethnicity, I reread the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard and Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenician Woman to uncover the ways in which reading from the point of view of the native informants troubles later scholarly binaries. Through these six case studies, I both demonstrate the need for and experiment with Postagrarian Analysis as a flexible methodology that incorporates knowledge of agriculture with an analysis of the social relations of ancient life. Through postagrarian analysis, I reread these texts in order to understand how Matthew and Mark use agrarian imagery to paint their portraits of Jesus as the Christ.