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5. Jesus and the Wild Animals in the Wilderness (Mark 1:13) The Hermeneutical Context Modern New Testament scholarship is historically situated. It inevitably approaches the texts with concerns that derive from its cultural context, both Christian and secular. Such concerns can be heuristically useful, but they can also limit and distort our perceptions of the texts. In the present context of ecological crisis, in which it has become urgently necessary that Christian thinking recover a sense of human beings’ place within God’s creation, as fellow-creatures with other creatures in the community of creation, new concerns are slowly bringing neglected aspects of the texts to light. At the same time it is becoming painfully obvious that much modern interpretation of the New Testament has been consciously and unconsciously influenced by the prevalent ideology of the modern West which for two centuries or so has understood human history as emancipation from nature. This modern ideology imagined human beings as the omnipotent subjects of their own history, and history as a process of liberation from nature, so that, freed from a limited place within the given constraints of the natural world, human beings may freely transform nature into a human world of their own devising. This rejection of human embeddedness in nature and of the mutual interrelations between human history and the rest of nature, in favour of an assumed independence of and supremacy over nature, is, of course, the ideological root of the present ecological crisis. Biblical theology has not escaped its influence, which appears in the strong tendency to set history against nature and salvation against creation. The assertion of salvation-history and/or eschatology as the key concepts of biblical theology has at least tacitly endorsed the modern understanding of history as emancipation from nature. References to nature in the New Testament, especially the Gospels, have been persistently understood from the perspective of modern urban people, themselves alienated from nature, for whom literary references to nature can only be symbols or picturesque illustrations of a human world unrelated to nature. But once the prevalent modern ideology is questioned, as it must be today, we are freed to read the New Testament differently. We can recognize that, in continuity with the Old Testament tradition, it assumes that humans live in mutuality with the rest of God’s creation, that salvation-history and eschatology do not lift humans out of nature but heal precisely their distinctive relationship with the rest of nature. However, to recognize that a concern with the human relationship to the rest of creation is a genuine aspect of the texts must not mean that we read into the texts our own particular ecological concerns, which arise from our own specific situation at a highly critical juncture in the history of creation on this planet. Before the texts can be relevant to our situation we must place them in the very different context of concern with the human relationship to nature to which they originally spoke. This task takes us into a whole area of historical scholarship – the study of ancient perceptions of the human relationship to nature and of the way such perceptions corresponded to ecological realities – that has been almost as neglected as the specifically biblical aspect of it. The present chapter is a preliminary contribution to the task: an ecological reading of one, very brief but significant, New Testament text. The attempt will be made both to understand the text in its original context, especially against the background of early Jewish perceptions of the relation between humans and wild animals, and then also to indicate its new relevance today, when re-contextualized in our own situation of ecological destruction. Our text is a mere four words of Mark’s Gospel: Jesus ‘was with the wild animals’ (eµn meta toµn theµrioµn). But the brevity of the statement should not mislead us into thinking it incidental. In Mark’s concise account of Jesus in the wilderness (1:13) no words are wasted. In these four words, Mark takes up the question of the human relationship to wild animals and gives it a key place in the christological programme which the prologue to his Gospel is designed to set out. Dealing with the human relationship with wild animals evidently belongs to Jesus’ identity and mission as the messianic Son of God. Our text provides us with a christological image, unique to Mark’s Gospel, sadly neglected Living with Other Creatures 112 [3...

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