The Repentance of Yhwh - by Sonya Shetty Cronin (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Repentance of YHWH reads the Gospel of Mark as understanding itself to be the latest installment in a long, complex, multivolume story, complete with atmosphere, setting, genealogies, ancient friends and foes, and all the other facets normal and natural to such epic tales. Mark believes he wrote the next chapter of a true, mythological history.

Book Synopsis

The Repentance of YHWH is not an attempt to recover the historical Jesus by looking through Mark's textual window, even if the things the real Jesus said and did could have inspired such a gospel. Nor is it a book on Christian origins, mining Mark for information about what the earliest followers of Jesus believed about Jesus, even though it inadvertently does make claims about such. Repentanceis not an exercise to prove early high Christology, though it does make that claim as well, all while giving a richer profile about how Mark imagines Jesus as YHWH's messiah.

The Repentance of YHWHis not a book about Mark's narrative architecture, though it does throw light on how Mark goes about telling his story as well as the underlying story that informs his Gospel. It does not simply examine the way that Mark uses the Old Testament (Greek and Hebrew) through citation (explicit footnote to a specific text), allusion (implicit nod to a specific text), or echo (implicit nod to a passage). Repentance tracks the way Mark mixes multiple stories simultaneously and constantly. Repentance has taken its cues from Mark--showing rather than telling, highlighting the currents of movement, and demonstrating how Mark melds old with new to open up a new world. In the end, Repentance exposes the narrative fusion throughout Mark's Gospel to reveal that, for Mark at least, the story of Jesus and his followers is really, still, the story of YHWH and YHWH's Israel.

Review Quotes

Sonya Shetty Cronin has written a daring, rich, suggestive interpretation of the Gospel of Mark that is thick with subtext and suggestive citation. We have nothing like her book, as she experiments with new modes of interpretation. She finds, everywhere in Mark, in every episode and word, allusion to a rich inventory of Old Testament texts. She shows us how Mark declared the end of Israel's exile, but then so much more. On offer in Mark, as she shows, is good news for Gentiles as for Jews. This new opening for Gentiles requires that God repent of exclusiveness for Jews. Her book, in its long lingering over texts, invites us to see afresh. We see in her writing, as in Mark's Gospel, an effort to clarify how radically new the way of Jesus really is. The book invites close attentiveness to a mass of citation and allusion that she fuses together as a great, fresh disclosure. --Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary

"YHWH repents." This shocking thesis serves as the through-line of this remarkable study of Mark's Gospel. Cronin masterfully unearths the cavernous underground of Mark's creative reading and sifting of his Old Testament tradition (in Greek and in Hebrew), revealing intertextuality to be not simply a garnish on a messianic biography but rather the very means by which Mark paints a new genre: gospel. Joining the growing number of those who find in Mark's Gospel a divine Christology, The Repentance of YHWH subverts expectations in depicting Mark's Jesus to be YHWH reconciling his own past dealings with Israel and Gentiles by establishing a gospel truly for all nations. No longer the stumbling novice bested by his literary successors Matthew and Luke, Mark shines anew under Cronin's sympathetic scholarly eye. Read this book and watch your appreciation for Mark and his Gospel deepen with every page. --Roberto J. De La Noval, assistant professor of theology, Mount St. Mary's University

The Repentance of YHWH: Mark's Gospel of Universal Inclusion is a remarkable fusion of poetic artistry and narrative storytelling. Sonya Shetty Cronin elegantly guides readers through the ebb and flow of Mark's Gospel, drawn from the stories and themes of the scriptures of ancient Israel and reinterpreted by the gospel writer to create a new, complex narrative that understands Jesus's mission and YHWH's mission as one and the same--universal inclusion and salvation for everyone. Cronin's work is a marvelous resource for scholars, preachers, and other readers, inviting them to contemplate YHWH's redemptive plan for humanity through an innovative perspective that unmasks the mystery, promulgating a new message that is good news for us all. --Terry Ann Smith, associate dean of Institutional Assessment and associate professor of biblical studies, New Brunswick Theological Seminary

Erudite, poetic, and refreshingly inclusive, this book offers an inspired reading of intersecting biblical narratives. Moving gracefully between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, it revisits, contests, and suggests alternatives to common dichotomies: Gentiles and Jews, the chosen and the rejected, the saved and the doomed, the future and the past. An ingeniously intertextual and truly polyphonic achievement. --Gilad Elbom, Oregon State University, author of Kabbalah as Literature: The Revolution of Interpretation and Textual Rivalries: Jesus, Midrash, and Kabbalah