Mark’s Demonic Christology: Reevaluating the Daimonic Confessions of Jesus’s Messiahship

Abstract

Markan scholars have often taken for granted that the daimonic acclamations of Jesus’s messianic identity in Mark’s Gospel present the author’s own Christological perspective. Giving attention to daimonic speech in Mark’s literary context, however, opens up the interpretive possibility that this daimonic speech may serve to mislead rather than teach. By using insights from the rhetorical practice of prosopopoeia (speech-in-character), this article compares the Christology of Mark’s daimones with a) Jesus’s reliable statements about his own messianic identity and b) Mark’s discursive presentation of the messianic role in order to assess whether the daimonic Christology in Mark’s Gospel is trustworthy or misleading.