(Part 1)

JBTM Book Reviews
167
One of the highlights of The Messiah of Peace is Boomershine’s optimistic approach
to Jesus’s passion-resurrection narrative. In contrast to many scholars who interpret the
passion narrative as the failure of Jesus’s ministry, Boomershine interprets the passionresurrection
narrative in light of Jesus’s Son of Man prophecies. As indicated by the Son of
Man statements, Jesus (as well as Mark’s audience) anticipated the events of the passion. The
resurrection brings about a restoration of honor for Jesus and his followers. Boomershine
exploits this paradigm by noting the fall and rise of various characters in Mark. One of the
more fascinating characterizations in the book is Boomershine’s treatment of the young man
in the tomb whom he contrasts with the young man who fled naked from Jesus’s accusers in
the garden of Gethsemane. Whereas the first abandoned Jesus in shame during the passion
account, the second sits in the resurrected Jesus’s tomb, robed in white. In conclusion,
Boomershine’s optimistic perspective on the passion-resurrection narrative provides a
refreshing perspective within a field which has overly stressed the negative aspects of the
account.
The most obvious difficulty with Boomershine’s work is the unjustified omission of Mark
1–13. He offers no perceivable explanation as to why he excluded the first thirteen chapters
of Mark from his commentary. The passion-resurrection narrative is indeed the climax of
Mark’s Gospel, but it nevertheless comprises only the final portion of the overall Gospel. To
exclude the majority of the Gospel is a glaring deficiency. In Boomershine’s defense, however,
he does a commendable job of engaging the entirety of Mark’s Gospel since he understands
the passion-resurrection narrative as the climax of the events preceding it. Additionally, for
Boomershine to write a commentary on the entire Gospel would be exhaustive, considering
that his commentary on 14:1–16:8 is 327 pages.
A series of eight appendices rounds out the book. The first is devoted to establishing
the historical context of Mark’s Gospel. In the second appendix, Boomershine compiles
the Greek sound maps attested throughout his commentary. The introductory material in
this appendix is especially insightful, as here Boomershine discusses the nature of Greek
punctuation. Boomershine then turns his attention to the pronunciation of first-century
Greek in the third appendix. Unfortunately, this appendix adds little more to the discussion
already given on pp. 6–7 of the introduction. The fourth appendix expands upon “The
Rhetorics of Biblical Storytelling” in the introduction and provides biblical examples of “the
rhetoric of alienation/condemnation” and “the rhetoric of involvement/implication.” Next
Boomershine defends his implementation of John Elliott’s classification of the Ioudaios/ta
ethnē. In the sixth appendix, one of the more interesting of the studies, Boomershine analyzes
the audiences in Mark in order to ascertain the audiences of Mark. He concludes that Mark
was written to large audiences primarily of non-believing Jews and Gentiles seeking to
rationalize the events following the Jewish-Roman revolt. The seventh appendix offers an
excursus on the pronunciation of elōi in Mark 15:34. Finally, appendix eight offers a short
comparison of the Greek in Mark 15:20 and Judg 16:25, with Boomershine contending that
the mocking of Jesus echoes the mocking of Samson, as attested by the LXX of Alexandrinus.