Many monographs proclaim their ambition to shift a paradigm; few do. In my opinion, this volume stands a better chance than most. This monograph is the second to develop from the author’s doctoral dissertation at McMaster University; the first was published as The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant: 200 BCE–132 CE (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022). The present work applies a nuanced, textured set of conceptualities for discerning and situating the “Jewishness” of an ancient religious text such as the Gospel of Mark, which it employs to undermine the reigning scholarly paradigm, which the author calls “Gentile Mark.”

By “Gentile Mark,” Van Maaren means not the ethnicity of the author but a reconstruction of the text’s perspective and its social setting (p. 14). The most significant pillar of Gentile Mark is “that the writer is understood to narrate a development during Jesus’s Galilean ministry in which Jesus’s behavioral expectations and target audience move from a limited focus on the Jewish people and their ancestral law to a more encompassing ethic and a universal embrace of all those who will ‘repent and believe in the good news’ (1:15)” (p. 14). Van Maaren argues that one crucial reason for the dominance of this view is that “scholars have been reading the Gospel of Mark through a particular Pauline lens” (p. 19). After an introduction (ch. 1) and a history of Gentile Mark in scholarship from the late nineteenth century to the present (ch. 2), Van Maaren argues that, in Mark, Jesus does not reject the Mosaic law either in whole or in part but instead assumes its practical authority (ch. 3); that instead of narrating a progressively widening mission to the nations, Mark’s narrative “assumes throughout an Israel-centric mission with little or no hints of the inclusion of the nations (p. 133; ch. 4); that Mark’s eschatology does not annul, delay, or reinterpret expectations of Israel’s national restoration but instead straightforwardly affirms them (ch. 5); and that the author of Mark understands Jesus’s death to “ransom scattered Israel from among the nations” (p. 217; ch. 6). In Van Maaren’s view, purported indicators of a mission of Jesus to foreigners rely on inconsistent narrative signals and create contradictions. Those contradictions disappear when the relevant textual details are understood as “part of a regathering of scattered Israel from among the nations” (p. 218). Finally, a brief conclusion recaps the argument (ch. 7).

Before I engage with the substance of Van Maaren’s provocative and significant arguments, one minor housekeeping matter needs addressing. The book is marked by thorough research, clear writing, and careful argumentation throughout, but it is marred by a distracting number of minor errors. I mention the following, not to blame the author (let the one who is without typos throw the first stone) but in the hope that the publisher might consider a modest revision of its editorial processes: “writers” missing an apostrophe (p. 34); “criteria” where “criterion” was needed (p. 56); “alter” for “altar” (p. 75 n. 93); οἶκόν misspelled (p. 112); εἰς with an acute accent instead of a smooth breathing mark (p. 119); a reference to 13:1 where 13:10 was intended (p. 129); “to acknowledgement” where “to acknowledge” was intended (p. 147); “the emphasize” instead of “the emphasis” (p. 165 n. 134); “the indicative case” for “the indicative mood” (p. 168); “Ps. 110:2” for “Ps. 110:1” (p. 173); misspelling the name of Rikki Watts as “Ricki” (p. 175); “necessarily step” instead of “necessary step” (p. 181); Mark 15:6 for 16:6 (p. 216); “it’s” for “its” (p. 223); “receive” for “received” (p. 224); “extent texts” for “extant texts” (p. 230); and “disciple’s” for “disciples” (p. 231).

To do full justice to Van Maaren’s work would require a far more substantial review essay than space permits here, so I will limit myself to commenting on what I regard as the work’s two strongest theses and its two weakest positions. First, the two strongest theses. While I would not endorse every detail of Van Maaren’s proposal regarding Jesus’s stance toward the law in Mark, I do think he has convincingly refuted the common position that Jesus rejects the authority of (at least large portions of) the Mosaic law. Van Maaren’s study of the handwashing incident in Mark 7:1–23 is particularly illuminating (pp. 69–79), although I wish it would have gone into even more detail the way the author’s 2017 article on the subject does (see John van Maaren, “Does Mark’s Jesus Abrogate Torah? Jesus’ Purity Logion and Its Illustration in Mark 7:15–23,” JJMJS 4 [2017]: 21–41).

Second, regarding the dominant perception that Jesus’s ministry progresses from an Israel-only focus to increasingly embrace Gentiles, I am convinced that van Maaren’s criticisms are decisive. For instance, he points out that, in the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus is seeking solitude, not embarking on a deliberate, Gentile-focused mission (7:24). “If the writer means to depict it as the beginning of a foreign mission, it begins contrary to the intentions of the story’s hero” (p. 98). Further, Jesus’s initial refusal of the woman’s request, supported by his explanation that he was sent first to the children, i.e., Israel, implies that Jesus had not yet ministered to Gentiles. This calls into question the widespread view that, in 5:1–20, Jesus had already initiated a Decapolis-wide mission of proclamation to Gentiles (p. 98). Insofar as Jesus’s stance toward the law and his purportedly shifting target audience are perhaps the most load-bearing pillars of “Gentile Mark,” in my view van Maaren succeeds in his overall aim.

In my view, the two weakest points of van Maaren’s argument are his treatment of the significance and beneficiaries of Jesus’s death and his failure to deal adequately with the evidence Mark presents that Jesus intends his disciples to engage in future proclamation to geographically widespread Gentiles. Regarding Jesus’s death, one key problem in van Maaren’s treatment is ambiguity regarding the intended recipients of its saving effects. He writes, “In the context of Mark’s new exodus motif, the identity of the ‘many,’ as the primary beneficiaries of Jesus’s death, is best understood as the many descendants of Jacob scattered among the nations whom the Hebrew prophets foresee being gathered to the ancestral homeland” (p. 205). It is not clear to me how much work van Maaren intends the adjective “primary” to do here and in what the primacy consists. Does van Maaren understand Mark to state or imply that others beyond scattered Israelites are intended beneficiaries of Jesus’s death? Who else benefits and how do we know? Those are crucial questions that van Maaren’s “primary” raises, yet, as far as I can tell, he nowhere answers.

Second, van Maaren underplays evidence in Mark for a future Gentile mission. Regarding 7:27, “let the children be fed first,” van Maaren sees “first” as merely “leaving open a possible later additional mission depicted as feeding dogs” (p. 118). “Possible” is too weak: “first” necessarily implies “second” or “next,” and the woman’s rhetorical triumph over Jesus’s pedagogical deferral confirms that Gentile dogs will, so to speak, have their day. Van Maaren’s attempt to limit the force of the metaphor to a statement about the priority of children over pets fails to account for how subsequent action interacts with the saying. Further, regarding the promise to bear witness before governors and kings, in the context of the good news being preached to all nations (εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη; 13:9–10), van Maaren argues that the target of such proclamation is scattered Israelites among all nations, not the Gentiles who constitute those nations (pp. 125–33). But this seems to me to run aground on at least the rock of “governors and kings.” Who are these governors and kings, and what realms do they govern? If they are Gentile rulers ruling Gentile realms, then the disciples’ promised proclamation to them would seem to constitute irrefutable evidence of Jesus’s intent that his followers will proclaim good news to non-Jews in non-Jewish lands.

This is a substantial, challenging, original monograph. There is much more I could have both commended and raised questions about. It deserves to be carefully reckoned with by all scholars and serious students of the Gospels.