The Repentance of YHWH

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.