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Papers by Joel Kuhlin

Patristica Nordica Annuaria, 2021

This article is devoted to the reception of the Gospel of Mark among certain heterodox early Chri... more This article is devoted to the reception of the Gospel of Mark among certain heterodox early Christian groups. It takes its departure in the hypothesis for-warded by some scholars – supported by an interpretation of Irenaeus – that the Gospel of Mark was well received among Valentinians, Basilideans and Carpocrateans. This, it has been claimed, pushed the need for adding a new beginning and end to the gospel of Mark. The present article begins with a recapitulation of the scholarship on the reception of the gospel of Mark and then aims to scrutinize the modern interpretations of Irenaeus, which claim that particular heterodox groups were drawn to Mark. The article ends by looking at what can actually be discerned from Valentinian texts as well as the scant sources of Basilidean and Carpocratean theology. The conclusion presented here is that there are some indications that Mark could have been of importance for Basilidean followers, but nothing that would suggest that Mark retained any particular standing among Valentinians or Carpocrateans, a notion chiefly supported by a flawed reading of Irenaeus.

Somatology in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year Joel Kuhlin lish Department Degree Thesis Spring... more Somatology in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year Joel Kuhlin lish Department Degree Thesis Spring 2014 INTRODUCTION J.M. Coetzee's novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) is engaged in a discourse of dislocating how human bodies are perceived in language, in contrast to animal bodies. Writing in a persona and a style I call -the opinion machine‖ (69), neither fully compatible with Coetzee nor the main protagonist(s) of the novel, 1 the novel functions something like a factory producing and counter-producing somatological opinions. The opinion machine is specifically interested in considering and bridging a somatic divide separating animals from humans, and does so through a series of -Opinions‖. 2

Book Reviews by Joel Kuhlin

Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok, 2021

Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2019

Svensk exegetisk årsbok, 2018

de det dock framgå tydligare framgå exakt vad GT-forskarna bidragit med.

Svensk exegetisk årsbok, 2017

Edited Journals by Joel Kuhlin

Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2020

In this paper, we look at the terrain of Malcolm X's "failed rhetoric" as producing an apocalypti... more In this paper, we look at the terrain of Malcolm X's "failed rhetoric" as producing an apocalyptic refusal of world, and world making. This refusal finds its intensity from a distinct gnostic calculus, driving Malcolm X's political theology of names and worlds, seen in his oratory from the years 1962–1964. First, Malcolm X's nominal history is discussed in relation to the violence of naming and political theology. Then, by turning to the speech "Black Man's History" (1962), we look at fundamental aspects of his gnostic theology of names and worlds. As we turn to the speech "God's Judgment of White America" (1963), a gnostic calculus is seen as intrinsically bound to the names of Muslim and Allah, and to refusal of the (White) World. With Malcolm X's hajj experience, best seen in the "Letter from Mecca" (1964), the rhetorical landscape of worlds shift into a discourse of a single Muslim World. As Malcolm X's rhetorical mood shifts from a gnostic indicative, of displaying and exemplifying the imminent end of worlds, into the imperative of political action for Black Muslims in the World, are fundamental elements of the 1962–1963 oratory transposed into a different key, or simply removed? We argue that much of Malcolm X's gnostic tendencies remain in the Meccan epistle, in terms of an unbending refusal of oppressive Whiteness. With the concept of being "double Muslim" of the Black Muslims, we finally turn to Salman Sayyid's Recalling the Caliphate in order to think a lasting problematic of the failure of Malcolm X's apocalyptic refusal of the world.

Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2018

This article looks to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to theorize the crucifixion of Je... more This article looks to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in order to theorize the crucifixion of Jesus as event, in early Christian literature. A Deleuzian view on the event is primarily articulated with the distinction between a sequential and serial understanding of happenings, where the latter forms the basis for singular events. It is argued that Jesus’ death is best considered a singular event in early Christianity, meaning that it displays a particular, distinct force in early Christianity theologies that is irreducible to other happenings, such as the resurrection.
The article’s first section investigates the difference between a sequential and serial view on Jesus’ death, by comparing Paulinism’s view of Jesus’ death and resurrection, on the one hand, with the function of Jesus’ death in a selection of Christian texts from the 1st to 4th cent CE, on the other (the Letter to the Hebrews, the Letter of John, the Letter of Barnabas and the Treatise of the Resurrection.)
In the last section, the singularity of Jesus’ death in early Christian texts is explored further, by turning to the Gospel of Mark. Returning to the Deleuzian theory of events, Jesus’ peculiar death in the Gospel is described with the eventive traits of paradox and obscurity. It is argued that the Markan portrayal of the death of Christ - as a singular event - invites embodiment of Jesus’ enigmatic death, in the lives of the Gospel’s audience.

Books by Joel Kuhlin

Is there beauty in rhetorical failure? This study is an exploration of disorder and death in the ... more Is there beauty in rhetorical failure? This study is an exploration of disorder and death in the Gospel according to Mark (Mk). With a surviving fragment from the second-century theologian Papias of Hierapolis, the early reception of Mk locates insights into the composition of Jesus’s death, especially through the concepts of ataxia and rhetorical failure. Papias launches an early and influential defense of its unsystematic presentation (Hist. eccl. 3.39.1–17), understood to be a kind of failure (hamartêma). By exploring this Papian doxa and heuristically accepting “disorderly failure” as a characteristic of Mk in general and 15:6–39 in particular, the present study seeks to determine a sense of Jesus’s death, directly linking an articulation of the shameful event of Jesus’s execution on a suspension-pole to the methodological and theoretical appreciation of disorder in a rhetorical composition.
The study first investigates the structural (in)coherency in Mk. Going as far back as the school of Formgeschichte in the 1920s, a widespread scholarly opinion finds the content of the passion narrative (Mk 14:1–16:8) to resist its otherwise largely incoherent narrative structure. Thus, I ask: What does a progymnastic analysis reveal about the episodic order, style, and thought of Jesus’s death in Mk 15:6–39? With a methodological perspective informed by Aelius Theon’s Progymnasmata (first century CE) and the concepts of order (τάξις: taxis), style (λέξις: lexis), and thought (διανοία: dianoia), the passion narrative unfolds with a series of basic narrational episodes of “short stories” (διηγήματα: diêgêmata) and “anecdotes” (χρεῖαι: chreiai). In relation to these episodes’ inner organization and the organization of the narrational elements of person (πρόσωπον: prosôpon) and happening (πρᾶγμα; πρᾶξις: pragma; praxis), Jesus’s death scene is a particularly troubled section. Yet its rhetorical idiosyncrasies are not limited to a presentation of “persons-in-action.” The passage is filled with aspects of humiliation, obscurity, secrecy, and a paradoxical rendition of the protagonist’s final hours, while also investing its story with apocalyptic imagery and a declaration of Jesus as “a son of God,” post-mortem. The Papian doxa therefore adequately summarize the acme of this ancient narrative.
With the Papian belief in truth subsisting in ataxia, failure does not need to be an end of sense and beauty. I therefore also ask: what sense and rhetorical meaning of Jesus’s death result from a progymnastic-like composition of disorder in Mk 15:6–39? In light of Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Franz Kafka, the exploration of Joseph K.’s execution in The Trial (Der Prozeß) underlines similarities to the symbolically loaded, yet obscure, death-event in Mk 15:6–39. An analysis of K.’s demise points toward an effectual rhetoric, dedicated to expressing a de-humanizing process of dying and its final actualization through a metamorphosis into an animal-like state. The prose of K.’s end rearticulates central features found in Jesus’s death, not least a “becoming-animal” of social death. Further, while Theon’s Progymnasmata and the rhetoric of the Greco-Roman antiquity helped identify disorder and failure in Mk, the same perspective nonetheless struggles with the task of attributing the ataxia in Mk 15:6–39 with meaning. Turning to the contemporary French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the concept of the “event” in his Logic of Sense in particular, disorderly failure is allowed to speak on its own terms. Building especially upon the results from the methodological and progymnastic analysis, Logic of Sense and the concept of event underline signs of novelty of thought and literary innovation in the ancient rhetoric of Jesus’s death. Logic of Sense assists in an evaluation of the failure of disorder in Mk 15:6–39, drawing attention to its ability to express the sense of an event. As event, I argue, the ataxia of Jesus’s death finds theoretical resources for constructing a “rhetoric of failure,” and thereby affirms the literary potential of the Papian doxa and adamant belief in the truth and perhaps even a divine beauty of failure. Lastly, imagining the sense and “sensation” of Jesus’s death, Deleuze’s exegesis of painter Francis Bacon and the motif of “crucifixion” in his art becomes crucial. Extending the line of argument found in Logic of Sense, Bacon’s vision of suspended and decaying bodies, the grotesque and creative event at play in Mk 15:6–39 gains even more determination.