Der Gescheiterte Messias

The Gospel of Mark tells a two-level story. While presenting explicitly the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, Mark also deals with the Jewish war, which ended in 70 c.e. with the destruction of Jerusalem, and with the questions it posed for the followers of Jesus: How could this happen - in spite of the Good News about the salvation brought by Jesus and about the imminent arrival of the reign of God? And how to proclaim the message of Jesus, the Messiah raised from the dead, without being gainsaid by a utterly non-messianic reality? Faced by these questions, Mark takes a path which has been taken, probably, never before: He tells the story of Jesus as the story of a failed Messiah.