Basing himself on Judith Butler's notion of gender, abjectness, vulnerability, and the precariousness of the human body, Manuel Villalobos offers a compelling study of a number of characters in Mark's passion narrative whom he finds to be transgressing boundaries and disrupting their assigned gender roles. He then applies the same methodology to Jesus, queering the Markan passion narrative, and concludes that because it was subject to all kinds of physical abuses Jesus' body is the way by which God becomes identified and fully implicated in the life of those who live at the margins of...

We are almost never encouraged in contemporary exegesis of the Pastoral Epistles to take the side of those 'dubious' and 'deviant' characters against whom our biblical author sets himself. When Men Were Not Men: Masculinity and Otherness in the Pastoral Epistles dares to give voice to those 'others' as a way to challenge the Pastor's (and his allies') 'performance' of masculinity. By deliberately highlighting texts where issues of masculinity, gender, power, race, money, (ab)use of religion and otherness are present in the Pastoral Epistles, Villalobos meticulously gazes upon bodies that have...