In her book The Kinship of Jesus, Kathleen Elizabeth Mills argues that the Gospel of Mark connects Christology and discipleship through the conceptual framework of kinship. Scholarship has often treated these two themes independently and somewhat separate from each other (depending on whom you are reading).
Mark’s Gospel presents a unique opportunity to explore how the identity of Jesus as the divine Son of God and the call to discipleship coalesce in a narrative that crafts a new fictive family of faith. Even though these disciples are not related by blood, they are treated as and function like family members.
Mills proposes a multidisciplinary method combining narrative criticism, social-science models of kinship and honor, and imperial-critical analysis. Her aim is to show that Mark portrays Jesus as the most honored divine Son who, through hospitality and welcome, forms a new kinship group of disciples called to do God’s will. This kinship group challenges the Roman Empire’s structures of honor, power, and household.
Chapter 1 surveys the major methodological approaches to Christology and discipleship in Markan studies, which Mills critiques for failing to hold the two together. She explores:
- the history-of-religions approach—considers how Mark’s portrait of Jesus may have drawn from Greco-Roman stories of miracle-working heroes. Fails to account for Jesus’ suffering and crucifixion.
- titular studies—mid-20th-century studies focused on the evolving use of titles like “Son of God,” “Son of Man,” and “Messiah,” ignoring how they functioned within the narrative.
- narrative approaches—Narrative approaches (like those by Tannehill and Kingsbury) shift attend to how Jesus is characterized in the plot of Mark, highlighting Jesus’ authority and the narrative’s flow. However, they often neglected to connect discipleship with Christology.
Mills also surveys studies that focus on both discipleship and imperial-critical readings, noting the beneficial insights while critiquing what they miss. She ends by proposing that the concept of kinship offers the best bridge between Christology and discipleship in Mark. The rest of her book will demonstrate how this is so in chapters 3–4, which cover all of Mark’s Gospel.
Chapter 2 gives us Mills’s methodology. Mills, combining narrative criticism, social-scientific models, and imperial-critical theory, reads Mark’s Gospel as a narrative of resistance, one that establishes a new kin-based community under Jesus. The narrative approach allows Mills to trace Jesus’s sonship and the disciples’s failures through Mark’s plot. Similar to what you might find in David deSilva’s works, Mills reads Mark’s Gospel with an understanding of Mediterranean kinship systems and honor/shame codes that lie in the cultural background.
This helps us understand how Jesus redefines family in ways that challenged both Jewish and Roman expectations (see also Stewart’s Gathered Around Jesus). Jesus called his disciples away from their biological family networks and formed a new household of faith. Mills believes that Mark used imperial language (e.g., “Son of God,” “kingdom,” “Father”) subversively. Jesus, unlike Caesar, inaugurates God’s empire by serving and suffering.
Chapters 3–4 offers insights on how Christology and discipleship are connected throughout the entire Gospel of Mark (1:1–8:30; 8:31–16:8). I will just give a few highlights on how this plays out.
- At Jesus’s baptism, God the Father proclaims from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Mills sees this as the first “kernel” that frames Jesus as the Son who will act in line with his Father’s will and gather a new family.
- Jesus’s parables disclose “the secret of the kingdom of God” to insiders but conceal it from outsiders. Mills argues this is household language for the mystery belongs to the family. Understanding requires faith; those who hear and respond become true kin.
- In Mark 6, Jesus’s hometown refuse to honor him, highlighting the reversal of Jesus’ own kin and social peers who fail to honor him, but outsiders (sick, women, Gentiles) enter his new household.
- Jesus feeding the 5,000 echoes both Exodus imagery and Roman imperial benefaction. Rome offered peace through military might, but Jesus provided food through compassionate leadership. He modeled the divine household where the leader feeds and protects his family.
- Jesus physically touches and heals a deaf man, showing his intimate care. The witnesses’ response—“He has done everything well!”—echoes both Genesis’ creation language and Isaiah’s prophecies. This links Jesus to God’s creative work while also affirming his role as the Son who restores people to wholeness.
The Chocolate Milks
What is new with Mills’s argument is how she connects Christology with discipleship. She doesn’t make these only with the “popular” scenes of Mark, but within every scene of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus is not only a divine Son, but he is the head of a newly formed family of followers. This familial framework is embedded in the social, political, and theological web of the first-century Roman Empire a setting which Mills explores with great depth of insight. Mills shows that who Jesus is (the Son of Man, Son of God, etc.) is directly tied to what kind of community he creates.
Drawing on 3:31–35 (where Jesus redefines his family as those who do God’s will), Mills builds her analysis around Mark’s theology of household. This shifts our attention to the relational and communal nature of salvation. Jesus is not merely a powerful figure who saves people. In salvation he becomes their brother (Heb 2), a host, and a household head.
Mills understands Mark’s Gospel as a subtle act of resistance to Roman norms—Roman household structures, patronage, and honor/shame dynamics. Jesus, as opposed to the Roman way, calls people away from biological kinship, instructs them to welcome children and outsiders, and establishes a new community based on doing God’s will rather than maintaining some elite status. Mills helps us understand how unsettling it would have been for a society obsessed with honor to hear Jesus’s words, “Whoever wants to be first must be last.”
With Jesus’s “ransom” language in 10:45, rather than reading in a theory of atonement, Mills sees it as a household and kinship gesture. It is the act of a head-of-household giving himself for the good of his family, reversing the power dynamics of Roman models. This interpretation makes Jesus’ death a familial and communal act of redefinition, not just individual substitution.
The Spoiled Milks?
Oddly enough, Mark 11–16 gets less attention than the earlier chapters of Mark, even though these chapters are the climax of Mark’s Gospel. Jesus’s suffering is essential to his kinship leadership, but her discussion lacks the depth and detail of the earlier chapters on Mark. If there were to be a future revised edition, a fuller investigation of the crucifixion and resurrection into this kinship model would bolster Mills’ argument.
One other thing I didn’t care for was how much the imperial-critical theory pervaded the book. However, this may not be an actual negative. Because I am not immersed in Greco-Roman literature, it is hard for me to parse out whether a connection between Mark’s Gospel and life in the Roman Empire is legitimate or forced (see esp. the section on Mark 5 with Legion and the pigs).
The Not-So Spoiled Milks
Regardless, Mills’s insights are for the benefit of showing us how the kingdom Jesus inaugurates is better than the powerful empire of Rome, which is no longer so powerful as it once was, and thus any other kingdom after that. As well, when everyone who would have read Mark’s Gospel lived within the Roman Empire, it isn’t any surprise that they would read Jesus’s words, actions, and role as Son of God as subversive to the Roman empire’s claims about family, identity, and divine sonship.
This lens helps Mills’s interpretations take on a more practical “real” feel. This family of faith is not some vague and ethereal concept. Kinship was the organizing principle of ancient life, and it encompassed economics, politics, religion, and identity. Jesus’ redefinition of kinship was a revolution of the notion of kingdom.
Recommended?
Mills helps us to see that there ought not to be any “lone wolf” disciples. We are a community of believers, a family. Jesus does not hoard honor for himself, but gives it freely to those in his family whom he teaches, lives for, and sacrifices himself for. This is a very helpful book that I will certainly use when I will preach and teach on Mark’s Gospel.
Buy it on Amazon or from Pickwick Publications!
Lagniappe
- Author: Kathleen Elizabeth Mills
- Paperback: 300 pages
- Publisher: Pickwick Publications (October 2016)
Review Disclosure: I received this book free from Wipf & Stock. The opinions I have expressed are my own, and I was not required to write a positive review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html.
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