When the story of Jesus known as The Gospel of Mark began to circulate as a written text in the ancient Mediterranean cities, it became engaged in a form of negotiation with the Roman imperial culture. A newly published dissertation from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) shows, however, that a European colonial heritage probably has caused biblical scholars to neglect the earliest Gospel's primary act of negotiation with its imperial context. Biblical scholar Hans Leander has investigated how Mark's Gospel was related to Rome's Empire when it began to circulate among the early Christians during the first century C.E. He...