Name: Gastvortrag Robyn Faith Walsh: The “Messianic Secret” Revisited
Start: 2026-05-11T18:30:00+02:00
End: 2026-05-11T20:00:00+02:00
Location: Dekanatssitzungssaal, Karl-Rahner-Platz 1, 6020 Innsbruck

$Gastvortrag Robyn Faith Walsh: The \u201cMessianic Secret\u201d Revisited$

The “Messianic Secret” Revisited:
Wonder and Narrative Misrecognition in the Gospels
The so called “Messianic Secret” has long been treated as a theological puzzle or an awkward literary feature of the Gospels, especially Mark. In this lecture, I suggest that the problem looks quite different when approached through ancient narrative conventions. Drawing on Graeco-Roman literature concerned with wonders, paradox, and heroic biography, I argue that repeated failures to recognize Jesus function as a form of narrative misrecognition rather than concealment. Such moments invite astonishment, confusion, and delayed understanding in ways that ancient audiences would have found familiar. Reframing the gospels within this broader wonder culture helps clarify how early readers were meant to engage these texts, and why the figure of Jesus appears, again and again, as both obvious and strangely elusive.
Robyn Faith Walsh is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami and Gabelli Senior Scholar. She is the author of The Origins of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and has published widely on early Christian texts in their Graeco‑Roman context.