Ideological Manifesto by the Act of Woman who Anoints Jesus in the Markan Narrative: Anti-colonial Rhetoric

Literature in the meaning of the word, as Terry Eagleton argues, is an ideology that has the most intimate relations to the questions of social power.1 If we see literature in functional rather than ontological terms, the criteria of what counted as literature would be ideological expression, in which the literary work represents one’s own concerns and values of the society one lives in. The ideology here is not so much about a physical means of enslavement but “a mental one, operating in terms of ideas, beliefs, cultural practices and religion,”2 In this article, I am going to focus on Mark 14:1-11, specifically concentrating on the literary-rhetorical function of the narrative in terms of ideology with the postcolonial hermeneutic lens. So this article will present another way of interpretation of Markan narrative. Firstly, I will analyze Mark s narrative strategy, technique and its effects, particularly in 14:1-11. Here one recognizes that the narrator’s sandwich technique, which makes a contrast between the woman and Jesus’ opponents, which reveals some kind of relation to the maintenance and reproduction of social power or a vision of socialization. So, one could see power dynamics and conflicts of ideologies between classes, even genders in the literature. Actually, on the ground of certain ideology and its dynamics, not only people can identify one’s social location and status, but also people endeavor to keep one’s position and power or to resist the dominating power. While hegemony continually pursue to maintain the structure of knowledge and value, the other lower class probably resists to the false ideology through representing alternative ideology for the equal distribution of power. All these social and mental phenomena appear in literature, even in biblical literature.