This book attempts to understand the potential impact of Mark's Gospel upon its early Graeco-Roman readers.

It focuses upon the role of the healing/exorcism accounts in this communicative process. These scenes forge a link with Mark's flesh-and-blood readers by:

1. strongly aligning the ‘implied readers’ with the suppliants in the scenes;

2. enabling the ‘flesh-and-blood’ readers to recognise their own world in the circumstances of the suppliants and to ‘become’ the implied readers;

3. thus drawing the flesh-and-blood readers into the story-world which seeks to move them by its message about Jesus and the coming kingdom.

To appreciate the impact of these stories on early readers, the book attempts to recover relevant aspects of the pre-understanding which Graeco-Roman readers could be expected to bring to their reading of Mark. This requires a special focus on ancient perceptions of sickness and death, as well as due attention to magic, which could be either cause or cure of the afflictions.

When read from this reconstructed perspective, the healing/exorcism scenes show Jesus dealing with death.

These scenes are read within Mark's wider framework of the expectation of the kingdom of God, to be inaugurated by the resurrection of the dead.

Portrayed as a king who brings life to those under the shadow of death, Jesus would be seen as an alternative to the deified rulers familiar to the Roman world. He had no apotheosis which removed him from death, but he truly died.