Lecture: “Secrecy in Second Temple Judaism — Reading Mark’s Messianic Secret with Georg Simmel”
Guest Lecturer: Prof. Dr. theol. Gabriella Gelardini, VDM, Professor for Christianity, Religion, Worldview, and Ethics (KRLE), Nord University, Bodø, Norway
WHAT IS THE ROLE OF SECRECY IN TIMES OF CRISIS?
As part of her visit to the Institute for Advanced Studies at Tel Aviv University as an IAS Distinguished Scholar, Professor Gabriella Gelardini (Nord University) will deliver a lecture titled “Secrecy in Second Temple Judaism — Reading Mark’s Messianic Secret with Georg Simmel.”
This lecture investigates secrecy as a socio religious and historiographical force within the wider textual world of Second Temple Judaism. It adopts the now increasingly influential view that the New Testament—including the Gospel of Mark — belongs within the Jewish literary and intellectual landscape of the late Second Temple period. Against this same backdrop, Mark’s so called “messianic secret” is reconsidered.
View the full invitation here.
COURSE DETAILS
Where: Room 501, Webb School for Languages
Date: Wednesday, 27 May 2026
Time: 12:00–14:00
Light refreshments will be served before the lecture.
The lecture will be conducted in English.
This lecture is open to the public.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Gabriella Gelardini is Professor of Christianity, Religion, Worldview, and Ethics at Nord University, Norway. An internationally recognized scholar of the New Testament, her research focuses on the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Gospel of Mark, and early Judaism in Greco-Roman contexts. She received her doctoral training at the University of Basel and has held research positions at leading international institutions, including Harvard University. She has published widely and is actively involved in the international academic community.
FULL ABSTRACT
SECRECY IN SECOND TEMPLE JUDAISM
— READING MARK’S MESSIANIC SECRET WITH GEORG SIMMEL
This lecture investigates secrecy as a socio religious and historiographical force within the wider textual world of Second Temple Judaism. It adopts the now increasingly influential view that the New Testament—including the Gospel of Mark—belongs within the Jewish literary and intellectual landscape of the late Second Temple period. This shift permits Mark to be read not against Judaism, but from within its patterns of scriptural imagination, crisis negotiation, and meaning making.
Drawing on Georg Simmel’s Sociology of Secrecy, the lecture explores secrecy as a mode of social organization and a strategy for managing volatile or dangerous knowledge. Particular attention is given to Flavius Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum, where secrecy repeatedly shapes the trajectory of the First Jewish–Roman War. Josephus’s own selective concealment of information—grounded in a biblical prophecy about a ruler destined to arise from Judea—reveals how scriptural expectation, political instability, and rhetorical self positioning could converge. His reinterpretation of this prophecy in favor of Vespasian exemplifies a distinctly Jewish way of negotiating messianic hopes under extreme pressure.
Against this same backdrop, Mark’s so called “messianic secret” is reconsidered. Rather than treating it as a uniquely Christian innovation, the lecture situates Mark’s secrecy motif within a broader Jewish grammar of confidentiality, revelation, and threat management. Simmel’s distinction between relative and absolute secrecy offers a heuristic frame for understanding how Mark deploys secrecy in continuity with other Jewish responses to crisis and contested authority.
