Homeric Epics and Mark

Dennis McDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) is a book that was always guaranteed to upset orthodox Christian theologians and biblical literalists and fundamentalists everywhere, since its main thesis held that the author of the first gospel used the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary models. He compares Mark to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a Gnostic book, and describes it as a "hypotext" that "relies somehow on a written antecedent" (McDonald, p. 2). Specifically, Mark used Books 22 and 24 of the Iliad as models for the death and burial of Jesus, in which Achilles brutally kills Hector and then releases the body to his father, King Priam of Troy. Hector's soul went to Hades and never returned, but of course Jesus was resurrected on the third day, even if his rather dim disciples in Mark failed to recognize him initially....
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