With the overall task of explaining Christian origins in mind, this dissertation describes, analyzes and compares how the formation of the disciples of Jesus is depicted by the Gospels of Mark and John. It assumes the Gospel genre to be biographical and defines ―formation‖ as the dialectical processes of interactions between Jesus and the disciples as His agents. A model that is based on the depictions of the divine-human interactions in the OT and literature of Second Temple Judaism is first developed for the analyses. This model is then piloted and fine-tuned in the first chapters of Mark and John in order to set the parameters for the study. With the aid of a narrative-theological method, the discipleship characters in both Gospels are identified, and the purposes of their formation, as well as the processes and events involved in their interactions with Jesus are separately analyzed and then compared to establish a number of hypotheses. These hypotheses are then validated by examining how both Evangelists narrate the feeding of the five thousand and the anointing of Jesus.

Asumang-A-PhD-Final-Dissertation-Apr-2010