More About Mark

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

Here is some more information about Mark's gospel.

People often appear surprised when I tell them that my favorite gospel is Mark.  

WHY MARK IS MY FAVORITE GOSPEL

Matthew has all that terrific Moses lore in it so we see Jesus as a great liberator.  Luke has all those parables that are not found in the other gospels.  John reveals a nearly Gnostic Jesus who is so magical, mystical, and loving that he could have been a professor at Hogwarts.

 But I simply love spare Mark for a number of reasons.

Mark is the shortest gospel.  I can read it in one sitting.  

Jesus is funnier in Mark.

Mark uses deliberate literary techniques to structure his message.  He cannot paint Jesus except with words, so he frames what is important about Jesus within events.

Mark shows Jesus doing the same thing more than once with another twist.

Mark is the least magical. 

In Mark, Jesus is so human, more so than the other gospels. I connect more easily with him.

Mark is written in the present tense.  It is translated in the past tense.  

By writing the story of Jesus in the present tense, the gospel writer is suggesting Jesus is being Jesus right now, this every minute, even as I write.

In Mark, Jesus' way of arguing with Pharisees was the way Mark’s community argued with that competing movement within Judaism that opposed them.

WHY MARK IS SO INTERESTING

   

Mark is so interesting for a number of reasons.  Mark is interesting for what it does not have as much as what it has.   

There are no birth narratives and no resurrection appearances in Mark.  It begins with Jesus' baptism and ends with a mysterious empty tomb.  

Mark is one of those gospels that shows how scribes can alter a text they believe is insufficient in some way. The resurrection material in Mark was added decades later by a scribe.

When Jesus dies in Mark, all the other criminals revile him.  That's it.  Matthew keeps that ignoble end.  Luke changes it.  John mentions it not.

In Mark, Jesus says before he dies, "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?"

That, and a final scream, was it.

We have a Jesus in Mark who reveals so well how abandoned by God life seems to so many people.  

There is also expressed, I believe, the sense of abandonment in the early church.  Ask a Jewish survivor from Germany circa Hitler if they ever felt that way, for example.

Jesus had been crucified by the Romans like a common criminal.  The disciples fled...according to Mark.  Only some women stood from a distance to watch.

The early church was left with a Messiah cursed by God, according to Deuteronomy, and stigmatized by society, according to mores.  That's a tough sale in any world--ancient or modern.

Yet the Jesus movement continued with the message that Jesus was the son of our God of love who vindicated him by raising him from more than death: indeed, from extinction.  

From the time of Jesus’crucifixion, around 25 CE, the movement simmered until a man named Saul of Tarsus began preaching and writing about Jesus.  

Stories about Jesus were being told.  Sayings from Jesus were being told. Eventually, these things were written down.

Eventually, a writer whom we call Mark wrote in the present tense and in the Greek of the common people an original genre called a gospel.  

This document must have been copied and carried to other writers who used it to tell their community's story of Jesus even decades after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

Blessings...