The Gospel of Mark

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.

We have begun studying the Gospel of Mark in my Sunday School class. I would like to recall what I know about the gospel.  Before I do any research, I shall fly by the seat of my memory.

Mark is the first gospel written.  In fact, Matthew and Luke are expanded editions of Mark.

Who wrote it?

Like the other gospels, we do not know who wrote it.  

According to Eusebius’ valuable, yet biased, 4^th century work Ecclesia Historica a bishop from Hierapolis identified the writer as a man who traveled with Simon Peter. 

His name was Papias and he lived around 120 CE.

Conservative writers love to say the gospels are reliable, and Papias is reliable, and Eusebius is reliable, but they are confusing reliable with possible.

A car is reliable, or a person may be, but a historical assertion without facts is not reliable.  I would not rely on it to cement my credibility as a historian.

However, the gospels can be said to be reliable in the sense I can gain wisdom from them or God’s word.

Papias is telling the truth in the sense of truth as he understood it.  Truth in the ancient world had a lot to do with authority, vindication, being wise, and feeling good, but factual evidence was not as great a concern as it is in our time.

In any case, there is no evidence that Papias’ assertion was true. 

There is abundant evidence that Mark was a common name during Roman times.  Think of Marcus Brutus and Marcus Aurelius.  So the definitiveness of this Mark is rather obscure.

Also, there is evidence that apostolic names and associations were used to give a book authority.   Indeed, some of Paul’s epistles could not have been written by him, but one of his students wrote in his name.

When was it written?

Dogmatic scholars, in the interest of preserving their assertion that Jesus was a fortune teller, put the gospel around 50 CE or sooner so he could predict the destruction of Jerusalem's temple.  

Of course, if Jesus had predicted that the Romans would eventually destroy the temple, the response would have been, “Duh,” by Jews who recalled Babylon destroying Solomon’s temple and Jews who recalled Rome’s tendency to pummel any who resisted them.

In the academic world of Biblical scholarship, there is a consensus that Mark was written around 70 AD.  That would have Mark writing while the Romans were destroying Jerusalem.

Where was it written?

No one really knows that either.  Some believe it was written in Galilee.  Some believe it was written in Rome.  Others believe it was written among the Diaspora (Jews who fled Judah to abroad) near the Mediterranean Sea where persecution was heavy. 

What was the purpose of the writer?

The purpose of Mark is to present Jesus as God's son speaking to a community of Christians who are suffering persecution.

However, he is not being thought of as God’s son in the theological formulas that would come later.  Indeed, Jesus in Mark is far removed from the trinitarian formula of the 4^th century.

In Mark, Jesus is a son of god in the sense that he was a divine person who, because of heroic or wondrous deeds, is numbered among the heavenly sons of god.

We must always remember when interpreting any book of the Jewish or Christian Bibles that the near-sky/flat earth cosmology is always the cultural background to all biblical thinking.  

I do not write this to denigrate the story of Jesus.  Indeed, I write this because it is my ministry and our ministry as Christians who live in the 21^st century to explain Jesus within the cosmology we know to be true today, so he does not become irrelevant.