Mark: Chapters 1 to 5

Click here for the end of Matthew.

CHAPTER 1

The Gospel According to Mark – scholars pretty much all believe that this was the first written of the gospels, and that Matthew and Luke drew on it as a source.  In fact, so much of Mark was already in Matthew, that you get déjà vu when reading this one – so much “been there, read that.”  It’s pretty clear that Mark was using Matthew as a source, because it wouldn’t make much sense to cut out all the stuff left in the editing room.  Mark is more about what Jesus did.  There isn’t too much on what he said.  Sure, there are some parables, but there isn’t nearly as much teaching as in Matthew.  The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, isn’t here.

The work is written anonymously, but has been attributed to Mark – or John Mark as he is sometimes called.  (The gospel is shortened to just Mark because there is already a Gospel According to John thank you very much).  Anyhow, Mark most notably is known as an accompanier and interpreter for St. Peter. 

According to Bart D. Ehrman’s “Jesus, Interrupted,” the tradition that Mark wrote a gospel goes back to at least the second century AD.  Our earliest source is a man named Papias, who wrote that Mark never saw/heard Christ himself, but accompanied Peter for a long time, and thus wrote down, a list of the Lord’s sayings, including everything he knew Jesus said. 

Two problems with that, as Ehrman notes.  First, if it’s everything he knew Christ said (after a long time hanging with St. Peter) shouldn’t this be a longer book.  You can read it out loud from cover to cover in a few hours, no sweat.  Second: Papias says it’s a list of Christ’s sayings, but there really aren’t many teachings of Jesus in this one at all.  That’s more in the others.  Actually, based on what Papias said, Mark might be the author of the theorized Q source, the list of sayings that some scholars believed Matthew and Luke used when writing their gospels. 

Actually, there is another problem beyond all that.  OK, so Mark wrote this, and Mark was a longtime companion of the chief apostle.  Yeah, well – the apostles in general don’t come off too well here.  That’s mighty curious if it was written by an apostle’s assistant.  Not impossible, but certainly unexpected.

Oh, and one other thing.  Everything else Papias ever wrote was debunked.  It wasn’t just debunked by modern scholars, but debunked by early church leaders.  In fact, we have nothing left from Papias’ own writings – except when other early church founders quote him to rebut him.  But they accepted what he said on the writing of the gospels.  And clearly, his statements indicate that there was some tradition of this Mark fellow writing on Christ, and we had this anonymous gospel here – so it became attributed to him. 

OK, now for the gospel itself.  There is no virgin birth.  There is no Star of Bethlehem.  There is anything like that.  The story begins with John the Baptist preaching.  Mark doesn’t waste time with any set up.  Throughout, he’ll be quick and too the point – overly so; abrupt even. 

Well, for the most part what we learn here is what we already learned in Matthew.  John baptizes people while eating honey and locusts and foretelling of the more important one who will come after him – the Messiah.  One interesting difference between this John and Matthew’s John.  Here, he says, “I have baptized you with water, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”  Yeah, Matthew recorded it as “baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire.”  I don’t quite get why Matthew made that addition, but there you go. 

Christ gets baptized and goes off into the desert for 40 days.  Satan tempts him – but we get no details.  Matthew went into detail on the three temptations, but Mark just says Jesus, “remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan.”  That’s it. 

Jesus again comes out, learns that the Baptist is now in jail, and so Jesus begins his preaching.  In Matthew, Christ withdraws to Galilee to fulfill a prophecy of yore.  Here, he just goes to Galilee.  There is far less emphasis in Mark on making Jesus fulfill Old Testament prophecies.  Christ’s first words are, “This is the time of fulfillment.  The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, and believe in the gospel.”  It was kingdom of heaven in Matthew.  That’s a minor difference, but more impersonal with Matthew. 

Jesus gets the same first for disciples as in Matthew – the two sets of brothers: Simon and Andrew, and James and John.  Interesting – Mark doesn’t indicate that Simon will later be known as Peter here, unlike Matthew.  (Doubly interesting, given that this was supposedly written by Peter’s aid).

Christ does his first healings, and there is one new thing I noted.  It isn’t actually new here, but it’s something I didn’t catch in Matthew.  Jesus goes to cure the mother-in-law of Peter (still called just Simon here).  Jesus does it – but hold on, Simon’s mother-in-law?  Yeah, I guess Simon was married.  Interesting, as he clearly won’t take his family with him when he goes off with Jesus.  Also: in Matthew this story appears in Chapter 8.  It takes places midway through the first chapter in Mark!  My goodness, things are moving quick!

At the end of a chapter comes an incident analyzed at length in another Ehrman book, “Misquoting Jesus.”  Some background is required. In that book, Ehrman takes on our copies of the Bible. We have no original copies of anything from the Bible.  We don’t have any copies of the originals.  We mostly have copies of copies of copies of copies.

The ancient world isn’t like modern times.  All copies of the same book now can be easily understood to say the exact same things.  Not so in ancient times.  Then it was always copied out word-for-word, letter-for-letter.  That opened the way for errors to be introduced.  It was especially problematic in early Christian centuries when the people doing it were amateurs who didn’t have as much training – and maybe their literacy was shaky.

People wouldn’t intentionally goof things up.  Most goofs were just accidental and minor – grammar crud.  But sometimes a scribe would make a change, intentionally. It wasn’t done with malice.  Maybe what he read sounded so off that he assumed a previous scribe had screwed it up. Maybe, as Christian theology changed and evolved, the old words seemed suspect in the new environment.  Anyhow, by the third and fourth centuries AD, the Bibles in use varied considerably from each other.  There was an effort made at standardization, culminating in the Vulgate, the common Latin Bible for 1,000 years.  But that was based on the 3^rd and 4^th century Bibles.  Modern archeology and studies have found some Bible going back further. 

And one sore sport is the end of Chapter 1 in Mark. There, Christ cures a leper.  In our modern Bible, when the leper approaches Jesus and asks to be healed, we’re told that Christ took pity on him and healed him.  OK, but our oldest and most reliable ancient copies don’t say Jesus took pity on him.  They say he became angry. 

What’s more, the angry Jesus story actually fits a little better with what happens later.  We’re told that after curing him, Jesus sternly warned him, and then dismissed him.  Ehrman points out that sternly warning and dismissing are mild translations.  A better translation would be that Christ rebuked him severely, and then cast him out.  OK, Jesus cured him, but he sure was annoyed by it. 

One general theme in trying to figure out what is in the original and what is not – which one would the scribe falsely translate into?  It’s hard to see why a translator would miss Christ’s compassion and pity for anger.  That seems totally out of character.  But it does make sense for a translator to want to clean this up into pity.  So he did.  But it looks like Christ was annoyed.

And Christ has a habit of getting annoyed at people in Mark. 

CHAPTER 2

This is stuff we saw in Matthew.  Christ heals some people.  The Pharisees ask the same question of fasting here as they did in Chapter 9 of Matthew – and get the same basic response.  The disciples pick grain on the Sabbath and are criticized for it.  Hey – that was way out in Chapter 12 of Matthew!  We’re just in Chapter 2 still here!

Aside from that, Christ calls some guy named Levi who is among the tax collectors.  I have no idea why this guy is called out, but it does allow Christ to explain to his critics why he hangs with sinners and tax collectors – they’re the ones who need him.  In Matthew, the tax collector was Matthew.  But here it isn’t.  Interesting.

I don’t think Matthew ever is identified as a tax collector here.  So that’s a difference.  I wonder if, once people began to associate the Gospel of Matthew with the apostle Matthew there was a need to include the story of his calling.  After all, that gospel has just five guys called – the first four and Matthew.  This one has just the first four. (In both cases, the full 12 are then later mentioned).  Then, rather than make up a story of a calling, you just changed Levi to Matthew.  That’s just a theory, but I like it.

CHAPTER 3

It’s more stuff from Matthew, but again – it’s stuff from deep inside Matthew near the front of Mark.  Christ heels a hand on the Sabbath, causing the Pharisees to ask, “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath?”  Seriously – that’s how they phrase.  Oh my – get bent, Pharisees.  Listen to yourselves! In Matthew, it just says, “Is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath?” which is also bad, but not as bad as questioning if its right to do good.

Jesus assembles his full 12 apostles and contends more with his critics.  Boy, the critics start early here.  The lack of the Sermon on the Mount really hurts Mark.  At least in Matthew you had a sense of momentum that would cause the powers to be annoyed by Jesus.

Christ is again accused of being in league with Satan, and I didn’t quite catch this the first time, but his response is a famous line: “And if a house divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.”  I assume the King James Bible more pithily says, “A house divided against itself can not stand,” which will later provided Abraham Lincoln with the key line to one of his best speeches. 

Finally, Christ says that his true family isn’t his mother and brothers, but his followers and believers. This was Chapter 12 in Matthew.

CHAPTER 4

This chapter is mostly parables – and they’re parables we saw in Matthew – the mustard seed, the parable of the sower, etc.  As was the case in Matthew, people don’t quite get his meanings and he has to explain them.  In Matthew, he started off calming explaining them, and then only later getting ticked off that people couldn’t figure them out sooner instead of later.

In Mark?  Christ starts off ticked off.  The first time he has to explain them, he cries out to his apostles, “Do you not understand this parable?  Then how will you understand any of the parables?”  Again, we see a bit of a shorter temper in Mark’s Jesus than in Matthew’s Jesus.  Also, this helps begin another theme in Mark: the apostles rarely seem to really get their Messiah. They’re a much more thickskulled dozen here.

Oh, and the chapter ends with Christ calming the sea.  Good job on that, Jesus.  This awes his thickskulled apostles, who begin wondering to themselves – who is this guy exactly?

CHAPTER 5

This one starts off with a weird story.  It’s one of the few stories in Mark that I don’t recall appearing in any form in Matthew.  Jesus comes across one guy afflicted by a demon.  This isn’t just any afflicted guy.  He is so strong, that no one could restrain him, not even with a chain.  In fact, he’d pulled apart many chains and smashes many shackles.  So he’s superhumanly strong.  Anyhow, Christ cures him.  He tells Christ his name is Legion.  Huh  - that was a Paul Bettany movie from a few years ago about some angels fighting over if they should wipe out humanity or not.  Or something like that – it involved angles and the final doom.  I wonder if this Bible verse helped inspire it.

Next comes the story of the swineherd that came in Matthew Chapter 8.  It’s a little different here.  In both cases, Jesus deals with possessed swine by running them off a cliff.  In Matthew, people were ticked off and wanted him to leave.  Here, the people were just amazed. 

The Matthew version makes more sense.  I didn’t quite get it then, but a reader pointed it out to me.  Look, some people would rather be prosperous than moral.  Possessed pigs can still be sold, but not a ton of dead pigs.  Also – if they were so devout, what are these Jews doing with un-kosher pigs, anyway?  Here, that subtext is lost.

The rest is more stuff we’ve already seen.  Christ heels people, most notably a woman given up for dead, that Christ insists isn’t.  A few things contrasting Matthew and Mark. First, in Mark, these healings were typically sprinkled with stories of healed gentiles – and they were often the ones praised as having the most faith.  Those aren’t here.  It looks like Matthew copied mark on the healings and then threw in some gentiles to help broaden his appeal to them.

Also, we again see Christ come off as easily ticked off.  A woman with chronic hemorrhaging issues goes up to Christ, believing that just touching his cloak will be enough to save her.  She does, and Christ immediately whirls around asking, “Who has touched me cloak?”  Well, maybe this is more just my reaction than the text.  Maybe I’m just preconditioned to see Christ as being annoying in Mark based on what I’ve read in Bart Ehrman’s books.  But that does sound like a nature reaction to having some stranger grab your clothing out of nowhere.

It’s all good, though.  Jesus is impressed by her faith and fixes her up.  

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