CHAPTER 6
This begins with one my favorite parts of the Bible – where
Jesus goes back home and is rejected.
There are a few minor differences between this and the same story from
Matthew: Chapter 13.
First, when Christ teaches at the synagogue, the people say,
“Is he not the carpenter, son of Mary?”
OK, this is the only place in the entire Bible where Christ is
personally called a carpenter.
Elsewhere, he is the son of a carpenter. Here, it’s just “son of Mary.”
That’s odd by itself, because normally a kid isn’t referred to by his
mom back in those days.
According to “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart D. Ehrman, there is
an explanation. Our oldest copies of
Mark have this line as “son of a carpenter” but somewhere along the way, a
scribe’s pen slipped, and that became the modern version.
Both Matthew and Mark have the locals mention Jesus’s
siblings, but it’s a little different here.
In Mark, Jesus is “the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon”
and “Are not his sisters here among us?”
It’s almost the same in Matthew – but it’s Joseph, not Joses for the
second brother’s name. But the brother
“Joses” will get mentioned again in Chapter 15 of Mark. It’s not a big point, but it is a
discrepancy.
Then John the Baptist is killed and it’s the same ugly story
as in Matthew. Actually, it’s a little
uglier here, as we’re specifically told the dancer is the daughter of
Herod. Ewwww. Actually, Mark does a better job explaining why he felt he had to
keep his word to her. He’d promised her
in front of other people. He’d look bad
for backing down now.
All this fear about killing the Baptist causing some
uprising turns out to be entirely unfounded.
The Baptist dies and no one does anything. Well, I guess it does help the Jesus movement.
Anyhow, the disciples are told to go out and they do. They come back. 5,000 are fed on hardly any loaves. Christ walks on water.
It’s all stuff we saw in mid-Matthew.
But there is one difference of note in the walk on water
story. In Matthew, when Christ walked
on water, that’s when the apostles began to figure out who he really was:
“Those who were in the boat did him homage, saying, `Truly you are the Son of God.’” (Matthew: 14:36).
It plays out differently here. Mark says, “They were
completely astounded. They had not
understood the incident of the loaves.
On the contrary, their hearts were hardened.” Wait – what? Instead of
realizing that Jesus is the Son of God, “their hearts were hardened.” We’ve seen that language before – that’s the
language of the pharaoh versus Moses.
It’s the language of someone denying God. And that’s what Mark has the apostles do here. That’s rather astonishing.
I don’t know fully what to make of that. I’ll say this much. First, it’s the best sign yet of the
apostles never really getting it in the Gospel According to Mark. Whoever wrote this didn’t think much of the
original 12. Second, it is even more
evidence that the attributed writer isn’t actual Mark, longtime assistant to
Peter. If he really thought that little
of Peter, he wouldn’t spend so long with him.
CHAPTER 7
It’s more Christ versus the Pharisees stuff that we saw in
mid-Matthew. The Pharisees accuse
Christ of not following tradition, and lays right back into them. He says they disregard God’s commandments to
follow human customs. I don’t quite know
what’s the basis for Christ’s claims here.
Say what you will about the Pharisees, but they base all their ideas
from the Torah, and that’s believed to be the word of God. I guess Christ thinks that some rulers are
but in there just because humans are weak and it’s actually watered down the
word of God. Jesus says this in Matthew
(but I don’t know if he says that here in Mark).
Well, to be fair, Christ does quote Moses back to them. His basic approach is that strictest equals
best. Jesus is holding people to the
higher standard, and he’s appalled that the Pharisees don’t. There’s an irony here. The Pharisees are the needless sticklers for
rules – but Christ is also calling for some strict standards. Only for Christ, it’s not about having many
laws, but just strict following of the high standards of his fewer laws.
When that’s done, the apostles question Jesus about what his
parables mean. Once again, Jesus is
annoyed at them. “Are even you likewise
without understanding?” Just one
chapter after the apostles came off as impossibly dense, now they’re just
routinely dense. Christ says the same
thing in Matthew, but the context overall is different. In Matthew, it was occasional chastisements
sprinkled with moments when the apostles figure things out (like Jesus being
the son of God). In Mark, you don’t get
as much positive to wash out the negatives.
Oh, Christ finally helps a gentile in Mark. There were more of them in Matthew, but here
you have a Greek woman with faith in Mark.
The chapter ends with a disgusting cure. A man is deaf and blind and Christ helps him
but putting his finger in the man’s ears, and then splitting, and touching his
tongue. At first I misread that and
thought he was giving the guy a wet Willie, but no – finger in ear first,
spitting second. Still – what an
unfortunate sequence to go through to help the man.
CHAPTER 8
It’s more stuff we read bout in Matthew: a second mass
feeding, Christ blows off the Pharisees demand for a sign, and some
healings.
One odd thing both here and Matthew. Oftentimes, Christ speaks to people from a
boat. When big crowds show up, he’s
often in a boat. Why is he in boats so
often? The Bible makes is sound like
that’s the best way to get his voice out to many, but I don’t get it. This whole boating prophet thing just seems
weird.
Also, once again Christ lays into his apostles for being
slow. At one point, Jesus lays into
them about as harshly as he ever does, saying, “Why do you conclude that it is
because you have no bread? Do you not
yet understand or comprehend? Are your
hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear? And do you
not remember when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many
wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?” One or two rhetorical questions should be enough – but when you
just keep going on like this, you’re badgering them.
Also, it’s weird that both here and Matthew that there are
two separate feeding stories. It’s the same basic feeding story, but told
twice. This sort of thing happened a lot in the Old Testament, and the best
understanding for it would be that you had two sources combined into one. Thus you get Abraham twice tell people Sarah
was his sister. Twice the world was created.
And so on. Is Mark drawing from
two sources? That’s tricky, because
he’s writing not that much after Christ’s death? Maybe he made some inquiries and heard two variations on the same
tale – and put both in. Then Matthew
decided to follow Mark’s lead. It’s
just weird you get two feeding stories like this.
However, at the end of the chapter, we finally – finally!
– get an apostle figuring something out.
Christ asks who do people say I am, and Peter figures out he’s the
Messiah. DING! Good one, Peter. That makes the score Peter 1, other apostles 0.
The build up is similar to Matthew’s Chapter 16. Christ asks
who do people say I am, and they start off with some wrong guesses – then Peter
wins the prize. Aye, but what happens
afterward is different. Here, the story
ends with Peter guessing correctly. In
Matthew, Jesus praises Peter extensively, calling him the rock upon which Jesus
will found his church and giving Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. There is nothing like that in Mark. Even when an apostle gets one right in Mark,
they don’t come off as well as they did in Matthew.
Mark may not give Christ’s praise of Peter, but he does have
Jesus insult Peter in the next section.
As in Matthew, right at this point in the story, Jesus tells everyone
how the story will end. Again, Peter
protests. And again Christ yells at
him, “Get behind me, Satan!” So we lack
Peter being the rock the church will be founded upon in Mark, but he’s still
insulted a few verses later. The
apostles just can’t win in this gospel.
CHAPTER 9
Again, the stories here were given in Matthew. Christ goes up to a mountain with his lead
apostles and Moses and Elijah come. Christ cures some people. Jesus predicts how the gospel will end. He cures more people.
Some notes about it.
First, here is one a reader brought to my attention. In Matthew, the lead apostles see Jesus with
Elijah and Moses on the mountain and are amazed. The question: how would they know it’s Elijah and Moses? There are no photos, after all. Well, maybe they had nametags.
Also, when Jesus cures a boy of a demon, he sounds downright
peeved. He’s not upset with the boy,
but – of course – with his apostles.
Either Jesus picked some really crummy apostles or he’s just too tough a
boss.
It’s a weird story.
A man bring a mute and apparently epileptic son for Jesus to cure. He tells Jesus that the apostles tried to
drive the boy away. Really? Man, the apostles are dicks in Mark. Jesus sure thinks so, exclaiming to them, “O
faithless generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?”
Later on, Jesus blasts the boy’s father. The father asks
Christ to cure the boy “If you can.”
Well, that just sets off our Messiah: “If you can! Everything is possible to one who has
faith.” Jesus comes off as rather
peevish in this story. Frankly, he
comes off as peevish throughout Mark.
It all makes it more likely that the story really did have him be upset
at the leper he cured at the end of Chapter 1.
It would be in character in this gospel.
CHAPTER 10
In a bit of a rarity in Mark, we get some teachings from
Christ here. It focuses on key matters,
too – marriage and divorce. It’s
similar to what Jesus said in Chapter 19 of Matthew. Jesus is against divorce and thinks the Torah’s acceptance of it
was due to human weaknesses instead of being a real part of God’s plan. But, perhaps more importantly, this is
significantly different from Matthew beyond that. In Matthew, Christ went on to tacitly endorse celibacy; saying
that abstaining is the best course, but for those who can’t do that, marriage
is the next best option. In Mark, Jesus
moves on to other subjects after talking of divorce.
In particular, Jesus moves on to insulting his
apostles. Yes, again. Now they’re trying to keep children from Jesus. No reason is given. I guess the apostles don’t like kids. Jesus rebukes them, saying, “Let the
children come to me; don not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to
such as these.” Matthew tells part of
this story. Sort of. In Matthew, no one
prevents the kids from coming to Christ.
They just come and he says those nice words. Matthew edited out the part where the apostles were dinks and
Jesus tells them to get bent.
Next comes the rich man who will have a harder time entering
heaven than a camel would in passing through the eye of a needle. That’s in Matthew, too (this entire chapter
is Matthew 19, essentially). If nothing
else, it lets us know where Christ’s socioeconomic base came from: the down and
outs.
In a rarity, Jesus is nice to his prophets for a
stretch. He says people must give up
everything to enter heaven, and when Peter says they’ve done that, Christ
congratulates them. So that’s nice of
him (for once).
After predicting how the gospel will end (third time now he’s
done that), there comes a story that has been modestly changed from Matthew
(Chapter 20 of Matthew, this time). It
involves apostle brothers James and John.
They ask Christ if they can sit next to him when it’s time to judge
all. That’s almost what happened in
Matthew. In Matthew, it was their
mother that made the big request. I
thought that sounded odd in Matthew.
Heck, he didn’t even know her name, just calling her, “the mother of the
sons of Zebedee” – an awkward formulation if ever there was one.
But this is part of a theme throughout. Mark makes the
apostles look bad. Matthew displaced
the request onto the mother so they don’t look so bad. Matthew consistently improves how the
apostles come off in his gospels.
CHAPTER 11
Time to enter Jerusalem.
This is a little less confusing than the similar story in Matthew:
Chapter 21. There, they had a cold and a donkey with cloaks put over both to
help fulfill a prophecy that Matthew didn’t understand. (Matthew didn’t realize that colt and donkey
could refer to the same animal in some Old Testament writings). Mark isn’t as concerned with having Christ
fulfill prophecies as Matthew was, and so just has Christ enter on a colt. (In both stories, Jesus’s friends borrow a
colt for him).
As in Matthew, Christ creates a ruckus in the temple, and
then kills a tree. It’s the same stuff
as in Matthew 21.
The elders question Jesus authority but he dismisses them
the same way as in Matthew. He gives
them a retaliation question – tell me what authority that John baptized people
by. Again, they don’t want to take a
stand, and so Jesus uses that as an excuse to not answer their question.
CHAPTER 12
As is normally the case, most of this was in Matthew. We get some parables, the “repay to Caesar
what belongs to Caesar” story, a question about Resurrection that Matthew
covered in his 22nd chapter, and the greatest commandment.
In that last part, things veer away from Matthew. Both Matthew and Mark have the same root
base. In both cases, Christ’s enemies
ask him what’s the most important commandment and he tells them to worship only
God. In both cases, Christ follows that
up with a bonus – the next most important part is to love your neighbor as
yourself.
However, whereas Matthew stops the story at this moment in
time, Mark keeps going. A scribe talks
to Jesus and notes how important it is to love others. Jesus agrees, saying “You are not far from
the kingdom of God” because he understood the lesson so well. That’s an interesting bit of Matthew to edit
out. Why would he do that? My theory is that it relates to the overall
difference in how they treat the apostles.
Mark makes them look bad while Matthew makes them look good. So when Matthew came across this story,
“Boy, not only does Mark trash the apostles, but he then makes some unnamed
scribe look good? Boy, I better leave
that out.” It’s part of the process of
making the apostles look better. Making
some unnamed scribe seem like he gets Christ when his own apostles don’t can be
an indirect swipe at the apostles.
Or maybe there is something different going on. Maybe Matthew just doesn’t like
scribes. Shortly after the above story,
Mark denounces the scribes “who go around in long robes and accept greetings in
the marketplace.” In Mark, it’s a brief
denouncing – just three verses. But in
Matthew it goes on forever – it’s much of Chapter 23. Clearly, Matthew has a bigger gripe with the official powers that
be in the Hebrew land. Interesting.
Click here for the conclusion to Mark.
No comments:
Post a Comment