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Everything You Wanted To

Know About The Gospel

According To Mark, But Were

Afraid To Ask

Dedicated to the memory of Marcus Borg.

“Myth is stories about the way things never were, but always are.”

― Marcus J. Borg

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Introduction: Pulling Back The Curtain

Glossary

Part 1: A Few Things You Need To Consider About The Gospel Of Mark Before We Even Talk About The Book Itself.

Part 2: Breaking The Spell Of Print Culture

Part 3: Redaction Criticism, The Textual Time Machine

Part 4: The Synoptic Problem, Thomas, John, Paul, And The Question Of Proto-Markan Tradition.

Part 5: The Creation Of The Gospel Of Mark.

Part 6: The Miracles Of Mark.

Part 7: The Sayings Of Mark.

Part 8: The Passion of Mark.

Part 9: The Post-Resurrection Narrative Of Mark.

Conclusion.

Part 10:Miscellany

Appendices:

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Introduction

Pulling Back The Curtain.

A man in a tuxedo and a long black cape steps up to a table and with a theatrical pop he pulls off his shiny, black top hat. He spins it around to show the audience it's velvet red interior; slowly he pans it across the audience as if to say "there's nothing in the hat", daring the audience to find something there. He places the hat on the table and pulls out a magic wand and slowly traces it around the brim of the hat, the audience waits, and starts leaning forward a little in their seat in quiet expectation. With a sudden flourish he taps the hat, there's a loud bang and a puff of smoke, the audience jumps back in their seat, and a rabbit hops out of the hat. He holds the rabbit and the hat up with a smile and a triumphant flourish as the audience dissolves into applause.

At that point there is two different audiences in the room: the curious and the satisfied. Though both audiences are enjoying the show, the satisfied are happy to see the trick but the curious are still interested because they want to figure out how the trick is done. The curious want to know where the rabbit came from and how the trick fooled them; their mind is racing, asking, is there a mirror in the hat? An assistant under the table passing a rabbit through a trick bottom? Did the flash of smoke cover the magician while he passed a rabbit into the hat? They think things like, the wand is a distraction what was his other hand doing? Was the hat a distraction too? Where was he trying to make sure I wasn't looking? The satisfied go home and say to themselves "good show" and they go to bed. The curious stare at the bedroom ceiling trying to sleuth out the secrets of the show.

I'm one of the curious. That's who I am. I really do want to know how things work. I can't just go to sleep, wake up, and go to work when there's a mystery rattling around in my head; the mystery goes with me, I dream about it, it follows me to work and back home again. The important thing to understand is that I'm not bothered by thinking about the mystery and if I do figure it out it doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the show, if anything it deepens my appreciation of it. It isn't as though I look down on the satisfied, I just don't relate to them. I really want to know the secrets. Like the other of the curious ones in the audience, I want to pull back the curtain and see what's going on behind the show.

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One of the areas where I really enjoy seeing behind the curtain, enjoy it enough that I got a degree in it, is in religion. I understand that religion is something that many people enjoy but most are solidly within the camp of the satisfied; they like to participate but they really aren't all that interested in how the whole thing works, why it works, and what went into it. Even though I like it, I do understand the most important thing about looking behind the curtain: you can't unsee what you see behind the curtain. Once the mystery behind the rabbit trick is revealed it changes the rabbit trick forever. If you are one of the satisfied you can lose something you enjoy by looking behind the curtain and the answers you find just aren't as fun as the mystery.

This article is a peek behind the curtain of the mythology of the Gospel of Mark. I'm going to take you through how it works from start to finish and beyond. The point of this rather lengthly exposition is to take any person from even the most basic level of understanding of the gospel of Mark, as in a person who has read Mark once, to an intimate understanding of the gospel's origins, context, and original meaning. This is the kind of understanding I prefer but I understand if it isn't the understanding you prefer. I am writing this short preamble by way of encouragement for those who might want to read this and also those who might not. One of the things you notice in the Religious Studies program is, in all of the lower level classes at least, there are people who take classes because they are part of the religion being taught. About halfway through the course some of these people aren't having as much fun as they thought; they thought it was going to be like what they learned from their families and religious institutions and when it isn't, when it's more clinical and a lot more impartial than they expected, they don't just lose interest in the class but the class can very much confront and disrupt their worldview. Thought I personally would always encourage people to educate themselves and always explore their most treasured views with the level of intellectual effort they deserve, I have watched people be torn up by this and I wouldn't wish anyone to wander into such a situation unwittingly.

This article is a clinical, scholarly view of how and why the gospel of Mark was made and what that means for the modern reader. If you are looking for theology, you will not find it here; I am not a theologian, I am not trained as a theologian, and to be as frank as I possibly can be I don't see theology as a fit academic pursuit (for myself! I'm not a theology bigot), I see it as the philosophical equivalent of creative writing: theology is just making stuff up according to how it makes a person "feel" and no theologian can provide any supporting proof for the merit of their "feelings". So, there will be no waxing theological here, and there will be

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no collection plate passed around, and if you want to send me money I won't stop you but you probably shouldn't.... I'd probably just spend it on booze.

What I can and will talk about is the beliefs Mark and his community held because that is germane to the understanding of the gospel. If you are hoping for a newer understanding of Mark, you won't find it here, what I will try to give you is the oldest possible understanding of Mark, something that approximates as closely as possible what the evangelist was trying to get across when the gospel was written. If all of that sounds interesting to you, if what you want is to understand the gospel of Mark better, by all means read on and enjoy. I wrote this article for my fellow curious, the seekers of information, those people who want to know more regardless of how that information makes them feel. For those people to whom the discomfort brought on by knowledge could never be as great as the discomfort of not knowing, I salute you! This article is for you.

This article began as an idea that I didn't immediately act upon years ago. I began to notice that the ongoing online debate about the New Testament between Christians and others was, for the most part, very superficial. Each person tended to gather a short list of talking points and factoids that confirmed what they believed on the subject and come armed with those as if they could apply to any situation. More often than not those talking points and factoids proved to go beyond the mere superficial into the realm of being just untrue. Now, I'm a big fan of having opinions, I like being in favour of things and opposed to other things, but I have a personal guideline that I refer to as "The Three F's", it goes like this: I like to base my opinions on Full, Fair, and Factual analysis. This is what this article is about, giving some full, fair, factual analysis of the Gospel of Mark. Though there aren't a lot of rock solid facts from the era of Mark's writing I have based this article on what facts there are and as I explore beyond those I attempt to stick to solid theories. Wherever possible I will do my best to make you aware of the dividing lines.

Originally I had intended to make this a much shorter exposition, however, as the idea developed further it became clear that a satisfactory treatment of this concept would have to be longer. Since this was largely a diversion for my own enjoyment I decided I might as well do a good job rather than a quick one. To make it easier for myself and any of the people who might read this I have organized it into ten sections that progress through the subject (and one labelled 'miscellany' that is totally random).

The intent of this article is to take a person from the most basic knowledge of the Gospel of Mark and give that person a much fuller understanding of the same. In this one article there

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is enough information for the lay person to go from having the most basic understanding of the gospel of Mark to knowing more than the majority of people. I have organized this article so that if the person reading starts with a good base of knowledge in early Christian and New Testament studies they need not read the entire thing. If you feel that you are such a person I encourage you to read the section of my glossary entitled "Source Assumptions" and then skip to "Part 5: The Creation Of The Gospel Of Mark".

Finally, I will say that I did a lot of research for this project. There was a nauseating amount of studying, collecting, collating, comparing, translating, and researching that went into this. I'm not complaining. I did all of this for my own amusement because I really do enjoy learning and sharpening my mental axe. However, I'm not handing this in for credit so I did not pepper it with footnotes. Wherever I am taking an idea directly from anyone I give them credit in the text, otherwise this is my own work based on my education and extensive readings on the subject. For the most part this is based on critical readings of the biblical material and utilizing the skills my education has bequeathed upon me. For better understanding I have included a part in my glossary giving credit where it is due and recommending some reading if you are so inclined. Also, I am making this available for free to anyone to download onto their computers or e-readers because I'm nice and because I like to think of the information I have paid for in terms of effort, resource materials, tuition fees, and my own effort as a gift that I can impart to those who are interested in sharing what I have; please respect the intellectual property I'm giving away here and don't pass it off as if it were your own.

Thank you and I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this,

Travis Benson.

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Glossary:

Important Terms And Assumptions.

Source Assumptions

For those of you who want to skip the first four sections I will quickly recap the textual assumptions I have made for the source criticism of Mark here:

1). Mark is independent of the authentic letters of Paul which are: Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

2). Matthew and Luke copied from Mark.

3). Matthew and Luke were textually independent of each other and their common material comes from a source called Q which recorded mostly sayings of Jesus.

4). The Gospel of John is textually independent of the Synoptics.

5). The Gospel of Thomas is textually independent of the New Testament.

Notes on Bibles and Translation

I use a few copies of the bible here. The bible I use normally for quotes and references is "The New Oxford Annotated Bible With Apocrypha, New Revised Standard Version, Fourth Edition". I also use a Greek interlinear bible app by photoKandy studios LLC which utilizes several Greek texts of which I prefer the Westcott-Hort edition because it is the most up-to-date Greek text the app has (It would be nice if the Nestlé Alland Novum Testamentum had an app, just in case anyone reading this can make that happen). The interlinear app only uses the Young's Literal Translation and the Word English Bible versions of the New

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Testament, neither of which is my favourite but at least the Young's Literal Translation is a good aid to understanding the Greek syntax. I use the Strong's Concordance app which uses only the King James Translation which is really, really not my favourite. I never quote the King James Version if I can avoid it (which I always can). For the most part these translations are used because they avoid the exorbitant copyright fees other translations demand.

I also use "The Complete Gospels" by Robert J. Miller et al which utilizes "The Scholar's Translation", this above any other is the translation I would recommend; unfortunately, I only have a paper copy of this so I don't often quote it here. All quotes from The Gospel of Thomas come from the Scholar's Translation because I have no ability to read or understand Coptic (and I also have no copy of Thomas in Coptic for obvious reasons) so I have to trust someone else for the translation. Understandably you may not have a copy of that book but you can find a nearly complete copy of the Nag Hammadi Codices in English on-line.

Under usual circumstances I will simply quote the Oxford NRSV but I do occasionally tweak the translation to more appropriate words than the original because the NRSV translation can be a bit outdated and a little too formal, especially for Mark. Biblical translators can also have a tendency to harmonize gospel passages more than they should which can lead to a less full understanding of the differences. Greek words often can have multiple different meanings in English and translators pick the one they feel fits the context and translation best, this is why the New International Version and the New Revised Standard Version can read so differently even though they're translated from the same text. These translators don't always make the best choices. This is also a copyright no-no, so wherever I have changed the original translation I will give some information that I have done so and why I did.

Authors and books that deserve credit and who I would recommend:

John Dominic Crossan has several books I would recommend for the more serious reader: "The Historical Jesus" is very exhaustive and I think I would even more recommend "The Birth of Christianity" which is also very large and packed with information. For shorter texts he has one called "The Essential Jesus" that's an easy, quick read and it's mainly a distillation of "The Historical Jesus" and his work on The Jesus Seminar. His book "Who Killed Jesus" is also a smaller book which is a masterful account of the development of antisemitism in the Gospel traditions.

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Burton L. Mack - Burton L. Mack's book "Who Wrote The New Testament" is the book I recommend to every novice person who wants to know more about the New Testament, it is both an engaging and easy read as well as hugely informative despite being fairly succinct. I take the term "Centrist" from Burton Mack to describe the sectarian group of the early Jesus movement that later came to represent all of Christianity as we now know it. He has another book: "Myth of Innocence" which is about 500 pages exploring the Gospel of Mark and which I have used for reference in the past but have not actually read it all the way through. Nevertheless, I feel entirely comfortable endorsing this book to anyone who is interested in learning more than I could ever relate on the subject; I trust Mack's scholarship to be better than mine. He has other books as well which I would recommend. His book on Q "The Lost Gospel" is another particularly excellent resource.

Marcus Borg - Borg was a very impartial Biblical scholar of great esteem and particularly useful on the subject of the historical Jesus; sadly he died only days before I completed this paper. He deserves credit as the first person to introduce me to the subject of pre-Easter vs. post-Easter narrative. He was also a Christian speaker and writer which makes him more approachable to Christians who might want to learn more about the scholarship surrounding the historical Jesus as well as what impact such a study might have on how they should view their faith.

Bart Ehrman - "Misquoting Jesus" is probably the best layman's breakdown of redaction criticism you can find at your local library. He is also an engaging writer who makes the subject as easy as possible to read through. Ehrman is an esteemed biblical critic who was trained by Bruce Metzger, also a very esteemed biblical critic. Ehrman is an avowed agnostic and as such is more approachable for atheists and agnostics who are looking to experience scholarship surrounding Early Christianity and the Bible without any exposition on theological themes or biases from same.

The Westar Institute - This is a great group to look up. The Westar Institute's website can connect you to a wide variety of great scholarly resources on the bible. In particular here I would point you to the books they produced under the designation "The Jesus Seminar" entitled "The Five Gospels" and "The Acts of Jesus". Most of my source criticism assumptions are based on the work of the Westar institute.

"The Complete Gospels" by Robert J. Miller, et al. This is a book that collected all of the early Christian Gospels together into one volume and creates an excellent translation into modern North American style English which they dub the "Scholar's Translation". I would recommend

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this book and these translations to anyone who wants to know more about gospels and early Christian literature.

"The Nag Hammadi Codices in English" by James M. Robinson, et al. A great resource for anyone hoping to learn more about early Gnostic Christianity. The Nag Hammadi Codices is a discovery no less important to the history of Christianity than the Dead Sea Scrolls were to the study of Judaism. Best of all, virtually all of these codices are available in English for free use on-line, simply type the words "Nag Hammadi Codices in English" into your web browser.

Important Terms

Redaction Criticism - The process of comparing different manuscript copies of the same text to determine what is the truest original reading of that text.

Source Criticism - The process of comparing different texts to determine where and how a text may have used other texts as a source for its own material.

Autograph - in ancient texts the first edition of a book as written by its original author is called "the autograph"

Chiasmus - A chiasmus or 'chiasm' is a literary or rhetorical device, commonly used in oral cultures for its mnemonic properties, where a concept is described or a statement structured by stating it and repeating it in reverse order. My favourite example of a simple chiasm is "the pure and simple truth is that the truth is rarely pure and never simple".

Diaspora - a term often used in the context of second temple Judaism as well as Christianity in the first century to mean outside of the homeland of Judea, Samaria, Gallilee and Idumea. i.e. Paul was a diaspora Jew, Jesus was not. Best estimates are that approximately half of the world's Jews at the time lived outside the homeland previous to the Jewish Revolt in 70 CE. After the Revolt in 70 CE many homeland Jews died or fled before the advancing Roman armies. Those who remained rebelled again in the Bar Khokba rebellion in 135 CE, were once again crushed by the Romans, and this time the Romans exiled all Jews from Jerusalem on penalty of death. After this relatively short period Judaism as we know it became a predominantly diaspora phenomenon, making the term less necessary as a disambiguation.

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Eschatology - a common narrative theme in the new testament about the end of the world; from the Greek Eschthon "end of the world" and logos "word". The New testament commonly uses apocalyptic eschatology whereby God will reveal himself (apocalypse actually means revelation) directly on Earth.

Evangelist - a term used when speaking about the unknown author of a gospel. Scholars, when referring to the author of a gospel, often use the traditional name ascribed to them for ease of reference and because there is no other name to give. It is understood that no one knows who wrote the gospels so when a scholar, or myself, uses the name "Mark" we are referring to that unnamed author.

Hellenistic - having the attributes of Greek culture. Greek-like. Not to be confused with Hellenic which is specifically a Greek person or the culture within the physical borders of Greece. Despite the fact that Jesus and the early movement associated with him lived in The Roman world, the wider culture of the Roman Empire had been a Hellenistic culture as cultivated by Alexander the Great and his successors. This is why the history of the Roman Empire is usually referred to as the Greco-Roman era, or Greco-Roman culture.

Proto-Markan tradition - the general "catch-all" term for what previously existing traditions Mark used in the creation of his gospel.

Provenance - this is a word we use to refer to the original date, place, and authorship of a writing.

Tradition - when we speak about mythology it is not always clear whether something started as a writing or an oral story or whether either of those things refer to something that actually happened or a fiction so we use the more general term "tradition"

Jesus followers/movement vs. Christian - The word Christian was not used by early believers. Today, "Christian" is a word that comes with a lot of baggage and using it to describe the earliest days of the movement started by Jesus and his earliest followers implies a continuity of agreement that really didn't exist between the two. Christian better describes the ideological heirs of the Hellenistic Christ cults to which the Pauline community belonged and so, in an attempt to demystify the perceived continuity of the two, I will often use the term Jesus movement to describe the earliest era of the religious movement in its immense diversity rather than the particularly myopic term "Christian".

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BCE/CE vs. BC/AD - I use the division of BCE/CE to describe history. The origin of this division is merely an effort on the part of scholarship to secularize the BC/AD division of history widely used in Christian cultures. The date range is identical but exchanges the archaic Christian designation of Anno Dominei, "Year of our Lord", for Before Christian Era/Christian Era or Before Common Era/Common Era.

Hebrew scripture - I try to stay away from using terms like the "Old Testament" as that is a post-Christian term; the terms normally used by the early followers of Jesus is "The Law and The Prophets" or just "the Law" or "The Prophets" used separately, or the teachings of Moses (synonymous for The Law), or "Moses and The Prophets", etc. Paul also refers to Jewish scripture as "The Writings". It's useful to bear in mind that in the age of Jesus and his first followers there had not yet been an official canonization of Jewish scripture so, though we do know what some of the books used at the time were, we have only a general idea of what books would have been widely used by various groups. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed at Qumran for instance, multiple copies of virtually every book of the modern Old Testament were discovered, all except the book of Esther. Some books were more important to the Qumran community than others, there were dozens of different copies of the books of the Torah, and other writings discovered there, such as "The Manual of Discipline" and "The Damascus Document", that had never been seen previously. Unfortunately, the Qumran scrolls have no indication we've found as to which documents they considered "true scripture" and which were auxiliary. On an interesting side note the modern name that the Jewish people give to their scripture, The TaNaK, is actually an acronym for the three Hebrew words: The Law, The Prophets, and The Writings so not much has changed in the intervening twenty centuries.

Jewish vs. Judaism - I also prefer to avoid the use of the word Judaism in reference to the Jewish religious landscape in the period of Jesus and his early followers. What we now know in the modern context as "Judaism" is a religion that draws its theological and philosophical principles from the tradition of Pharisaism during the period after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. During the second temple period and for quite some time after its end the religious life of the world's Jewry was more diverse and only partially known, so identifying this as "Judaism" is as misleading as calling the early Jesus Followers "Christians".

Empire of God - one of the most enduring and unhelpful mistranslations in the New Testament is the term "Kingdom Of God". This is a remnant of the first major edition of the bible produced in English, The King James Bible. The word used by all of the New Testament

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writers is "baseleia" which means Empire. It was an entirely political decision because the patron of the translation was, big surprise, King James. The translators decided to avoid bruising the King's ego by translating it as Empire because he wasn't an Emperor. Insulting the king wasn't a good idea in the first place, it was an even worse idea when he was the guy signing the cheques. However, the translation makes less sense when you read it in the context of the New Testament's history in the Roman Empire. In the Roman Empire kingdoms were provincial jurisdictions; small client regions with no real autonomy. Kingdom doesn't capture the subversive nature and revolutionary appeal of the concept of an Empire of God. The Scholar's Translation is the only one I know of that corrects this mistake.

Christology - a technical term for what a Christian community views as the nature and meaning of the person and life of Jesus.

Adoptionist Christology - The belief that Jesus was a man like any other who became the Christ/Messiah because of his exemplary life. He was adopted as the son of God. This is just a general summation and not intended as an exhaustive definition of all Adoptionism.

Docetic Christology - the belief that Jesus was not a man at all and did not even possess a physical body. He was a divine spirit who came to earth to enact God's will. Again this is just a general summation.

Gnostic Christology - The view that Jesus was a man and that Christ was a divine spirit but the two were separate. Gnosticism took the idea of mind/body dualism that was popular in the ancient world very much to heart and applied it also to the person of Jesus, almost as if the person Jesus was possessed by the spirit of Christ. Again this is just a general summation and many Gnostic groups were actually docetic but doceticism was not an exclusively gnostic phenomenon. Gnosticism was a religious tradition that predated Christianity much in the same way Jewish tradition did. Gnostic Christians tended to reject the Jewish God's association with Christianity; they saw the Jewish deity as a vengeful, evil god which was distinct from Jesus' more loving and positive nature.

Orthodox vs. Centrist - this is a term I freely admit to taking from Burton Mack's book "Who Wrote the New Testament" (and I thank him for it). Many scholars use the word Orthodox to describe the sectarian group within the early Jesus movement that eventually won out after several centuries to be the only acceptable ideological interpretation of Christianity. This group is known from the Nicene creed as the "Orthodox Catholic Church". Using this term is also misleading and I find Mack's term "Centrist" best describes them because their

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Christology was halfway between adoptionism and doceticism and opposed to the duality of Gnosticism. Centrist Christology believed Jesus was both fully man and fully God at the same time.

Thanks

Since this is the length of a novella, there are a few people who deserve some credit and thanks for their personal contribution to my education and to the knowledge that made this article possible and/or support of me. They are:

Dr. David Neale, Dr. Gerry Bowler, Dr. Karen Overbye, Dr. Terry Fach, Dr. Deborah Jenson, Dr. Stephen Engler, Dr. William McCready, Dr. Haijo Westra, Dr. Leslie Kawamura, Dr. Tinu Ruparrel, Dr. Anne Moore, Dr. Irving Hexham, and best of all, Dr. Anne White.

Most of all, I want to thank my Grandmother, Vi Benson, who more than anyone else cared about me having a far better education than anyone deserves, my mother who is a fantastic role model, and my wife who is the best companion anyone could ask for.

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Part 1

A Few Things You Need To Consider About The Gospel Of

Mark Before We Even Talk About The Book Itself.

The New Testament is one of the things that I studied as a matter of course when I was in school, but it was also one of the subjects I really enjoyed. Flashing forward to modern day and it is still a subject I spend a lot of my time studying and I have noticed that it is something that a lot of people still have some interest in and some serious misconceptions about. I decided to write this article to help dispel some of these misconceptions and help anyone who is interested in learning more while also writing about something I find quite interesting. Generally when someone I know says something misinformed about the New Testament I have in the past handled it on a case by case basis with short (hopefully informative) corrective statements but I thought that I could be more helpful if I took that which I have learned and condensed it down into a very small package for people who don't have the time, desire, and/or money to pursue my education level on the subject. In other words, this article is intended as a learning resource. There are much better resources of course, which I have referenced, this is only intended as a primer on one subject.

One of the first things I would like to clarify is that I have been trained as a New Testament critic but that is not the same thing as saying "critical of the New Testament". I get into debates with people who qualify as "critical of the New Testament" and people who are decidedly not at all "critical of the New Testament", neither of which actually know very much about the New Testament. This is another example of a term that is used differently in academic circles than in the wider public. Academically speaking, a New Testament critic is a person who has been trained with a special set of skills useful in reading and interpreting texts against each other and also reading the texts against themselves. Inside the academic circle -as well as outside- one of the most common subjects discussed about the New Testament Is the gospel according to Mark which is why I chose to make it the subject of this article.

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In the case of Mark the most enduring and misleading fact that it seems almost everyone knows is that Mark is the earliest of the New Testament gospels. Though this is almost definitely true, it is a good example of the principle that a person with a few facts feels very certain, whereas a person who is in possession of many of the facts is full of doubt. Something I will expound on at great length below is that Mark being the first of the New Testament gospels is not at all similar to what many people have taken that fact to mean: that Mark was the first thing ever written about the life of Jesus. Mark may be one of the earliest sources we have, however, as Mark itself shows us, it was far from the earliest source there was.

In textual criticism there's a lot of work that goes into interpreting a text before you even step up to the text itself and it is referred to as "context". It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out that is the literal meaning of the word context: con=with and text=writing. In order to understand any writing better it helps if you can know who the author was, when he/she was writing, who the audience was that the writing was intended for, and what sort of things were happening in the lives of those people. These are the things that go along with the text. When it comes to Mark these things are both very important and understood by practically nobody.

The first question is, who was Mark? Well, nobody knows, but his name was not actually Mark (or it would be an amazing coincidence if it was). None of the gospels were actually signed and no one knows who originally wrote them. We get the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from a second century Bishop named Iranaeus who argued that the only official version of scripture were the writings that came from the original apostles of the early church. Unfortunately, it seems that Iranaeus figured this all out by first deciding what Christian scripture should be and then linking it all to an apostle by any means necessary. The name Mark comes from John Mark who, early traditions maintain, had been a companion to both Peter and Paul; this was the way by which Iranaeus attached this gospel to an apostle, however, the reality is we have no idea who wrote the gospel. This is not to say we don't know anything at all about the author of Mark.

It may not be possible to know exactly who Mark was but there is still some things we can know about him (or her, there is a credible theory that Mark might have been a woman, for more on this see "Part 10: Miscellany"). In reality, knowing exactly who an author is isn't as important as you might think; after all, we have no real clue who Shakespeare was and no one alive today has ever met him so it makes no real difference to us if we know who wrote his plays. In the case of Mark we can know about him from what remains of him: his gospel.

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Mark and his community are easy to find because they are as much a part of the narrative of Mark as Jesus and his disciples; the book was written by Mark and for his community. In order to truly understand Mark you can't forget the original storyteller and audience for they are present in every page.

The first thing that is quite evident about Mark is that he never met Jesus, in fact, he may never even have met anyone who met Jesus. All four of the New Testament gospels are what you could call "written sources" and Mark is no exception. This means that The Gospel of Mark originated as a written source and was not originally an oral tradition. This is observable not because the gospel is so long; keep in mind, the Iliad and the Odyssey were both oral epics before they were written, the Mahabharata was also originally transmitted orally and is literally over a hundred times as long as Mark. In the case of Mark and the other New Testament gospels if they had been transmitted as an oral tradition before they were written they would be more seamless than they are. It is fairly obvious, especially in Mark's case, that the author wrote his gospel out before he or anyone else told it. This is not to say that oral traditions did not play a role, they almost certainly did, only that the gospel in its entirety had not been transmitted orally.

Mark was a diaspora member of a Jesus community probably living somewhere in Asia Minor or Syria. The community Mark was writing for were Hellenistic non-Jews as evidenced by the amount of time Mark spends explaining simple Jewish customs. It is uncertain whether Mark himself was Jewish or not, but his apparent complete ignorance of basic Judean geography tells us he definitely didn't spend much time in the Jewish homeland. Mark himself didn't identify as Jewish; several places in his text Mark identifies the Jews as "other" saying things like "their synagogues" (1:39) and "they don't eat" (7:39). Nowhere in Mark's gospel does Mark reinforce the practice of Judaic law; in fact, many of Jesus' interactions with Jews in the Book of Mark is to challenge their focus on legalism.

The date that Mark was written is particularly instructive of he book's context and the struggles it's community was facing. The book of Mark was written in or shortly after the 70's CE which was a time of great tumult for the Jesus community. Previous to 66 CE the Jesus movement had its putative head in Jerusalem at the temple with a group known as "The Pillars" which Paul refers to in his letter to the Galatians. The Jerusalem Pillars, as they are today called, were led by James the Just the brother of Jesus and at least a couple other well known early church figures, Peter and John. In 62 CE this group took a major blow when their leader, James, was executed rather unexpectedly during a period of political upheaval. A short time thereafter, in 66 CE, Judea attempted a rebellion against Rome which didn't go

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well and didn't take long to resolve; four years later Judea remained a Roman province and the temple in Jerusalem had been razed to the ground. What became of the Pillars after this is lost to the vicissitudes of history but it doesn't seem that they survived long and their vaunted position within the early movement seems to have evaporated completely.

Elsewhere in the world of the Jesus Movement in the mid 60's the Emperor Nero accused the new religion of starting the disastrous fire of Rome, thus beginning the first official persecution of Jesus followers. It is unclear how widespread and energetic this persecution was (honestly, Jesus followers couldn't have been very numerous at the time so it could not have been anywhere near what some people claim). We do know that during this period both Peter and Paul were executed, and doubtlessly other leaders of the early church fared no better. Add to these stresses on the early movement the fact that during the Jewish revolt the followers of Jesus and the rest of the Jewish religious world had a very acrimonious split over the Jesus community not fighting alongside the Jews and the Jesus followers in turn blaming the Jews' complete and humiliating defeat on the fact that they had rejected Jesus as the messiah and the atmosphere into which Mark's gospel was born becomes a lot more clear.

It would be naive to think that the death of major leaders, the loss of Jerusalem, and coming to face the fragility of the movement's leadership hierarchy didn't have something to do with the desire to write down a gospel for posterity, however, in Mark's case his motivation is much more immediate for his own community . One of the traps the modern person falls into when reading the gospels is to treat them as if they are history, they aren't. The evangelists who wrote the gospels were not as concerned with maintaining the accuracy of historical facts as they are with creating a narrative that speaks to their community in the present and guides them for the future.

Mark writes his gospel for the use of his community. When Jesus tells his disciples what a parable really means that's Mark telling his community what it means, when Jesus tells them to keep the faith it's because Mark wants everyone to do so, and when Jesus rebukes someone it's Mark telling his community what they should watch out for. When Jesus argues with Pharisees about their adherence to Mosaic law this is also an argument Mark's community would have been having with Jews in their region as well as with other Christian groups who would've seen the Markan community's gentile sensibilities as heresy. All of this isn't to say that Mark is making his entire gospel up from scratch, far from it, it is only that the entire gospel is designed with its audience in mind. Mark certainly used earlier traditions that had been handed down to him but it is doubtful that all of the traditions handed down to Mark became part of his gospel. Many of the traditions Mark used also underwent some

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secondary editorial revision to make them more palatable for his community. For example, in the parable of the sower in Mark 4: in verses 3-9 Jesus tells the parable of the sower and says "those with ears, listen!" then in verses 10-20 Jesus explains the meaning of the parable. It is fairly clear that the second half of the story was appended to the original parable, the question remains whether the second half was a Markan invention or if the tradition came down to Mark already expanded, however, that is an academic query since it is the message Mark wanted for his community nonetheless.

Everything we see from the gospel of Mark paints a portrait of a community in a great deal of stress and an evangelist trying to "right the ship" so to speak. One of the longest sections of narrative that was largely a creation of the evangelist to speak to the needs of his community is the apocalyptic narrative of Mark 13. Even though this chapter is peppered with quotations that are from earlier traditions it starts with Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple and follows with a prophecy of what life will be like during those days. I encourage you to take a moment to read Mark 13 again and put yourself in the mind of a Jesus follower of the day. Imagine how comforting the passage would be for a person who had already lived through most of the things written there. This is the whole purpose of the book of Mark: giving a worried community some peace of mind and encouraging them to keep the faith.

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Part 2

Breaking The Spell Of Print Culture

Modern print culture has completely shifted our concept of the written word; in a world where the written word is both easily and inexpensively reproduced and editions are dated and tracked where originals can be reproduced at a whim from archived editions we completely lose any sense of how ideas are transmitted in the ancient world. The best example I can give to help people understand what a strange, literate bubble we live in is about pubs, no, you didn't misread that, I said pubs. The city I live in, much like any major city, has a lot of European style Public Houses where people can go for food or drink and for some reason they have the strangest names. My city has pubs with names like "The Pig and Whistle", "The Drum and Monkey", "The King's Head", "The Toad and Turtle", etc.; it seems that everywhere you go there are equally strange pub names with very similar format, why is this? Well, I know why and in a second you will too, and you'll be amazed at the simplicity of it. The tradition of the public house extends well back to preliterate times where writing the name of your pub on the front would be worse than useless. If you wanted people to know your pub and to describe it to anyone else you hung some sort of memorable art on a shingle near the door. If it was a picture of a pig playing a flute your pub became known as "The Pig and Whistle" and so forth. It's such a simple answer but everyone I have ever told that little factoid to had never realized it; it was a paradigm shifting moment for them and the reason people never thought about it is because we live in a culture that is so literate.

The ancient world is a completely foreign world to us both in terms of literature and literacy. To put the literacy rate of the ancient world in context I now live in a culture in Canada where we consider illiteracy nearly eliminated and the percentage of people who are considered functionally illiterate in our here and now is the same as the percentage that could be considered functionally literate in the Roman Empire of the first century: less than three percent. All paper-type products of the day were expensive and very labour intensive to produce; papyrus, for instance, was made by cutting very thin strips from a reed and pressing two layers of them together (side to side on one side and up and down on the other) and then

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drying them, a process that took a couple of weeks. If you wanted to write a book it was going to be expensive and if you wanted to make another copy it wouldn't just be twice the money, it was twice the effort too. Until the invention of moveable typeset and the printing press all copies had to be painstakingly made by hand. What this means is that writings were rare in the ancient period and only the most popular texts were copied and recopied. The New Testament, as it turned out, became one of those popular texts.

Our modern world has a great deal of difficulty understanding mythology because of our widespread saturation of print culture. One could write a whole book on that one subject alone but I will only touch on the three major stumbling blocks I have noticed with how the modern person misunderstands ancient writings:

1). Most things weren't written down

Oral culture has all but disappeared in the modern western world but in the ancient context where the average person couldn't read, and writing was an expensive endeavour even for those who were capable, oral culture was the norm. The net result of this is that ancient people were used to carrying around a whole culture and everything else on top of that inside their head. If ancient people wanted to know something they had to remember it. There was hardly any going down to the library to look it up like when I was a kid -I mean, they had libraries but only a small minority could use them- and there certainly was no using a smart phone to google it; for people in the ancient context if you didn't memorize something you might as well not even hear it. A good example of this idea is the writing of music; writing musical sounds down on paper is a relatively modern idea, the ancient world depended on someone who had committed the music to their memory already to teach the next person so they could commit it to their memory and so on. The psalms were originally set to some form of music but now we have no idea what they sounded like because somewhere in the vicissitudes of history that chain of transmission was broken, never to be recovered.

The ancient person lived in an oral culture that is a very alien world to our sensibilities. The best remaining analogue for oral culture in the modern world is humour. Even though jokes do get written down and collected, for the most part they still promulgate through the oral medium and are stored in living memory. It seems like some people are experts at telling a joke, some can remember a huge amount of them, and yet other people have the ability to masterfully craft humour; that is what oral culture is like. If jokes were the entire basis of our culture, we would all be masters of humour in the same way the ancients were masters of mnemonics and oral transmission. This is not to say that ancient people were human

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dictation machines, oral retellings would have been very mutable, however, much like a joke, oral narrative was less about the words and more about the message behind those words.

2). Once things were written down, when we speak of popular literature like the New Testament, they were meant still to be read aloud.

Especially when we talk about mythology, even when something became important enough for people to want to write it down it still wasn't made to be a source of light, bedtime reading; it was intended to be read aloud by the people who could read to the people who couldn't. In the case of the scriptures of the early Jesus movement this would have happened largely in a communal setting. This phenomenon means that oral culture has a couple interesting effects on this type of literature.

In the New Testament the first thing this causes is an effect I would call "conservation of narrative"; through years or even decades of oral transmission a story will take on new and more meaning while simultaneously becoming more concise. They would then be written down for the purpose of being read to people so that they could remember and retell the stories themselves. What this means is that when these books were written not a word was wasted. In books like the gospel of Mark everything means something to its original audience, if we today don't know what it means it's because, much like the music of the psalms, that meaning was lost.

The other interesting effect this had is that mythology gets a lot of recycling. Even though myth is meant for the narrative format many of these authors and orators would borrow quite liberally from other scripture available to them by incorporating that narrative into their own. The ancients weren't as concerned with citing sources as us though, in fact, the more skillfully ancient narrators could incorporate other narratives into their own, the better a narrator they were. what we end up with in most cases is a mythology that brings layers of previous material along with the new.

3). After things were written down it was no insulation for their mutability.

The problem with copying and recopying a text by hand, however, is that most new copies will come with changes to the original text; sometimes those changes are accidental transcription errors and other times they are deliberate alterations on the part of the editor. What we have today is a massive cannon of New Testament manuscripts all of which have internal differences; for a great treatment of this problem I recommend Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting

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Jesus" since I am not going to deal with it in great detail here. What the problem of textual disagreement in ancient manuscripts leads us to is an entire realm of textual archeology to reclaim the most original reading possible for ancient texts. This discipline is known as redaction criticism.

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Part 3

Redaction Criticism: The Textual Time Machine

Redaction comes from The Latin meaning "To bring back"; in the modern context it means to prepare, change, or edit a text, to obscure meaning, or to censor the original text. Basically, every time any copyist recopied a text in the ancient world they were producing a brand new edition; in academic circles this earns these copyists the title of "redactor". Their edition would have a new set of alterations, both accidental and intentional, and often that edition would in turn be copied by someone else thus producing a third edition and so on. This creates a serious problem for texts like the bible because, assumably, people want to have the original text. Over time redactors don't just change texts through transcribal ineptitude, they also reinterpret and corrupt the text in light of their own biases and new political attitudes that weren't always reflected in the original writings. For academics the need to have something as close as possible to the original text is even more immediate because they use the ancient texts to give them context of the period in which they were written, not the age in which they were copied. In order to mitigate this phenomenon an entire branch of textual criticism exists known as redaction criticism.

There's a very good example of this type of ideological adulteration in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is a fairly openly misogynistic passage but I often use this as an example because it is one of the easiest passages of the New Testament for even the most novice person to realize that it is not original to the text. These verses clearly prohibit women from speaking in church, however, three chapters earlier (11:5) Paul speaks of how a woman should cover her head when prophesying before the church; though it is not uncommon for people to change their minds, and many scholars have written about Paul's changing attitudes over time, it is quite a bit more rare for a person to completely contradict himself in the same letter. It isn't just the blatant contradiction that leads us to the conclusion that this verse was added later, the flow of the text actually shows it as well. When you read chapter fourteen in its entirety this passage sticks out like a speed bump in the narrative. Paul had already begun his conclusion of this section when the editor awkwardly sandwiched these two verses into the text; if you read verse 33 next to 36 they flow very naturally from

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one to the other. It is so blatantly obvious that this is a later editorial addition that it baffles me that these verses remain in the bible. To reiterate, this is a great example of a later editor purposefully altering the text to suit his own, in this case very misogynistic, purposes.

Redaction criticism is mostly employed in the service of reclaiming from the ether of history the most "true" original reading of a text. New Testament redaction criticism involves scholars who are consummate masters of the historical context of the first century, early Christian literature, and Koine Greek (the original language of the New Testament). Most of what these scholars do is study and compare manuscripts to find the most original words possible; in their quest the two most important data points they need is a text's provenance: the date and location of its writing, and it's textual relations: what other texts it was copied from, which ones were copied from it, and, most importantly, which copies are completely independent of it. The concept behind this is that if you can determine which copies are the earliest versions and compare them with other early versions that did not copy from each other, by comparing the areas where they agree with each other, you should be able to find what has been lost: the autograph from which all of them came or the closest possible approximation to it. It is like having a window back through time for the lost manuscripts; it is not a perfect window, the view gets fuzzier the farther you try and look, but it is still very useful.

There is another, more conjectural side to the redactional criticism of the New Testament and that's what I'm going to spend most of my time talking about here. The early Jesus movement, the movement during the first century after the life of Jesus during which all of the books of the New Testament were written, was a relatively small and very widespread community that didn't agree on everything (or really anything) and their pool of oral and written traditions seems to have been very incestuous. When you use the methods of redactional criticism to compare two manuscripts of the same tradition it can give you a clearer picture of what their "source tradition" (often this term is shortened to just "source") might have looked like; however, by using the same methods to compare two different writings like say, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, you can find that the two have a lot of common material and that common material looks very familiar. In the case of Matthew and Luke one of their common sources is Mark, they both copied extensively from his gospel. This type of textual redaction criticism is known as "source criticism".

When you engage in textual criticism of the bible it involves an archeological level of examination. You pull the text apart and examine it as closely as possible. You ask questions about the smaller pieces, examine how it compares to other small bits, ask how well it agrees with the whole. You dissect the small bits into their component parts right down

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to the individual words; more questions: does the evangelist use this word elsewhere? Do other evangelists use it? How do other authors of the same period use these words? What words get used with these words? You ask more questions, you dissect and redissect, compare passages, seek out patterns, etc., etc., etc. There's an asinine level of detail you can go to and a nauseating amount of questions you can ask. If it is not clear as of yet allow me to assure you, I am not that level of expert, that's the big leagues, people dedicate their lives to studying that. I may have some level of training in that arena but on the whole I studied other things that were more interesting to me; textual and redaction criticism help inform the areas I study but the expert level is not necessary for me, I fall somewhere in the intermediate level. Luckily, the expert level is also not necessary for this article. I am confident that my intermediate level of expertise is adequate to guide any novice reader through the foothills of this particular subject and my other expertise in areas like comparative religion and mythology and theory of religious formations make some useful contributions as well.

Without too much further ado let's get to the heart of this article as promised and dig into the meat of the New Testament and ultimately the Gospel of Mark. Thus far I've been dancing around the edges of context and the basics of criticism to hopefully help you understand how this whole dog and pony show works, but now as we move on into talking about the Book of Mark I want to emphasize that this article does not intend to be anything exhaustive. Burton L. Mack (one of the aforementioned masters) wrote a book called "Myth of Innocence" which is five hundred pages long, with very small typeset, entirely on the subject of Mark's gospel. What I am writing here is a quick overview. My goal here is to give you, the reader, a sense of the complexities of biblical narratives and a subtler appreciation of how the New Testament was formed. If I have accomplished what I set out to do you will walk away from reading this with a greater appreciation of the complexity and nuance that goes into our understanding of the New Testament.

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Part 4

The Synoptic Problem, Thomas, John, Paul, And The

Question Of Proto-Markan Tradition.

Anytime someone attempts "Source criticism" it has to start the same way: by spelling out the assumptions you are making going into it. My assumptions are not mine, I am in no way qualified to make statements like this; largely my assumptions are based on the general consensus of a large group of New Testament scholars. All of these assumptions are still open to wide debate. As John Dominic Crossan put it, a child playing on the shores of the Dead Sea tomorrow could find a clay pot full of manuscripts that could prove everything I assume is wrong. As a person with the heart of a scholar I welcome such a thing; I would be giddy with excitement. However, until such a thing happens we can only proceed based on the best information we have right now. Mostly my assumptions are based on the assumptions made by the fellows of the Westar Institute, a think tank of religious studies and biblical scholars that seek to promote biblical literacy and share a clinical approach and skeptical outlook on biblical history.

The first assumption has to do with what is known as "the synoptic problem". In New Testament studies the first three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are known as the Synoptics -from the Greek meaning "same eye" or "same view"- because they share the same narrative structure as well as a lot of material that ranges from similar to verbally identical. There are multiple theories that explain this phenomenon which all agree on one major feature, that the three are textually dependent on each other; in other words, they copied from each other because the explanation that "they are telling the same story" does not account for verbatim agreement in Greek.

The dominant explanatory theory is called Markan priority which basically means that both Matthew and Luke copied sections of their narrative from Mark. In Luke's case he copied half of Mark and Matthew copied ninety percent! (in New Testament redaction criticism a

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relationship of seventy percent or more common material is considered a close relationship). One of the main arguments -though there are many more good reasons besides this- is that the general rule of redaction criticism is that redactors don't change the text to make it harder to understand, less explanatory, and just plain weirder; both Luke and Matthew expand on Mark's narrative, smooth out rough spots by editing and explaining, remove weird passages like where Mark uses Aramaic words as if they are magical incantations, and fix up Mark's mistakes in regard to Judean geography. It makes very little sense to propose that someone created Mark by editing large amounts of material out of one of the other two Synoptics and then changing the geography to be more wrong, etc. So, to conclude, like most experts on the subject I see Markan priority as a good assumption, probably the most solid of all the assumptions I am going to make.

The second part of the synoptic problem involves the common material between Matthew and Luke that is not part of Mark's narrative. At first this common thread was explained with the hypothesis that one of the two copied from Mark and that the other had a copy of both other gospels. The most popular of these hypotheses, better known as "the one source hypotheses" is that Matthew copied Mark and then Luke copied from both Matthew and Mark; it can go the other way with Matthew using both sources but that seems less likely and is thus less popular. There is a couple major problems with this notion. First: wherever Mark is the common source both other evangelists copy from Mark; as mentioned previous, Mark is a much less polished narrative than the other two and it begs the question why one of these more polished evangelists would still prefer Mark's text over the other. Second: virtually all of the common material between Matthew and Luke is sayings of Jesus; for instance, no attempt was made to synchronize their birth narratives or post-resurrection narratives which is extremely strange if either possessed a copy of the other. Another theory was first advanced in 1801 by Herbert Marsh but was popularized by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Christian Weisse in 1837 that the explanation for these problems was that Matthew and Luke possessed both the Gospel of Mark and another source, that has since been lost, which recorded the wisdom sayings of Jesus. This source has come to be known by the fairly milquetoast name "Quelle" which is a German word meaning "source"', which would be shortened to just "Q" and in usual New Testament source criticism is called "Q source" but has taken on the moniker "the Gospel of Q" in more popular culture oriented venues.

For decades many scholars still resisted the idea of Q's existence since it had never been found and there was no precedent of any "sayings" gospels within Christianity. In 1945 this assumption would be dealt a heavy blow when the Nag Hammadi Codices were found in Egypt containing a treasure trove of early Christian Gnostic literature, amongst them a special

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jewel known as the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Thomas was a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus with no substantive narrative at all making not just the claims that Q existed more credible but also suggesting that other sayings traditions could have been collected in the first century previous to Mark's authorship. I operate on the assumption that collections of wisdom sayings circulated in the pre-Markan time period in both oral and written traditions and that one of them bore some resemblance to Q; there is fairly good evidence that this is the case and, since in both Jewish and Hellenistic cultures -and really all oral cultures- the preservation and promulgation of ones worldview was often expressed through the oral recitation of wisdom sayings and aphorisms, it makes very little sense to assume that those sayings would not be circulated amongst both Jewish and Hellenistic groups of the followers of Jesus.

The next assumption is that the gospel of Thomas is independent of the canonical gospels and Mark particularly. Thomas has many common sayings and sayings with common elements to the canonical gospels; however, Thomas' sayings don't fit into the same order as any synoptics and where Thomas seems to have expanded on earlier, shorter sayings to add an interpretive layer its interpretation differs from any synoptic tradition. Thomas also has a remaining attachment to Jewish law in particular that bears no relation to Mark. Many scholars also place the date for Thomas' writing at not long after Mark. When combined, all of these things make it unlikely that any of Thomas' material was lifted from Mark's narrative.

I will also assume that the gospel of John is independent from Mark's narrative. The editorial structure of the fourth gospel has three distinct layers of development before it becomes most of the gospel found today. Arguably there is a fourth editorial layer wherein John 1:1-18, 8:1-11, and 21:1-25 were added by later editorial interlopers. Particularly in the case of 8:1-11 which is an "orphan story" that is completely out of place within the language of John, it is found added to later manuscripts of John in a couple different places as well as it being found in some manuscripts of Luke. The "final product" that is the Book of John has areas of agreement with Mark and the Synoptics which I will expound on later, but on the whole does not match them very well. The order of events in John are quite different, for instance John has the cleansing of the temple three years before the passion, has Jesus turning water into wine -an event with no analogue in the synoptics- at the beginning of his' ministry, and has Jesus' crucifixion a full day earlier than the synoptics. At a textual level John has very little verbal or thematic agreement with the synoptics.

It bears mentioning that some scholars cite the differences in John as not an indication that the author is independent from the synoptics but rather that one or two of the early editorial

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layers of the gospel predate the Johannine community's contact with the synoptics. In other words, John (or John III as it were) was aware of at least one of the synoptics but already had a gospel tradition that his community either produced or liked better and as such used his copy of a synoptic gospel as an ancillary source to flesh out his gospel. Most scholars believe the third editorial layer of John was written by the end of the first century or the very beginning of the second but the earliest layers could very well predate the writing of Mark altogether. I, like most of the more skeptical scholars I follow, am dubious of this claim. The fact is, if John had a synoptic source to use he certainly didn't make much use of it; John just doesn't have enough real, verbal agreement to support such a hypothesis, in my and many others' estimation.

Finally, and probably the most tenuous assumption, I assume that the Gospel of Mark is independent of Pauline traditions, or at the very least, independent of any of the seven Pauline letters we currently have and written before the pseudo-Pauline epistles. Many scholars have argued that Mark is a Gospel according to Pauline theology, I see this as probably a mix of wishful thinking, a tendency to see the New Testament as more cohesive than it actually is, and an emotional attachment to the assumption of John Mark as the author. Mark is listed as a companion of Paul in Acts (which is the only source that names him as John), the pseudo-Pauline epistles of 2 Timothy and Colossians, and once by Paul in his letter to Philemon. The legend of John Mark that grows out of this is that Mark was the companion and interpreter of Peter and later the mission companion of Paul, giving this gospel a link to Peter as a witness to the events of Jesus' life and Paul as a theologian. Even to scholars that are aware that Mark was not the actual author of this gospel there still remains another, more obvious, temptation: the letters of Paul -or at least the seven of them he actually authored- are the only writings in the New Testament that were written before Mark.

It is very enticing to look at Paul and see him as many things: the first voice we have of early Christianity, the very first witness who is a convert after Jesus' death, a leader within the gentile Christian movement, and the progenitor of Christian theology. Unfortunately, these are all modern biases. First, the word "Christian" would have been totally alien to Paul but (I think) he probably would have liked it. Christianity as we know it today should really be called Paulianity because Paul is the single most prominent contributor to modern Christian theology, that was not the case in the days of the early movement. Critical reading of Paul's correspondences tells us he is only one voice among many and certainly not the most respected of those. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9:1 "am I not an apostle?" that isn't rhetorical bluster, he's actually passionately defending his position against some very credible

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nay-sayers. So, today when we assume Mark had to be aware of Paul because Mark's community was a gentile community, that is not necessarily the case. It is entirely possible that Mark was utterly unaware of Paul's writings; it is also entirely possible that Mark was aware of Paul's letters but completely disagreed with them.

It is a natural instinct to want to see a relationship between texts, that's one of the reasons I am writing this article, and that desire becomes especially strong when considering that Paul was a leader in the gentile Christian community and Mark's community were also Gentiles; certainly, the other Gentile gospel, Luke, wasn't just familiar with Paul, he was something of a fan. However, the main principle that runs through the centre of all of Paul's letters, what we today call Pauline theology, is salvation through faith and not through works; Mark never once promotes Paul's theological view in his gospel. Mark's Jesus exhorts people to keep the faith, and Jesus tells people they are healed by their faith, but he never mentions salvation through faith. In fact, one of the last miracles in Mark's gospel, the healing of the deaf mute (Mark 9:15-29), ends with Jesus telling his disciples "that sort of spirit only comes out through prayer and fasting" which would seem exactly opposed to Pauline theology. Also, the title Paul uses most often is "Christ Jesus" which Mark never uses, in fact, Mark never uses the names Jesus and Christ together after the very first verse of his gospel (which was likely added later). To Mark, the fact that Jesus is the Christ is treated as if it is a tightly held secret. If Mark portrays anything as the road to salvation it is this "secret knowledge": secret knowledge of Jesus as the Christ, secret knowledge of what Jesus' teachings mean, secret knowledge of what the miracles mean, and secret knowledge of the approaching end of the world. This has led many to speculate that Mark was an early gnostic gospel but I will touch on that in my miscellany section.

One of the other reasons people like to assume Mark knew about the Pauline writings is because both authors are critical of Judaism. Even though Paul was definitely a diaspora Jew and Mark was a diaspora follower of Jesus the diaspora was a big place and Christianity was far from monolithic. Paul himself speaks often about other Jesus followers that opposed him or that he vehemently disagreed with. In his letter to the Galatians Paul refers to one such group who came after him preaching circumcision to the Gentiles. If I could be indulged briefly to talk about this: one of my favourite verses from Paul, which is not usually translated very well for reasons that will become fairly clear is Galatians 5:12. After defending his own gospel and complaining about these interlopers preaching that Gentiles need to be circumcised, Paul says something that is simultaneously very forceful and kind of hilarious (and I translate here into what it would sound like in vernacular English): "I wish those people

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that were messing with you would cut their dicks off instead!" Gal 5:12 (that's a surprisingly accurate translation that you won't find in any version of the bible any time soon).

Anyway, to get back to the point, Mark and Paul both criticize Judaic law. When Mark has Jesus criticizing Jewish laws he isn't just speaking about Jews but is also levelling criticism at other Christians of his day; since Paul isn't speaking through a narrative, but directly to his audience, he is able to be a great deal more direct (remember Gal 5:12). Mark's community has three major arguments with Jewish law:

1 - Laws regarding ritual cleanliness - as Gentiles this would have been a constant source of tension between them and both Jews and Jewish followers of Jesus

2 - Food laws - again this would be a constant source of tension, Gentiles would not have observed food law and as such both Jews and Jewish followers of Jesus would not have eaten with Gentiles.

3 - Sabbath day laws - In Mark the reason the scribes begin to plot against Jesus is because he heals a man on the sabbath. Jesus has run-ins with the Jewish authorities over his apparent lack of observance of sabbath law.

Paul had three major arguments with Jewish law:

1 - Circumcision - Circumcision would obviously have been a major deterrent to Gentile Christians converting not just for the obvious reason: ouch! but also because in Hellenistic cultures men played sports naked which means circumcision immediately identified a person as an outsider. Paul rails against this issue more than any other.

2 - Genealogy - Paul is against the idea that Christianity is as ethnically exclusive as Judaism. Paul believed in a profound duality of body and spirit and he argues that Christians are the spiritual heirs of God's kingdom even if they were Gentiles and Jews were the physical heirs. Spirituality was far more important to Paul.

3 - Food laws -see above

Lets handle the differences first. Mark never even mentions the idea of circumcision in any way, which is odd. Mark either didn't see circumcision as an issue for Gentiles at all, and it seems unlikely that the situation between Gentile and Jewish Christians would have changed

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that dramatically only twenty or less years after Paul's time, or his community practiced circumcision, which also seems unlikely but would definitely mean his community was independent of Paul's. A third possibility that presents itself is that following the acrimony of the revolt Mark's community was one that had completely severed all ties with Judaism and was now only experiencing tensions with overly Judaistic remnants in its own community. Mark also never addresses the geneology issue that Paul does; he does make several symbolic recriminations of the Jews: Mark 7:27-29, 12:1-11 and 15:6-15 are good examples, but he never attacks the notion of genealogy In the same way as Paul, he merely affirms that the Jews lost their claim as God's chosen by virtue of rejecting Jesus; since there actually were Jewish Christian communities that we know of who continued to exist well over a century after Mark was written this reinforces the idea that Mark's community has split from them. The only time Mark talks about genealogy is Mark 12:35-37 which isn't about Judaism but rather handling the obvious problem that the Old Testament said the Messiah would come from the line of David even though, by Jesus' time, the Davidic family line had died out.

Paul objects to the idea of circumcision for the Gentiles ad nauseum, it was obviously the most common and contentious issue he ran into. Paul also objects to the ethnic claim of the Jews as God's chosen people; he sees the old covenant of genealogy and circumcision as a physical reality that had been superseded by the spiritual reality of the Christ. Oddly enough, this is an assumption that Mark could not have agreed more with and yet he's completely uninspired to attack circumcision or genealogical claims anywhere in his gospel; if Mark had or used any of Paul's letters, you would think some of Paul's influence would have leaked through on these issues, it's baffling to think that it wouldn't.

In the other direction Mark has observation of the Sabbath laws as one of the most contentious issues Jesus faced and actually claims that a sabbath dispute is the first dispute that precipitates the plot by the other Jews to murder Jesus. Paul, in all of the known letters, barely even touches on the sabbath. The only explicit mention of the sabbath Paul makes is in his letter to the Romans which was a community that was mixed between Gentile and Jewish Christians. If anyone would have wanted some extra instruction on how to navigate the subject of the sabbath it would have been the church in Rome and yet Paul, in his longest known letter, dedicates two verses (14:5-6) out of over four hundred to tackle the issue of sabbath law. The only other reference to the sabbath Paul makes is a passing inference in his letter to the Galatians (4:10). It seems the sabbath was not an issue to Paul or his community the way it was for Mark. This shouldn't be seen as all that strange since new issues can develop but it is worth noting something that is a major issue for Mark isn't even a

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blip on Paul's radar. In fact it seems that when it comes to their arguments with the traditions of Jewish law most of what Mark and Paul are concerned about is different.

The one area of Jewish law in which Paul and Mark agree in their dissent is on the matter of food laws, yet even here there is a difference. When Paul argues that Gentiles need not follow Jewish food law he does add a very specific addendum that Christians should refrain from eating any food that had been sacrificed to an idol (1 Cor8:1-13, 1 Cor 10:14-33). This would have still been somewhat difficult for Paul's community. It was custom in first century Greco-Roman culture to sacrifice an animal to the gods by cutting out its entrails and burning them on an altar, the rest of the animal could then be cooked and eaten; the result is that it would have been somewhat problematic to avoid idolatrous meat in these Hellenistic communities especially when shopping from Hellenistic butchers. We know from Paul's letters that some early Christians avoided this issue by simply abstaining from meat altogether (Rom 14:2, 1 Cor 8:13). Paul's prescription for idolatrous meat is not very stringent, however, he simply outlines a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" (1 Cor 10:25-30) for his community. Mark has two sections addressing Jewish food law (2:16-22, 7:1-23), consisting of two and three sayings of Jesus respectively, neither of which shows any concern for idolatry. Even in this case where Mark and Paul agree on the issue they really don't agree all that well.

The long and short of all of this is to say that where Mark agrees with Paul is a fairly small area that doesn't prove, or even make a very good case for, any textual dependence on any known Pauline writings. There are some common areas between the two texts which I will discuss in the following sections, however, the common areas are not due to textual dependence but more likely from common elements of the early Gentile Jesus followers. As I said earlier, it is a temptation among biblical scholars both to imagine the early Jesus movement was more united and monolithic than it actually was and that the influence of Pauline theology was more widespread than it actually was. In reality, the early Jesus movement was very divided on what following Jesus really meant and Paul's message and writings didn't become widely popular in the Christian movement until well over a century after his death; even still, the New Testament contains the epistle of James, a pseudonymous letter from the turn of the first century, which offers a scathing critique of Pauline theology.

In summation, for these reasons and some others I won't mention for the sake of concision, I don't see any particularly compelling reason to support the hypothesis that Mark was aware of our current Pauline canon. In fact, I'm very dubious that Mark would have even liked Paul's letters had he known them. For the rest of the writings of the New Testament it is most

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likely that Mark predates all of them and fairly clear that Mark is not textually dependent on any of them. The gospels of Matthew and Luke are both textually dependent on Mark but not on each other; for their common material Matthew and Luke depend on another written source called Q, which was a collection of the sayings of Jesus that would have predated the writing of Mark. Finally, the gospels of John and Thomas are textually independent of Mark, each other, and the synoptic gospels. These are the assumptions with which I bring to the table for this article on the gospel of Mark.

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Part 5

The Creation Of The Gospel of Mark.

Let me tell you a story.

In the beginning there was a community and that community was in a lot of pain. They had all gotten involved in this strange, exciting, revolutionary idea they liked to call the Empire of God. It was exciting to believe in an empire that was greater than Rome, where the Emperor was a supreme God that alone wielded all the power in the universe and yet still cared about each and every one of his subjects like they were his own children, in fact, he'd given them his own son to be with them to teach them about his father and their empire. This was an empire where people could belong, a community they could fit into in a way it seemed nobody did in the Roman Empire; this was a community where everyone, regardless of their status in the eyes of Rome, could be a disciple.

But the Empire had changed. The Judean war had spread a distemper amongst the Jews, even those among their fellow disciples, and animosity had only been growing. Of course, the war between the Jewish disciples and the other Jews, the ones that thought they were the children of God but really only cared about their bodies and their empty traditions, had started long before the war between the Jews and Rome. Their war had started when a wicked high priest had taken advantage of a temporary power vacuum in the governor's office and murdered the leader of their church, the brother of the Lord himself and the patron of the Jewish disciples. While Roman armies had been at war with the Jews other disasters had been brewing for the disciples in Rome; The emperor had declared the disciples traitors and many of their leaders had been murdered including one of their own assembly's original patrons, the disciple known as Peter.

Now there was rumours and whispers throughout the disciples about wars, famines, and all manner of wicked signs; this wasn't the way life in the Empire was supposed to be! ... Was it? They'd left the synagogue behind -too much bad blood- everything had become blasphemy to those people: fasting on the wrong day was blasphemy, not observing the sabbath was blasphemy, eating the wrong animals in the wrong way was blasphemy, the list went on and

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families were being torn apart so they had to leave. The pharisees, the scribes and the priests, they thought they were the only true followers of God, but if that were true why did God let the Romans destroy their precious temple? Those people could have their synagogues! The disciples' little corner of God's Empire had become a family without a home with leaders being cut down and whisperings amongst the disciples of worse things to come. Everyone was wondering, was this how the Empire of God was to end?

In those days, One came from amongst the disciples to say "Don't be troubled. These things must happen! This is not the end! Let me tell you the story....". This is the story of that disciple.

The disciple we know only by the pseudonym "Mark" sat down one day at a desk with an audacious plan. The plan was to bring a new creation into being, something that had never been seen before. The author had collected all of the holy writings of the community of disciples; the disciples had been sustained by these stories in the past but now they were all facing new troubles and they needed a new story and that was what this author was to give them. This story was to be a "Bios", a "Life", like the ones that Greeks and Romans loved to do to honour their great men. This "Bios" would be different though, this was to be the life of the greatest man who had ever lived, the greatest man who would ever live, this was the life of Jesus, the Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God who had established the Empire of God on earth and would one day return to gather his people together. The disciples needed to be that empire, they needed to preserve what the Son of Man had established until he returned. That was what this author set out to create, not just a story, but a people. This people, the disciples, the elect of the Son of Man, would persevere so that God's Empire would survive. The author sat down to create a people and save an Empire and gave us a book we know now as "The Gospel of Mark".

The Markan Desktop

"Mark" doubtlessly sat down at a desk to compose "his?" gospel. Mark wasn't so much writing a gospel but forging a new creation using the traditions of the Jesus movement that the disciples -which is what the people of his community called themselves- had been using for scripture. When John Dominic Crossan conjectures about a small child finding a clay pot full of manuscripts and changing biblical studies forever, I muse about the author of Mark standing over the finished product and sweeping all of the other papyrus strewn there into a

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sack or folio that found its way into that clay pot; that would be, by a wide margin, the greatest archeological find in New Testament history. The question that biblical historians and source critics have attempted to answer ever since is what that desktop must have looked like. We know with certainty that some Greek manuscripts of books from the scriptures of the Jews, what we call the Old Testament or the Tanak, in particular the books of the prophets Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel would have featured prominently. Beyond this, what we know about Mark's sources are only what we can infer from the gospel itself and any reading we can make against other independent sources. Mark collected or created three different kinds of material when creating his "Bios of Jesus": the miracles of Jesus, the sayings of Jesus, and the passion of Jesus.

The three types of material Mark gives us in his gospel -at least the ones Mark himself didn't produce- have every indication of having circulated originally as stand alone units or collections of stand alone units. Another way to put this is that Mark seems to have been the first to use the idea of a bios-style gospel and the miracles, sayings, and passion, of his gospel are woven together with narrative elements that have every indication of being original to Mark's composition. Another good example of a bios that you can easily find at your local library is "Lives of the Twelve Great Caesars" by Suetonius. Mark is hardly unique in writing a bios gospel, all four canonical gospels are bios-style gospels as well as the gospels of Peter, the Nazoreans, the Ebionites, the Hebrews, the Egerton Papyrus, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 840, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1224, as well as the two infancy gospels of James and Thomas.

Mark likely edited all of his earlier material to fit his narrative better but in all three cases Mark was working with some tradition, either written or oral, that had come down to him from an earlier age among the followers of Jesus. Allow me to put in a small disclaimer here: just because a tradition predates Mark does not even come close to saying it goes back all the way to Jesus. If you want to know what traditions go back to Jesus you can read my take on that in my blog entitled "Did Jesus Really Exist?". The fact is that we know there were traditions about Jesus that predate Mark, however, we have only an amorphous idea of what they looked like.

One of the things that is lucky for our modern purposes about the author Mark is that he wasn't an overly talented writer. This is not to say that the book of Mark is not a masterwork of Christian Mythology, it certainly is; this is simply to say that it is entirely possible to be a master mythologist without being a master scribe. Mark's writing style is fairly crude, for example he uses the Greek word "euthys" (immediately) almost as a form of verbal punctuation. The reason this is lucky is because a highly talented scribe could make it nearly

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impossible to tell where he is copying other sources into his narrative; conversely, Mark makes it positively obvious in some places where he is using other writings. A good example for the novice reader that I can walk you through is the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13 (give it a read or open it up in another window to follow along as I take you through it).

Mark 13 is usually read today as a somewhat ominous passage about the end of the world but at the time it was an exhortation to the community that was intended as a positive narrative; everything "predicted" in this narrative had already happened, it was the source of much of the community's grief, and Mark is putting the disciples' minds at ease. The apocalyptic narrative is also peppered with sayings that Mark pulled from earlier sources that, when read by themselves, have no apocalyptic context. Verse 5-6 and 21-22 are basically the same message in different words warning people of the community not to be led astray by heterodox Jesus followers; in the case of 21-22 there is a similar passage at the original end of the Gospel of Thomas (113). Verse 12-13 is a quote that sticks out conspicuously because it does not flow well from verse 11 or into verse 14. Verse 28 is another example of a verse that appears obviously out of place to the verses that follow. Verses 34-36 also have no apocalyptic tenor if taken out of the narrative at hand. To make all of these non-apocalyptic passages fit an apocalyptic narrative Mark brings in verses like 7-11, 14, 19-20, 23-27, 29-30, 32.

This is how most of Mark is structured, with Mark working some form of what we usually call Proto-Markan tradition into his narrative. The question has always been a matter of asking ourselves which parts came before Mark and which ones are from Mark? The answer to that question can never be adequately answered, however, by using source criticism we can create an approximation of an answer. Through the next few sections I will take you through the different sources Mark must have been using and talk about a few other issues that, hopefully, I can clear up. However, I first want to discuss the provenance of Mark and a little about his community for those that skipped the first half or to sum up for those that didn't.

Mark wrote his gospel shortly after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Mark may or may not have been Jewish but his community is a gentile church, we know this by his explaining simple Jewish customs and the fact that he refers to synagogues as "their synagogues". Despite this fact, Mark's people believed their particular Jesus community had been founded primarily by Peter and also by James and John; this means that at one point in their church's history this church had been a primarily Jewish community but after or during the Jewish War they had split from the synagogue and any Jewish members of the community had either stayed in the synagogue or atrophied. By Mark's time the members of

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the community identified as "disciples" (mathetai) of Jesus. Mark was writing from the diaspora probably somewhere in Syria or Asia Minor and has no practical experience of ever being in Judea or Galilee.

Mark portrays Jesus as both a wisdom teacher of the Greek traditions and prophet of the Jewish traditions; these two ideas are probably not original to Mark's community but were likely both ways in which Jesus had been seen in various Jesus communities previous, some of which would have provided the source for his proto-Markan material. Mark is fond of the prophets, particularly Isaiah and Daniel; the name Jesus repeatedly claims in the gospel of Mark, the Son of Man, only appears in the book of Daniel in its Greek translation (Daniel 7:13). Mark's Jesus is also often portrayed as the source of secret knowledge that is only bequeathed upon his disciples and in a few cases only to Peter, James, and John; as far as anyone can tell this view of Jesus is probably original to Mark's narrative.

It seems it would be the greatest work of the unknown author that we call Mark to tie all of this together. To unify his community with a new vision of Jesus. To give his people a new hope for the future that was anchored in their past. It was time for the disciples to forge ahead with a new vision of Jesus and what he truly meant to a community like them. Jesus had to come to lead them out of the dark.

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Part 6

The Miracles Of Mark.

The best place to start this study of Proto-Markan traditions is with the miracles Mark portrays in his gospel. Mark has eighteen miracle stories in total that comprise much of the narrative in Mark. It is clear that by the time of Mark's writing this community was entirely comfortable with the portrayal of Jesus as a miracle worker otherwise eighteen stories would seem a bit strange. Many of these miracle stories have been reworked by Mark to add details that probably didn't exist in their original telling, it is nevertheless clear that he is working out of some earlier traditions and that at least some of them were written down.

The first thing I am going to discuss in this section is actually an ancillary detail to the miracles but bears mentioning here nonetheless: Mark's relation to Judean geography. Now, I have mentioned before that Mark has no knowledge of Judean geography, but I think it would be a instructive to talk about how badly he understands it. In chapter 7:24 Jesus goes from Gennesaret to "the region of Tyre and Sidon"; Tyre and Sidon were coastal cities in Syria located about forty kilometers apart from each other and the nearest one, Tyre, is about fifty kilometers north west as the crow flies from Gennesaret. This would be a long trip to be sure but also a fairly strange trip because after performing one miracle for a Syro-Phoenician woman the text says in verse 30: they left Tyre through Sidon (which is due north of Tyre) to the sea of Galilee (which is south-east of Tyre) in the region of the Decapolis (which is on the south-east side of the Sea of Galilee south of Bethsaida and Gennesaret). To put it another way, the fact that Jesus could go from Tyre through Sidon and end up in the region of the Decapolis should probably count as Mark's nineteenth miracle.

The obvious question that arises from this is if Mark knew so little about the geography of the region why would he write geography into the story? The answer to that question is that he didn't. It is a common motif in mythology to write a myth where the narrative is driven through travel, a good example of this is Homer's Odyssey. Two of Mark's sources from the Hebrew scriptures whom he writes into the narrative of his gospel on several occasions, Moses and Elijah, both have similar traveling narratives. In Mark's case he is taking his geographical cues from the miracle accounts he is using and attempting to fill in the gaps (poorly) as he gets to them. Originally these stories were the founding mythologies of the communities of

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Jesus followers that peppered the area until they were likely collected into chains of traditions by an earlier editor which Mark then used. In all likelihood these tales contained only the miracles that each community held as the basis for people in their region originally believing in Jesus' importance as a religious figure without dialogue or, at least, with less complex dialogue which Mark has embellished.

It's fairly clear that the miracle accounts contained within Mark are from diverse sources because there is a pointed lack of uniformity in the way Jesus performs these miracles. In some instances Jesus acts like any other Jewish folk magician: using spit, touching the person, and using Aramaic phrases as if they're magical incantations (7:32-37 and 8:22-26), at one point he heals a woman without meaning to just by her touching his clothes (5:24-34) even though in other places people have to convince him to heal them. In other places Jesus doesn't even touch people to heal them, in one case he heals a young girl without even going to where she is (7:25-30). In one of the more notable differences, any miracle that involves casting out an unclean spirit in Mark, Jesus never touches them. Only once does Jesus touch a person who'd had an unclean spirit during the story of healing the young man with a deaf mute spirit (9:15-29), but this only after the spirit has been cast out and the young man appears dead; Jesus then takes him by the hand and raises him up (kratesas tes cheiros -takes the hand-, egeire -raised up-, and aneste -got up-, the same words in the same order as is used to describe the raising of the dead girl in 5:41-42). In some of the miracles Jesus credits the person's faith with healing them and in others he treats it as a sign of his authority; six of these "signs" miracles are the ones I am going to concentrate on here because they offer the only vague clue we can have as to what at least one of Mark's miracle sources could have looked like.

There is no way to be sure what Mark's miracle source(s) might have looked like because, as I said previously, they all likely started as individual origin stories for the various Jesus communities scattered throughout Galilee, Judea, the Trans-Jordan and Syria which gave Mark his various geographical cues. It remains highly doubtful that Mark himself travelled to these churches to collect their origin stories himself given his lack of basic understanding of the geography. Someone else must have collected the traditions beforehand and transmitted them to Mark either orally, in a written document, or both. In the case of six miracles in particular it seems that they were written down because of some very pointed similarities with the gospel of John.

One part of the earliest editorial layer of the Gospel of John is a theoretical construct called the "Signs Gospel". John contains less miracles than Mark by a wide margin; despite being

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longer than Mark, John only records seven miracles to Mark's eighteen. Each of the miracles in John is intended as a clear sign of what Jesus is and most of them likely circulated at some point in the Johannine editorial history with accompanying discourses -called "I am" discourses- on why it was a sign which later editors shifted to other places in the gospel. For example, the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:2-14) ends with saying those who "saw the sign" proclaimed him a prophet and follows later in the same chapter after the walking on water miracle Jesus gives a discourse starting with "I am the bread..."(6:35). Those two end up fairly close together but the miracle of turning water into wine (John 2:1-11) waits until chapter 15 to have the discourse "I am the vine..." that accompanies it. Mark's version of these sign miracles have no specifically related discourses like John's does; Mark likes to use his sign miracles as symbols of Jesus' authority and to communicate lessons to his community. For instance, Mark's first sign miracle is the healing of the paralytic in which Jesus gets into an argument with the Pharisees over healing on the sabbath, Mark then uses it as a jumping off point to start his first discourse which largely challenges legal issues.

Of the seven Johannine signs there are six parallels of varying levels of agreement to Markan miracles; only the first sign in John, the wedding at Cana, has no precedent. The fact that there are six similar miracles common to both gospels implies an earlier tradition that some scholars have called the "Miracle source". The Miracle source is considered common tradition between The Gospel of Mark and The Signs Gospel meaning that Mark's narrative is likely to represent the more original version of the tradition seeing as John has at least two layers of editing after the Signs source; however, it is clear that both evangelists edited and expanded the tradition that they had and also changed the order so there is no certainty how things might have originally appeared but the areas where common details exist must have come from earlier tradition.

As I take you through the similarities here I have organized the two traditions into parallel passages for your ease of reference which can be found in "appendix 1". I used the order present in the gospel of John and have placed the Johannine passages first because they are the longer. Wherever the order of text has been modified I have indicated such in bold and have kept the original verse numbers so that you can tell how things have been modified. I also include a legend with the following information:

Number) Title of Miracle (Jx/Mx) = the number of miracle it is within the original gospel narrative (chapters and verses in John/Mark)

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1) Healing at a Distance (J2/M12) (John 4:46-53/Mark 7:25-30)

Both miracles start with establishing Jesus' spreading fame as a miracle worker and the people involved seek him out to beg him to heal their child who has been left at home. Following this Jesus challenges the petitioner and they respond. Jesus then tells them they can go because their child is healed (this passage usually looks much more verbally similar in the English translation than in the original Greek). Then the petitioner leaves to find their child healed.

Both authors have changed the dialogue to fit their narrative. In John Jesus accuses the petitioner "without seeing a sign you won't believe", the term "sign" being used to describe a miracle was likely not original to the source. In Mark the author adds the exchange between Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman. This is an extremely important embellishment in the gospel of Mark and is often misinterpreted as an anti-gentile passage which it is not; I will address this passage more in the miscellany section. Mark has the child ill because of an unclean spirit and John simply says the child is at the point of death; this isn't a big difference and is probably caused by Johannine editing to make the malady seem more serious. One other obvious difference is that John's version the petitioner is a man and the sick child is his son whereas Mark's tradition has a woman petitioning for her daughter. It has to be that one is correct (or maybe they're both half right) but Mark seems to have a female bias in his (or her) narrative and John may just as easily have a male bias or have changed the narrative to suit the "I am" discourse about the father (John 8:12-58), therefore, there's no possibility of even conjecturing which is more likely to have changed the original.

At the end John's version is extended with an exchange whereby the father confirms his son is healed at the same hour Jesus said he was and an addendum explaining the origin of the Jesus group in Capernaum. Mark includes the geographical cue earlier in his narrative and doesn't have an addendum about the founding of a group. It is unclear whether the original miracle source included any Jesus group addendums because it is just as easy to believe that Mark would remove them as that John would add them. Both sources have geographical information but Mark sets the miracle in the region of Tyre and John puts it in Cana and the petitioner in Capernaum; it is more likely that Mark's narrative preserves the original and John is connecting his second sign to his first by using Cana, however, it is entirely possible both authors changed the geography.

There is another tradition we find in Matthew and Luke that also bears some resemblance to this miracle narrative. The healing of the centurion's slave (Matthew 8:5-13/Luke 7:2-10) has

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a very similar formula; it is also a miracle that occurs over the distance, has a petitioner who cares about the afflicted (in Luke's narrative he makes a fairly strong suggestion that it is a romantic relationship between the centurion and his slave), Jesus has a quick dialogue and the following the person's answer heals the person.

2). Healing a Paralytic: (J3/M4) (John 5:2-16/Mark 2:3-12 omitting John 5:4 because most early manuscripts do not have it)

The miracle of healing the paralytic is very different between the two gospels but, as above, the basic elements are the same. Jesus encounters a paralytic in two very different ways. When Jesus heals him he uses virtually the same exact words in Greek; the only real difference between John's v8 and Mark's v11 is the final word(s): "walk" in John and "go to your home" in Mark. Each miracle story also includes a discussion of sin and both get Jesus into a tension with the authorities for blasphemy through Jesus claiming equality with God.

The beginning of this miracle in Mark has a paralytic lowered to Jesus through the roof because the crowd around him was too thick; John has Jesus and the paralytic by themselves at a pool by "the sheep's gate" in Jerusalem. This change seems obviously Johannine: John has connected the narrative to an important spiritual site in Jewish tradition, which is something he likes to do often in his gospel, and has connected it to the "I am the gate... I am the good shepherd" discourse (John 10:7-31). In Mark Jesus forgives the man's sin before the miracle and in John Jesus tells the man "now that you're well sin no more so something worse doesn't happen". In John's case Jesus then gets in an argument with the Jews about the sabbath in which Jesus says "the father is still working, so will I" at which the authorities accuse him of blasphemy for equating himself with God, the same objection that is found in the middle of Mark's representation of the tradition.

3). Feeding the Five Thousand. (J4/M10) (John 6:1-12/Mark 6:32-44)

This miracle has probably the strongest agreement on the individual elements of the story of any of these six miracles. Like the others the verbal agreement is virtually nonexistent except in common words like "fragments" (klasmata), "loaves" (artous), "grass" (chortoi), and all the numbers are the same; no phrases have any notable verbal similarity here. The sequence of events, however, is remarkable. Both start in geographically non-specific areas near the sea of Galilee with a large crowd coming to Jesus (J6:1-2/M6:32-34). The question of feeding the

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multitude is brought up (J6:5-6/M6:35-36). Both narratives specify "two-hundred dinarii of bread" (J6:7/M6:37). They then count what they have and both narratives specify "five loaves and two fish" (J6:8/M6:38). They sit down on the grass (J6:10/M6:39). Jesus first prays over the bread -strangely enough Mark uses the term blessed (eulogesen) instead of "give thanks" (eucharistas)- then breaks the bread and gives it to the disciples to distribute, then divides up the fish; it mentions those four steps in the same order in both (J6:11/M6:41). Finally, it says they gathered up the left over pieces and filled twelve baskets.

This is a good example of an early miracle tradition for yet another reason aside from its level of agreement with John: there is an example of a duplicate tradition in Mark as well. The term "duplicate tradition" is used in cases where there are two distinct traditions that are very similar; what this often means is that one tradition has become so popular and been transmitted and retransmitted so many times that it becomes two (or more) different traditions that are seen as distinct from each other. This seems to be the case for the stories of "feeding the five thousand" and "feeding the four thousand" in Mark (6:32-44 and 8:1-9 respectively). It is very likely that both of these miracle traditions are not original to Mark because it just doesn't make a lot of sense to hypothesize that Mark created one. Having a second feeding miracle so similar to the first doesn't make much practical sense from an evangelist's point of view; the repetition of the miracle doesn't do anything significant to advance the claims Mark is making, nor does it make any meaningful contribution to Mark's narrative structure. Frankly, it's a bit unusual that Mark decided to include both despite their similarity, it is an irregularity that Matthew maintained but Luke corrected it in his narrative.

It shouldn't be seen as surprising that these feeding miracles would be so popular because the tradition of the common meal seems to be one of the earliest known ritual traditions of the Jesus communities. Today the practice of communion, or the eucharist, is still a ritual practice within the liturgy of the Christian church, but it is very different. For one, the modern practice focuses more on the bread and wine Eucharist as memorialized within the tradition of the last supper. In actual fact, in the ancient context the practice was less a formal ritual and more a gathering of the community for an actual meal. The last supper as a Eucharist tradition would have probably become more popular amongst the Hellenistic churches because of its similarity to the memorial meals of various hero cults and mythologies across the Hellenistic world. Paul preserves to us a recounting of this tradition in his first letter to the Corinthians (11:17-26) written one or two decades before Mark; In this section it seems that the group had a communal meal, which he calls "the Lord's supper", every time they gathered.

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The bread and fish feast miracles recorded in Mark and John represent what was probably the more widespread tradition of the common meal in the earliest days of the Jesus movement. This Eucharist tradition doesn't have the theological overlay of Jesus' death acting as a sacrificial offering for the sins of the world that would become one of the cornerstones of the Centrist group's ideology. This type of common meal story certainly underscores the miraculous nature of Jesus that the early movements seemed they could agree on but without enough theological specificity to leave anyone out. The question that can't be adequately answered is which came first? Did the story of the miracle inspire the common meal or was the story created as an origin story for the meal. Perhaps there is a third option: a historical event in the life of Jesus, an event that need not have been in any way miraculous, inspired both the miracle story and the practice of the meal. Perhaps at one point Jesus convinced a large crowd of people to share a meal, those with food sharing with those who had none, and through the less miraculous but no less magical process of emotional distortion of memory, loose exaggeration, and repeat transmission it transformed itself into a miraculous event.

4). Walking on Water (J5/M11) (John 6:16-26/Mark6:45-52)

The first thing that needs to be noted is that both Mark and John have these two miracles paired together with no break between them. In both cases towards the end of the walking on water miracle it references the miracle of the loaves (Jv26/Mv52). Again the details between these two miracles are very similar. The miracle starts with the disciples leaving while Jesus goes up the mountain. Both narratives go to some trouble to emphasize that the disciples had gone far but in completely different ways: Mark says "fourth watch of the night" (early morning), and John says "they had rowed twenty-five or thirty stadia" (4-6kms). In both Jesus walks to the boat when the disciples are being tossed by a storm. When the disciples see him walking on the water they are afraid (understandably) and Jesus reassures them with the same phrase in Greek for both narratives: "I am me, don't be afraid" (Ego Eimi me phobeiste). They then let Jesus in the boat and another miracle occurs: in John's narrative they reach the shore immediately and in Mark's the storm stops. John's narrative then ends with the crowds discovering Jesus on the other side of the lake and being curious how he got there whereas Mark's only has a short narrative about him being recognized and gathering another crowd; this is a common theme of John adding an appendix to his miracles whereby certain people come to recognize the sign that has been performed.

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It wouldn't be advisable to consider this miracle without also looking at another miracle in Mark as well: the miracle of Jesus calming the storm (4:36-41). In most ancient mythologies, particularly the Old Testament, the sea or any body of open water is used or seen as a force of chaos and disorder. It is hard in the case of the "calming the storm" or the "walking on water" miracles in Mark to miss this symbolism in the storm. In both cases Jesus is not present, in one physically and in the other because he is sleeping, and a storm threatens to kill the disciples until Jesus shows up/wakes up to stop it. This wouldn't have just been read as a miraculous story by the Jesus followers who collected these traditions but also as symbols for what they were to do when their lives became chaotic and their ultimate fate looked uncertain.

One of the things we can gather from the earliest writings is that many communities of the early era had what can be called an "apocalyptic immediacy", or in other words, they believed God was about to destroy the world as it was and establish his Empire (whatever that meant to them). These communities began to have some serious doubts in the early days as their members began to die before these things happened and later on the situation got more uncertain as the church itself began to see some major friction both within itself and from outside critics. Paul spends a lot of time reassuring his followers about those among them who have already died and addressing tensions his followers are having with other groups of the day. An especially good example of this is Paul's apocalyptic narrative in his earliest known letter 1 Thessalonians dating to roughly 50 CE or earlier (1 Thess 4:13-5:11). The walking on water miracle must be read in the light of these sensibilities.

This miracle gives me an opportunity to touch on a subject that I haven't really addressed in these miracles so far: the highly symbolic side of mythology. The symbolic meaning in Mark of both water miracles is that the disciples, representing the body of the church to its readers, are tossed about in a storm, representing difficulties they might be facing, but God is in control, represented by Jesus physically calming the storm. In the narrative of Jesus calming the storm it portrays petitioning Jesus much as a later follower would petition him in prayer. However, the walking on water narrative has a decidedly more apocalyptic flavour with the disciples going out without Jesus to be tossed by a violent storm whereupon Jesus returns to save them; Mark's gospel has Jesus simply calming the storm whereas John's has him bringing the disciples immediately to their destination, both powerful metaphors for an apocalyptic resolution to the community's struggle. Mark's tradition goes so far as to draw a comparison to the return of Jesus by portraying the disciples as being afraid because they mistook Jesus for a ghost; unfortunately, because John doesn't also record this detail we

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cannot know for certain if it is original to the miracle story or not, but it seems like a Markan interlocution.

The water miracles are arguably the most openly and obviously symbolic miracles in Mark but that doesn't mean that other miracles aren't symbolic as well. Obviously there is more symbolism embedded in the feast miracles like the significance of the twelve baskets, the number of loaves and fish, etc. but I have to limit my exposition somewhere. This miracle is the best place to talk about symbolism because it is so obvious and unambiguous here. Also, this represents a good example of a type of apocalyptic narrative that shows less theological development than most we're used to. There is a huge difference between this miracle's apocalyptic tone and that of Mark 13. This miracle also doesn't show the kind of eschatology we see in Pauline apocalyptic literature. This may be the case because it is a more symbolic narrative than either of those or it could be due to the fact that this miracle is a very early tradition.

5). Healing of a Blind Man. (J6/M15) (John 9: 1-11/Mark 8:22-26)

These two narratives are very different from each other; The only common elements to these is that they both involve healing a blind man and that Jesus used spit to heal his eyes. This is specific enough to show a relationship between the two and this miracle actually has a lot more significance in both gospels than they first appear to the modern reader. Healing of the blind is a miracle that is entirely without precedent in the Hebrew scriptures. Greco-Roman mythology and culture sees the restoration of sight as a more common miracle which probably inspired John changing the miracle to a man who had been born blind.

This miracle has been extensively edited and expanded by John; even though the healing is done by verse 11 the narrative continues for the rest of the chapter with the trial of the young man who was healed and a meeting he has with Jesus. The first difference between the two is a geographical one: John locates this miracle at the temple in Jerusalem. This is probably not the case even in John's earlier editorial layers as we see in verse 22 where John says he would be put out of the synagogue; as far as archeology can tell synagogues didn't exist in the Jewish homeland during this era, however, you definitely wouldn't find one at the temple, it would be totally unnecessary meaning this miracle was probably originally set somewhere else and John moved it to Jerusalem to suit his narrative. The entire trial of the young man is an invention created to speak more to the events of the community of John in their time and place. It is quite unlikely there would have been any push to remove followers of Jesus from

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the synagogue until after the Jewish war and even then they probably wouldn't kick out the poor kid mere hours later, it's a pretty melodramatic scene even for John.

Mark's placement of his two blindness miracles is quite central to his gospel narrative. This healing of a blind man is Jesus' last miracle before the transfiguration on the mount which is the central event in the gospel. Jesus' second miracle where he heals a blind man is not a sign type miracle and is the final miracle Jesus performs in Mark aside from the withering of the fig tree which should be considered part of the passion liturgy instead. As I mentioned previously, even though the Hebrew scriptures often portrayed their prophets as miracle workers the healing of a blind man had never been done before. Mark is setting his blindness miracle in the narrative to show his community that Jesus was greater than the prophets; this would have been an important distinction to make since the scriptures this community has been using up until now were largely comprised of the Hebrew prophets. This miracle leads into the Transfiguration on the Mount where Mark has God himself literally tell the disciples Jesus is superior to the prophets by putting Moses and Elijah on either side of him and saying "This is my son. Listen to him!".

6). The Raising from the Dead. (J7/M9) (John 11:1-45/Mark 5:22-23/35-43)

These two miracles are actually more similar than they appear at first glance. The main reason they look so different is because of extensive editing done within John's gospel and for good reason. To explain this more clearly I'm going to very briefly talk about a strange and unnecessarily controversial figure in John's gospel: the beloved disciple. Many arguments and discussions have been had about this mysterious figure about who he might have been and the reason this is such a controversial topic is thanks to a later editorial change to the gospel itself. If you read the fourth gospel without the epilogue which was added later (21:1-25) it becomes very clear to anyone who exactly the beloved disciple was. This disciple is never mentioned previous to chapter thirteen of the gospel immediately after the raising of Lazarus (even more immediately when you consider that chapter twelve was probably moved by this editor from a earlier point in the gospel). During the story of the raising of Lazarus John goes out of his way four times to mention how much Jesus loves Lazarus (John 11 v. 3,5,11,36). Within the narrative of this gospel it is as obvious as it possibly could be that Lazarus was intended as the beloved disciple.

The reason modern people have gotten so caught up in an argument about who the beloved disciple was -with many people coming down on the side of John- is because of that later

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editor who added the second epilogue. That later editor, who probably was an official editor of the Johannine community, added a narrative which says that the beloved disciple was the originator of this gospel tradition (despite making it clear that he has already died). The problem with that for the early church fathers was that Lazarus wasn't present for most of the events of the gospel so they decided to name the beloved disciple someone else they liked better: John. Despite the fact that this epilogue starts by saying that both John and the beloved disciple were present at this second appearance for some reason his designation as John stuck, which is coincidentally where this gospel gets its name, it should really be called the Gospel according to Lazarus. (Lazarus didn't write it either, but he would at least have an earlier claim than John)

The Raising of Lazarus is to John what the Transfiguration is to Mark: the central and most important moment of the gospel before the death and resurrection of Jesus. Lazarus is a very important figure not merely in the gospel of John but also to the community of John; he could have been seen as the putative founder of the community or an important figure at the least. The narration calls him the beloved disciple, gives him the most prominent place at the Lord's supper, has him remaining faithful to Jesus after all the other male disciples had fled, bequeaths Jesus' mother to him, and has him outrunning Peter to Jesus' tomb. All of these details tell us that the author(s) of John saw the beloved disciple as the greatest of Jesus' disciples, the most likely reason for this is that he was a founding figure to them; this fact is more than justification enough for John to make this man the star figure of Jesus' final and greatest sign in his gospel.

Beyond the editorial changes made in John to entwine this miracle with the story of Lazarus you can see a definite similarity between the two miracles, I've ordered this into a list of events for ease of following

1). They both start with a petition whereby someone visits Jesus to ask for Jesus to come and heal someone who is sick.

2). Jesus delays before leaving; in Mark Jesus is delayed by another miracle, in John he waits for two days on purpose.

3). They resume the trip and are then informed the person in question has died; in Mark messengers inform them, in John Jesus informs the disciples. Jesus continues anyway and in both cases the narrative has Jesus saying the person is sleeping (in John Jesus corrects his disciples' misunderstanding when he says asleep).

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4). In both narratives Jesus arrives some time after the person has died. In Mark the mourners have already arrived and in John Jesus is told Lazarus has been dead long enough that "there is a stench".

5). In both narratives Jesus exhorts the bereaved to believe. (Jv.25-26/Mv.36)

6). Both narratives portray the crowd mocking Jesus.

7). Jesus raises the deceased with a short pronouncement: in Mark "Girl! get up!" and in John "Lazarus! Come out!"

These two miracle narratives have so many similarities in their structure that the main difference between them is the fact that they are about different people which is explained easily enough by the theory that John added Lazarus' story over the previous narrative. It also bears mentioning that John's gospel has ordered the signs by their ascending miraculous nature. Every one successively raises the bar until the last where Jesus raises a man who has been dead for four days which was intended to be just as unbelievable to ancient ears as it is to modern ones. Marks account of these miracles is not so ordered and possibly closer to the original order, particularly considering that, of these six miracle accounts, four of them appear together in Mark (Markan miracles 9-12)

Here we have six examples of common miracles which assumably shared a common source. Nevertheless questions remain about the original source. The largest question is how many miracles did it actually contain? Between Mark and John there are six similar miracles, however, both sources have more miracles. John has an extra sign account where Jesus changes water to wine and Mark has twelve other miracle accounts. Not every miracle in Mark could be considered a sign account; what mainly distinguishes a sign account from other miracle accounts is that the miracle serves as a clear sign of Jesus' identity or authority and is usually accompanied with an appendix where the people present become amazed or make comment on the sign in some way with people coming to believe in Jesus as a result. Of Mark's twelve other miracles three obviously fit this type:

(6) 4:36-41 - Calming a storm,

(7) 5:2-13 - The Cleansing of a Man With Many Spirits,

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(14) 8:1-9 - The Feeding of Four Thousand.

Four others have a similar format to a sign miracle but in such a way that it is unclear whether that format is original or a Markan interlocution:

(1) 1:23-28 - Casting out an Unclean Spirit,

(3) 1:40-45 - Healing of a Leper,

(5) 3:1-6 - Healing a Man With a Withered Hand

(13)7:32-37 - The Healing of a Deaf Mute.

It is also entirely possible some might be Markan creations in their entirety, without multiple source corroboration this endeavor becomes an exercise in conjecture. Some conjecture can be based on more educated guesses, however. For instance, the fact that Markan miracles nine, ten, eleven, twelve and fifteen are all from the miracle source makes a better case that miracles thirteen and fourteen might have also been from that source. Conversely because miracle seven, The Cleansing of a Man with Many Spirits, shows what appears to be extensive editing from Mark (I'll explore this more in the miscellany section) as well as the consideration that none of the six common miracles involves unclean spirits makes a decent case against it being part of the original source. It could also very well be the case that there was only one miracle source that contained all the collected miracles, sign miracles or otherwise, and both evangelists chose whichever ones they liked and edited some out; without source corroboration there isn't any possibility of any level of certainty.

There is other questions of course, for instance, what was the original tradition like? Some theorize that the vast differences between John and Mark can be accounted for if the miracle source hadn't been written in Greek which is reasonable but the phrases that have verbal agreement cast some doubt on that. Some theorize that it might have been an oral tradition but the structural similarities, particularly in the Feeding the Five Thousand/Walking on Water pairing cast some doubt in that as well. The most reasonable explanation I can see is that it had been a written source in Greek originally but that it became part of the Johannine community's narrative early on and changed as that tradition underwent extensive and repeat editing. However, allow me to place the caveat here that when archeological riddles are solved the truth doesn't always turn out to be the most reasonable hypothesis.

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This list is a good example of one type of source which Mark used in the creation of his gospel: stories of the miracles of Jesus. The people that produced these traditions had no difficulty seeing Jesus as a miracle-worker. This wasn't exactly rare in this time period, Josephus records the existence of several first-century magicians in his book "Jewish Antiquities". These would not have been Magicians that Josephus had met but rather traditions that came to him as well meaning that the motif of "Jewish miracle worker" was something that many Jewish people were perfectly comfortable with. It seems that to many early Jesus communities Jesus had been a miracle worker and many of the stories of their founding were associated with some person or people within their community who had had or claimed to have had a miraculous experience with Jesus. At some point someone or likely more than one person decided to collect these miraculous origin stories into miracle collections which were used by Mark and others in the crafting of their own gospels. Miracle worker was not, however, the only way early Jesus groups viewed Jesus. Many early Jesus followers found Jesus' significance to be a teacher of great wisdom like the prophets or the philosophers and recorded Jesus great wisdoms rather than his great acts.

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Part 7

The Sayings Of Mark

As we continue into the next discussion of early material that Mark used to compose his gospel I am going to use a slightly different term than I used in the last section. In the previous section I used the term "source" because it seems more clear that I was talking about a single early document; in speaking about the sayings of Jesus I am going to be more often referring to an early "strata" of tradition because there is a lot less clarity here. It seems that the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Thomas shared a source of earlier material, however, Thomas has common material with Luke and Matthew as well, implying that Thomas either uses a copy of Q or that Thomas and Q may also have shared an earlier source of material.

Sayings attributed to Jesus function both as smaller and more versatile units when being recopied into larger narratives; sayings are also easier to remember and transmit as oral traditions and more likely to be made up or falsely attributed. Greco-Roman culture is no exception but all mythology has a tendency to borrow sayings from other wise teachers and attribute it to someone the community likes to bolster the tradition. As the (apocryphal) saying goes: "I never said half of the things I said" . In Jesus' case several scholars have noted a marked similarity between his sayings and both Greek philosophers and Jewish prophets. Similarity between Jesus' sayings and the sayings of Cynic philosophers like Diogenes has been noted by many scholars as well as some similarities between the Cynic ethic and that of early Jesus traditions (and assumably the movements associated with them); however, Cynic philosophy is not so complex nor the similarities so striking as to rule out unintentional imitation. In a very practical example Cynic philosophy inspired the philosophical school known as Stoicism and the apostle Paul, who was a well-educated Hellenistic Jew, was obviously a student of stoic philosophy.

It is worth mentioning that Jesus being a Jew from Nazareth his familiarity with Jewish traditions wouldn't be all that surprising. Also, considering the city of Sephoris was heavily renovated (or rebuilt depending on your source) in the region of Gallilee during Jesus' lifetime, it would hardly be strange for Jesus to have encountered Greek culture as well. Regions Jesus goes into in Mark, such as the region of Tyre and

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Sidon (Syria) and the Decapolis are widely Hellenistic populated areas during that time and Gannesaret, Bethsaida, and Capernaum are all on the north end of the Sea of Gallilee about ten kilometers away from Tiberias, a large Hellenistic city nestled on the western shore that was founded in 20 CE and populated mostly by Hellenistic Jewry and other Hellenistic gentry fit for a spa town. The historical person of Jesus could very well have been influenced by Jewish philosophy, Greek philosophy, or both. The only thing we can be certain of is that the early Jesus movements were definitely students of both so any concrete determination of what Jesus actually said is impossible because literally any saying could have been posthumously attributed to him by later communities.

There is a book called "The Five Gospels" by the Westar Institute under the authorship designation, The Jesus Seminar, in which a group of over seventy scholars with nearly a millennia of formal education between them and thousands of years of practical experience attempt to answer the question of what Jesus actually said. The whole purpose of this book is to determine what sayings Jesus likely said by debating them and then casting ballots as to whether they see them as authentic or not. The result is probably the best educated guess that democracy can provide. It should go without saying that their guess has got to be better than mine. The most I could say on the matter is that I would be very surprised if at least some of these sayings didn't originate with Jesus though I couldn't say which ones. However, I'd be far more surprised if all of the sayings attributed to Jesus were things he actually said; I would confidently classify that assumption as completely impossible.

Any comprehensive hypothesis that attempts to reconstruct what pre-New Testament sayings traditions might have been is bound to be too complex to point out a definitive source book or books. The first and most unanswerable question is, where did the oral tradition give way to written tradition? In the case of Q source there is too much verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke to assume they were working off of an oral tradition; the provenance of these gospels is also a fairly good argument: it's difficult to believe that a Jewish community and a Gentile community, who were otherwise independent of each other, operating from sometime in the 80's to the beginning of the second century could encounter an oral telling that is so similar. This makes it a very safe assumption that Q was a written source in Greek.

When the Gospel of Thomas gets added into the equation the kind of clarity that we have in the Q hypothesis is not the case. Thomas shares common material with Mark

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as well as Q, Matthew, and Luke as well as having material that is unique as far as we know. Unfortunately, only two extant copies of Thomas exist: one in Greek which is fragmentary and one (mostly) complete copy from the Nag Hammadi Codices in Coptic. The language barrier makes it difficult to know for sure in most cases but from the Greek Thomas as well as just what we know of Mark's gospel there is a fair chance that the common material between the two comes from a written source in Greek. The questions then become whether these come from a variety of written sources, different stages of completion of one written source, or is it just one written source that all evangelists only copied portions of? Since all of these questions have no clear answer it makes it easier to speak in terms of strata instead of sources. There are also other concerns about strata among the more elite scholars in the field who can identify stages of development within a single text; for instance, prominent Q scholars John S. Kloppenborg and Burton L. Mack, as well as others, suggest three strata of development within the Q material itself.

The oral transmission aspect of religious tradition clearly plays a larger role when it comes to the sayings of Jesus. It is obvious that short, memorable statements made about things considered important to Jesus and his early followers are the most likely to be passed down to the later movement. For one, these statements would be the easiest to remember as well as the most often repeated. Particularly the sayings that have a certain folk quality while also having a certain versatility of interpretation like the parable of the sower (Mark 4:2-9) would be easily and often remembered and retold. Add to this the fact that whatever sources Mark was using to craft his narrative would have to predate Mark's authorship in the early seventies and it is actually fairly easy to believe that the sayings sources from the early movement are the most likely to contain authentic information from the Jesus of history.

Scholarship in regard to the sayings of Jesus generally separates them into two categories which can be considered what's called the pre-Easter and post-Easter Jesus. This concept refers to the observable fact that as the Jesus movements evolved and theologies changed the narratives about Jesus became more about Jesus' importance as a theological reality to their community and less about any message that might remain of the original person. To put it another way, it is the difference between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of theology. There's a great documentary series called "From Jesus To Christ" that takes you through this really well and, since it was made by PBS, is available to watch for free on the PBS website

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or on YouTube (type "from Jesus to Christ" in the search bar, there are four episodes in total).

Obviously, all of the sayings of Jesus that remain have some spiritual significance to those that followed him, however, there is still a noticeable difference between those sayings that might represent the teachings of the original founder of a social religious movement and sayings that clearly represent a fully developed theological view of Jesus from later communities. For instance, when Jesus says "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" that's a fairly practical teaching that applies to everyday life for Jesus and his followers that doesn't impose any messianic or any other overtly Christian theological assumptions on the saying; that is a pre-Easter saying. When Jesus says "I am the way, the truth, and the life. None come to the father but through me" it's an obvious theological statement of the Johannine community; that is a post-Easter saying. The designation of pre-Easter versus post-Easter is a scholarly way to address the difference between those sayings that might be authentic to Jesus and those that are not. Since there's no way to know if any material is authentic to Jesus splitting it into designations such as "historical vs. ahistorical" or "authentic vs. inauthentic" etc, draws too definite a line. Pre-Easter could be interpreted as "possibly historical" and post-Easter could be summarized as "outside of any reasonable probability of being historical".

Generally speaking, the material that can be reasonably assumed to be pre-Easter comes from the earliest strata of Jesus tradition; the further a tradition gets from Jesus the person the less likely it is to be an authentically recalled event. That said, there is no clear dividing line because even the earliest strata are infused with post-Easter material. Take for instance this saying of Jesus in Mark's first discourse (Mark 2:18-20):

18 John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, and they came and asked him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?” 19 Jesus said to them, “Can the groomsmen fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can’t fast. 20 But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then will they fast in that day."

This saying is called a "Chreia", which is a common type of mythological as well as rhetorical speech where a person is challenged and responds or is himself

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challenging his audience with a pithy pronouncement. This saying is used by the Jesus community to defend the fact that they fast on different days than the Jewish fast days. The first half of this statement in v.19 is a pre-Easter statement where Jesus retorts but it doesn't make clear what he means by the saying; however, in v.20 he makes it clear that he is the bridegroom, refers to his own death, and justifies the practices of his later followers. Everything about the second half of Jesus' statement here is post-Easter and yet it comes from an even earlier strata than Mark; the Gospel of Thomas has a similar saying to this (Thomas 104):

They said to Jesus, "Come, let us pray today, and let us fast." Jesus said, "What sin have I committed, or how have I been undone? Rather, when the groom leaves the bridal suite, then let people fast and pray."

Note how different this saying is. Jesus isn't challenged by a critic here, the first half of the saying is in defence of Jesus himself rather than his followers, and he doesn't mention a bridegroom. The second half of the saying does reference a groom and establishes what the followers will do after Jesus is gone. Whatever common origin these two sayings have must have included the post-Easter interlocution at the end.

As interesting as it is to speculate about which sayings are earlier and which are later, that 's a subject for a discussion of the historical Jesus rather than the gospel of Mark. It is useful when discussing Mark to be aware of the pre-Easter/post-Easter distinction and of stratifications within the traditions because not only has Mark added post-Easter material to his narrative but so has his source(s). In fact, there are places where Mark's own editing is at odds with his sources. Take as an example the walking on water miracle I discussed in the previous section: the original source of that story used it as a symbolic apocalyptic narrative to reassure their community, however, Mark edits some sayings together and expands on them to craft his own apocalyptic discourse (Mark 13) where Jesus tells his community of the coming apocalypse rendering a symbolic apocalyptic narrative largely unnecessary. For the most part, however, without a clearer indication of what Mark's sayings source looked like it is quite difficult to know how Mark might have changed those sources.

One feature of Mark's sayings that differentiates his narrative from that of Thomas and Q is the adversarial nature of many of Jesus' verbal interactions in Mark. In Thomas and Q Jesus' sayings are framed as discussions with his followers or pronouncements made by Jesus to an unidentified audience; though Mark does have these types of

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sayings as well many of Jesus' statements in Mark are portrayed as arguments with Pharisees, priests, and scribes, who are portrayed as his adversaries in the narrative of Mark. This is an example where the narrative reflects the context of Mark's community more than that of Jesus' day; Jesus debates with Pharisees in the synagogue in Mark because Mark's community were also arguing with Pharisees in the synagogue.

The first fairly important thing to understand is that, as far as archeology has found, there actually were no synagogues in the Jewish homeland during Jesus' lifetime (or Mark's time for that matter). The Synagogue and Pharisaic Judaism were largely diaspora phenomena, as was the community of Mark. The reality is that if Jesus and his followers had run across Pharisees they probably would have gotten along well enough, especially considering they would have both been considered by the Jewish authorities of the region as alternative interpretations of Judaism. Forty years later, after the bitter split between the Jesus movement and the Jewish community it was a very different story. For one, after the collapse of the temple system both the Pharisaic movement and the Jesus movement would have been vying against other groups to fill the power vacuum left behind and attempting to gather popular support for themselves as the official broker of Jewish tradition. The assumption of most historians is that eventually Christianity and Pharisaic Judaism rose to the top of that competition in the diaspora but in Mark's time it probably seemed like their particular movement was being pushed to the outside of the Jewish community, including amongst the Jewish Jesus followers. Mark's Jesus then becomes more than the font of spiritual wisdom for Mark's community, he becomes the charismatic philosophical defender of their worldview against their enemies.

If you take those sayings of Jesus that are distinct and able to stand as distinct pronouncements (ie. Mark 5:9 where Jesus says "what's your name?" is a detail of the story not an actual saying) I have identified 75 distinct sayings in the gospel of Mark. Of course it's possible to split hairs further than this, for example take the passage of Mark 3:22-30:

22 The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul,” and, “By the prince of the demons he casts out the demons.” 23 He summoned them, and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is

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divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 If Satan has risen up against himself, and is divided, he can’t stand, but has an end.

27 But no one can enter into the house of the strong man to plunder, unless he first binds the strong man; and then he will plunder his house.

28 Most certainly I tell you, all sins of the descendants of man will be forgiven, including their blasphemies with which they may blaspheme; 29 but whoever may blaspheme against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation."

This saying could be interpreted as three distinct sayings (23-26, 27, and 28-29) and, in point of fact, they likely are since the sayings in verse 27 and verse 28-29 have parallels in different places in the Gospel of Thomas. However, I have organized my breakdown of Mark according to Mark's organization of his material so, where he (or a previous writer) has harmonized more than one saying into a single unit, I have kept that in mind.

Mark organizes the sayings of Jesus within his gospel into seven discourses of varying lengths, each of which has a general theme. The overview of these discourses is as follows:

1st discourse. Mark 2:16-28. This is a small discourse focused on arguing issues of Jewish law with other authorities of the day.

2nd discourse. Mark 3:22-4:34. This discourse is about the kingdom of God and the Jesus community as Mark saw it.

3rd discourse. Mark 7:1-23. This is a small discourse denying the ritual cleanliness laws of Judaism.

4th Discourse. Mark 8:11-9:13. This is a discourse, interrupted by the first healing of the blind man, concerned with Jesus' messianic identity which ends off with the transfiguration on the mount and the disciples asking about the prophecy concerning Elijah.

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5th discourse. Mark 9:33-10:45. This discourse is directed to teaching how the disciples should act and what the church should be like.

6th discourse. Mark 11:17-12:44. This discourse speaks about the traditions of the Jews and reinforces Jesus' authority as a teacher.

7th discourse. Mark 13:1-37. The Apocalyptic discourse. This discourse has Jesus speaking about the difficulties Mark's community has faced in the form of a prophecy and assures them that God will not abandon them.

These divisions are my own and, of course, also debatable. The first and third discourse are so short that it's questionable if they count at all, the fourth discourse is broken by the healing of a blind man at the beginning and the transfiguration at the end, and the last two are contiguous so could be considered one discourse even though they have different themes. There are also two stand-alone sayings in chapter 6 that don't fit into these discourses (6:4 and 6:10-11), a few other sayings that are part of the miracles traditions of Mark that might have originally been separate sayings (2:6-9, 3:4, 7:27-29, 9:23), three sayings at the beginning of Mark that might have come from the introduction of Mark's source tradition (1:15, 17, and 38), and several sayings that are embedded in the passion narrative of Mark's gospel (9:31, all of Jesus' sayings in chapter 14, and 15:34). (See appendix 2 for full details)

Of Mark's 75 sayings traditions 23 have some parallel within Thomas; some of those are longer sayings that have parallels in two sayings in Thomas. Reading the texts the other way, 27 distinct sayings in Thomas have parallels in Mark. I'm not going to go through all of them here because you can read on them yourself in Appendix 3. However, I will give a brief breakdown of the similarities and what that might mean for both texts. The first notable fact is that Thomas gives us parallels in every one of the seven discourses I mentioned, in both of the orphan sayings of chapter 6 of Mark, and one saying from Mark's passion.

There is no real structural agreement between Thomas and Mark which is not surprising since it seems clear that Mark has organized his sayings into themes that probably were not originally part of his source. Thomas' organizational scheme doesn't have the complexity of Mark and no narrative to structure them around which is probably the same as any sayings collection of the early strata. Thomas' gospel does contain an introduction as well as an introductory saying:

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These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded. And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death." (Patterson/Meyer translation)

Thomas also originally ended with a conclusion saying. The extant Coptic manuscript of Thomas likely originally ended at saying 113:

His disciples said to him, "When will the kingdom come?" "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' Rather, the Father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it." (Ibid)

The 114th saying was added by a later editor. Beyond that the sayings of Thomas are not overly structured in the same way as Mark's discourses. Thomas is not entirely void of structure, however; there seems to be many sayings in Thomas that were originally formed from two or more sayings. Thomas saying 14 in particular seems to have been formed from three different sayings, the second and third of which have parallels at different points in Mark. This smaller level of editorial grouping is common in both Mark and Thomas and probably speaks to what the earliest sayings sources might have looked like.

At some point the sayings tradition would have to have been an oral tradition consisting of pronouncements, aphorisms, and parables oft-repeated amongst Jesus followers. Eventually they must have started to be written down into collections much like the miracle stories. The process of multiple short sayings coming together into mini-groupings, like the examples I used above of Mark 3:22-30 and Thomas saying 14, was probably one of multiple oral recitations as well as later editing. Without more and better early sources there is no clear way to determine how that process actually happened but it likely occurred previous to Mark using his sayings source(s).

There are also many places in the sayings of Mark that imply an oral tradition. For instance, in a couple places in Mark Jesus' sayings end with the statement "those with ears to hear, hear!" (4:9, 4:23, and 7:16 - though this last one is not present in all manuscripts) which is often translated as something similar to "those with two good ears had better listen". This represents a fairly common theme of oral traditions where the speaker closes out a discourse, or an important section of a larger

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discourse, with a conclusion statement the audience would recognize. In communities like the early Jesus movement people can often develop such statements into rhetorical devices that are widely recognized within the entire community; for instance the Hebrew scripture's use of the word "Amen" -Hebrew for "so be it"- has become so commonplace as an appendix that it has become part of the English lexicon. This statement is represented in several places in Thomas as well (saying 8, 21, 63, 65, and 96) but is associated with different sayings than the ones it is associated with in Mark. Matthew also preserves an instance of the use of this saying from one of his Q passages (Matthew 11:15), although Luke's rendition of the same passage does not.

There is also a good example of a repetitious passage in the sayings of Mark. In the fifth discourse, in reference to members of the community who follow heterodox teachings, we find this passage:

If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed, rather than having your two hands to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire, ‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’

If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter into life lame, rather than having your two feet to be cast into Gehenna, into the fire that will never be quenched— ‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.'

If your eye causes you to stumble, cast it out. It is better for you to enter into the Kingdom of God with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into the Gehenna of fire. ‘where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched.’ (9:43-48)

The statement "where their worm doesn’t die, and the fire is not quenched." is a quote from Isaiah. In this passage the quote likely originated as a mnemonic device giving the passage a lyrical quality which makes it easier to remember and repeat. Such a repetition doesn't lend itself very well to the textual medium which is likely why some manuscripts omit the repetitious passage the first two times and only place it at the very end. Passages like these are little clues to the early, oral history of the gospel's sayings tradition where sayings functioned as discrete, loosely ordered units that could be repeated within speeches or on their own. These small groupings of sayings

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very likely also fulfilled some purpose at communal meetings of the early Jesus followers which would have eventually precipitated their collection into a written form.

The secondary level of editing that we see in Mark, the organization of all those mini-groupings into longer discourses with an overall theme, is not altogether clear if it is a Markan imposition on the text, the result of pre-Markan editing, or a mixture of both. When we look at the gospel of Thomas it would seem more likely that Mark was responsible for editing his discourses. The fact that Mark's themes seem to progress along with The gospel's narrative arc makes it seem that Mark was the editor in question, however, Q source paints a somewhat different picture. Unlike Thomas, Q source was likely organized into thematic sections. Most scholars of Q source see the evangelist of Luke as copying Q more diligently with respect to its original structure; if that is indeed the case, Q had a series of thematic discourses as well, many with the same themes as Mark. Q starts with an introduction from John the Baptist and Jesus' baptism (Luke 3:7-17) and the temptation in the desert (Lk 4:1-13), has sections on condemning Pharisees (Lk 11:39-52), a discourse on possessions (Lk 12:13-34), parables of the Empire (Lk 13:18-14:34), and even an apocalyptic passage to end it off (Lk 17:23-37 and 19:11-27). To put it another way, the thematic progression of Q is very similar to that of Mark.

In many ways it is tempting to assume Mark created the themes of his sayings because those themes in many cases speak so specifically to his community. Particularly the apocalyptic passage of Mark 13 seems to be written especially for the needs of the Markan community and it referenced the destruction of the temple, an event that had only recently happened when Mark was written. However, if you remove the first two verses of chapter 13 the rest of the narrative of the chapter does not reference any specific event of the Jewish war and could have been written much earlier. The reference to "rumours of war" and "famines" (v.7-8) could very well have been referring to Caligula's threat to desecrate the Jewish temple in the late thirties and a drought that happened in the late forties. The bottom line is that there is not much that we can know about what part of the Markan discourses predate Mark's editorial influence.

What can be gathered about what Mark's sayings source or sources might have looked like is fairly rudimentary. About all that can be known is limited by what independent sources can be found and reading Mark against itself. It can be assumed that anywhere between about a quarter to most of the sayings attributed to

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Jesus in Mark come from sources that predate Mark. There are some sayings that are almost certainly Mark's creation like the temple verses of chapter 13 (v.1-2) and the explanatory sayings Mark uses to interpret Jesus' parables (Mark 4:10-20, 7:17-23, 10:10-12). Oddly enough some of those sayings can help us understand Mark's source and how he uses it; for example, the explanatory passages tell us that the parables that precede them do predate Mark because it wouldn't make much sense to create a passage so esoteric that you would then have to interpret it for your own audience.

Unfortunately, for most of Mark's sayings it is ambiguous whether they are Markan creations or earlier traditions. We can be reasonably certain that the common sayings Mark shares with Thomas are from an earlier strata and can assume that other sayings must come from an earlier strata as well. The main thing to note in Mark's discourses is that, for the most part, they are set apart from the narrative of Mark's gospel. Mark seems to have edited his sayings source to add the antagonism of the Pharisees, scribes, and priests but other than that there is no (or very little) narrative content amongst the sayings. What this means is that Mark's source, much like Thomas and Q, was a collection of wisdom sayings without a narrative setting that imagined Jesus as a wisdom sage. To the communities that created and preserved these collections Jesus was a wise philosophical teacher like Solomon, the prophets, and the great philosophers of the Greeks.

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Part 8

The Passion of Mark

The last type of source Mark uses is simultaneously the most mysterious one and possibly the most important to Mark's narrative: the passion of Jesus. The Gospel of Mark has been called a passion narrative with an extended introduction for good reason, the passion narrative of Mark comprises half of the gospel and most of its narrative elements. There is no clear indication as with the miracle stories and sayings traditions that the passion narrative of Mark had a written source tradition, though the similarities with John's passion narrative would strongly suggest some written details. The passion narrative of Mark also appears to have a lot of later editorial changes that were almost definitely made by Mark himself which is hardly surprising since the passion does comprise the bulk of the story within Mark. Of course, we do have other passions to compare with Mark's; John's passion narrative has some very intriguing differences from Mark's. Also, Paul gives us a few glimpses into his community's passion and that also has some interesting differences. One thing we do know is that the telling of passion stories is a tradition that extends back to the earliest days of the Jesus movement, long before Mark ever put ink on papyrus.

There could have been as many different passion narratives as there were different Jesus communities. As it is, the two different passion narratives we currently find in Mark and John are different enough to categorize them as divergent passions and, if both evangelists had a written source to work from, the two were not the same written source. The fact that the Gospel of Luke shares some details of John's passion, coupled with the fact that Luke was written around the same time as John, makes a strong case that John was working off of a written passion source. If there was some primordial written passion source from which John's and Mark's both descend it would be difficult to say what details were more original.

In Paul's letter to the Galatians, written around 51 CE, Paul makes a passing reference to an event that had happened sometime earlier in that group's history. Paul says:

"Foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was in front of your eyes that Jesus Christ was portrayed as crucified!" (Galatians 3:1)

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The word Paul uses there that is translated 'portrayed' is "proegraphe" which means something akin to 'publicly shown' or 'performed in front of'. It's a reference to an oral recitation of the passion or perhaps even a type of passion play being performed for the believers in Galatia. Unfortunately, Paul doesn't go into any detail as to how that might have looked; it would be very interesting to know what the passion might have looked like in Paul's day. By the seventies when Mark wrote his gospel the passion had already become a fairly intricate narrative with a clear schedule of events. You see, the passion didn't just function as a central story of Christian mythology, it functioned mostly as a liturgical schedule for the early Jesus followers. The memorial of Jesus' last week, his death, and resurrection formed the highest holy days of the Jesus movement's calendar.

I think it would be useful here to speak a bit about the use of time in Mark's gospel. The first half of Mark's gospel gives no clear sense of the time scales involved; apart from some mention of John the Baptist, a journey into the wilderness, and Jesus gathering his disciples together, the first half of Mark is mostly just Jesus traveling around to speak and perform miracles. Only going off of the geographical cues in Mark the first half of the gospel had to have taken place over the course of months, if not years. After the transfiguration story, which is the pivotal point in Mark's gospel (it is no coincidence it is in the centre), the narrative compresses immensely and the events of that half of the gospel take mere weeks and consist only of the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem and his final week there; chapter 9 and 10 covers the journey of Jesus and his disciples south through Galilee and into Jerusalem, a considerable distance to go on foot especially with a crowd of people in tow; assuming a very optimistic estimate of twenty kilometres a day it would still take a couple of weeks. The events of chapter 11 to 16:8 take place over the course of only one week. This week was, and is still, the central liturgical event of the Christian calendar.

Jesus communities would celebrate the passion yearly by memorializing, and likely recreating, the events of Jesus' last week. The basic liturgical events that Mark's community used would have unfolded roughly as follows:

1). Jesus' Processional into Jerusalem. Palm Sunday. (11:1-11). Day One.

2). The Cleansing of the Temple. (11:15-19). Day Two.

3). The Anointing of Jesus. (14:3-9). Day Four.

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4). The Last Supper. (14:17-25). Day Five.

5). The Prayer and Arrest. (14:32-42). Day Five.

6). The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus. (15:21-37). Day Six.

7). The Discovery of the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection. (16:1-8). Day Eight.

These seven events are told in such a way that the community can ritualize them and make some symbolic reenactment of them on a yearly basis. How elaborate that reenactment was is anyone's guess. Mark retains details and events outside of these seven that likely would have also been part of the Markan community's passion observance; for instance, between the meal and the prayer on the fifth day Mark mentions Jesus and his disciples sang a song, this would have definitely been part of their celebration. The third day of Mark's passion has Jesus teaching and prophesying in the temple after he had cleared it; this is where the last two discourses take place. This was symbolic to the community of Jesus re-establishing the true worship of God in the temple; this would have been a very important day to the Markan community even though it doesn't mention any specific liturgical event. Likewise, the seventh day of the passion, between Jesus' death and resurrection would also have been an important date.

The passion story leads us to a bit of a "the chicken or the egg" dilemma: did the liturgy of the passion come from the passion story or did the passion story get created around the liturgy? Chances are it was a bit of both. The passion story was definitely based on at least one historical event: the crucifixion of Jesus. Other events of the story could also have happened such as the cleansing of the temple, because if anything was likely to get a person crucified it would be making trouble at the temple during Passover. However, to Mark, the passion is about a lot more than just a historical event. The passion as we know it today is a myth of Messianic destiny and cosmic significance where Jesus acts within human history to alter the spiritual destiny of humankind; this is how Mark would have seen it. Although Mark and John's passions differ on many details, as Paul's community's passion must also have, they share this common vision of Jesus: the vision of a divine figure whose death and resurrection brought salvation to the world in accordance with prophecies from Jewish scripture.

Several of the small details recorded in both Mark and John's passion narratives are nods back to prophecies about the messiah in the Jewish scriptures. For instance, Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is a reference to Zechariah 9:9:

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"Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."

The anointing of Jesus in chapter 14 is a parallel to the anointing of the Kings of Israel, in particular King David (1 Samuel 16:1-13), although Mark has modified his narrative to make this a preparation for burial instead. The passage in which they cast lots for his clothes refers back to psalm 22:18

"They divide my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots."

That same Psalm begins with the verse "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" that Jesus says as he dies in this passion. The passage about Jesus being crucified between two criminals is foreshadowed earlier in Mark (10:35-41) and is a reference to Isaiah 53:12. Isaiah 53, the song of the suffering servant, was a favourite of the Jesus movement for obvious reasons and was likely also the inspiration for the detail that Jesus was buried in a rich man's tomb (Isa 53:9).

The more original iterations of the passion narrative likely contained so many Old Testament parallels because the early Jesus movements (particularly the Jewish ones) had looked back to the Jewish scriptures for prophecies to support their beliefs; something very similar happens in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. It is useful to keep in mind that in the early days of the Jesus movements the only scriptures they had were those of the Jews and they had certainly worked diligently to incorporate those scriptures into their own mythology. In particular it seems these groups saw both Jesus and themselves as the heirs of the prophecy in Zephaniah 3. In the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem this would have been a particularly agreeable passage to Mark.

Mark is attempting to go a step further than just using Jewish scripture though and I have to admire his boldness for it: Mark set out not just to tell a story for his community but to create new scripture for them. Allow me to explain this and how it connects to the passion in Mark. In the story of the transfiguration, which is the revelation of Jesus' messianic identity and begins the passion in Mark's gospel, he says as much by using another reference to Jewish scriptures. When Jesus is transfigured on the mount Moses and Elijah appear with him. Moses was seen as the progenitor of Jewish law and Elijah was viewed as the pinnacle of the Jewish prophets, together they are symbolic of the Jewish scriptures which are referred to as

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"The Law and The Prophets" or "Moses and the Prophets" either together or separately by other authors in the New Testament; Paul also calls them "the writings". This story, which does not have an analogue in John's gospel, is Mark setting Jesus as the third form of scripture and has God himself tell the disciples to listen to Jesus at which point Moses and Elijah disappear. In other words, Mark is telling his audience that his gospel, the teachings within it, and the sources that he draws from are more important and authoritative than the scriptures of the Jews.

The narrative Mark gives us of Jesus symbolically breaking from the Jewish tradition in the transfiguration is the beginning of a trend whereby Mark diverges from his passion's roots in the prophetic tradition of Judaism to focus on the antagonism between Jesus and the Jewish authorities of his day. This is a concern that Mark's community faced and was not original to the passion Mark was using. We know this because when we compare Mark's passion to its common elements in John's we find even more antagonism in Mark than John. This is not a case where we should assume that Mark preserves the more original form of the text because whatever attachment Mark might have had toward antagonism, John had more. The Gospel of John, despite having been written by a Jewish community, uses the word "the Jews" as a hostile epithet and where Mark styles Jesus' enemies as the scribes, priests, Pharisees, and Herodians, John describes his enemies as "the Jews"; if John had a passion tradition that had come with animus towards the Jews of the day he would not have edited it out.

Before we discuss the ways in which Mark edited his passion I should probably take you through the various differences and corroborations of Mark's passion. There are a few major differences between John's passion narrative and Mark's. John's passion has no Transfiguration, no Last Supper, and no Cleansing of the Temple; John's gospel does record the Cleansing of the Temple but he puts it at the beginning of his gospel, three years before the passion and there is no mention of the other two events. Instead John's passion begins after his final sign, the raising of Lazarus, has the anointing of Jesus before palm Sunday, has a supper where Jesus washes his disciples' feet earlier in the week, and, most notably, records Jesus' crucifixion a full day earlier than Mark.

Mark's rendition of the last supper may not be attested by John but it is corroborated beautifully in Paul's letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 Paul says:

"For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he

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broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes."

Mark could not be the originator of the Last Supper tradition because Paul related it here, decades before Mark was written and Paul himself admits in the text that this tradition was handed down to him. It bears mentioning that Paul's rendition of the last supper is actually more developed than Mark's; Paul's community celebrated the last supper as a memorial meal of the type common to the many hero cults of the Hellenistic world. Paul's last supper also corroborates the day of the supper: "the night he was betrayed". Paul indirectly corroborates other details of the passion, namely the death and resurrection of Jesus, many times throughout his letters. It isn't necessary to go through them all here because they are summed up well in one place later on in the same letter (1 Cor 15:3-4):

"For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures"

Again, Paul himself admits this is a tradition handed down to him. Given that from the timeline Paul himself gives in his letters he became part of the Jesus community sometime in the mid-thirties, these are very old traditions. Between Paul and John the only major detail of Mark's Passion that lacks independent attestation is the Transfiguration.

The Transfiguration on the Mount in Mark is the resolution of the key narrative element of the first half of the Gospel, an element scholars refer to as the "Messianic Secret". Throughout Mark Jesus rebukes spirits that identify him, speaks in parables which he explains in private to his disciples, and at one point openly says:

“To you has been given the secret of the empire of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’ ” (4:11-12).

Mark treats Jesus' identity and the meaning of his mission as if it is a secret that only the disciples are privy to; by that I mean the disciples for which Mark wrote his gospel because

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Jesus' disciples consistently miss the point throughout the narrative to the point where, even at the Transfiguration the disciples misunderstand and offer to set up tents for Moses and Elijah. This is also the only place in Mark where Jesus' identity is explicitly revealed (more on that later). Given the facts that the Transfiguration is the resolution of Mark's major plot line and that we have no other attestation of it makes it likely that Mark is the originator of the story. Nevertheless the story of The Transfiguration does begin Mark's passion narrative and sets the tone for other ways that Mark strays from the original basis of the passion in the traditions of Judaism.

The most noticeable way Mark makes his own impact on the tradition of the passion can be found in his rendition of the trial and sentencing of Jesus. In John, after Jesus is arrested he is handed over to Annas, the father-in-law of the high priest Caiaphas, for what could be called a formal interview. The only person of note present for this interview was Annas, a retired priest, no one else who represented any body of authority within the Temple is mentioned. In Mark, however, after Jesus is arrested he is brought to the high priest where the text says "all" of the priests, elders, and scribes had been brought together to put Jesus on trial. A few things need to be mentioned about this story because it is what you could call a whopper of a fish story. First, this is a very auspicious group of men within the temple system of Jerusalem and the chance of all of them even being available to come together at very short notice during the highest holy festival and busiest time of the temple calendar in order to put one Galilean trouble-maker on trial is what mathematicians call: functionally zero. Second, this council had absolutely no judicial power over anything outside the day to day activities of the temple which would make this trial totally unproductive and unnecessary. Third, trials at night were strictly illegal in the Roman world, meaning this council would have nothing to gain by this and absolutely everything to lose. In short, this event never happened, it is ridiculously far fetched.

Mark created the trial by night account in his passion, from whatever story was previously there, to reverse the dramatic engine of Jesus' crucifixion in the most advantageous way for his community. By placing Jesus in this illegal show trial setting, where witnesses can't be found and those that are can't even get their stories straight (14:55-59), Mark isn't only underscoring Jesus' complete innocence but establishing the guilt of the Jewish authorities. In this one short section Mark has incriminated the leaders of the temple as vigilante insurrectionists; this would have been very appropriate to Mark's community because those same authorities had participated in the rebellion of Mark's day. Needless to say this wouldn't help all the bad blood Mark's community had toward the Jewish authorities but it also comes

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with a not-too-subtle implication for Mark's co-religionists as well, that those who side with the Jewish authorities are taking sides against Jesus.

Mark's narrative further supports this dichotomy with the idea that the charge being levelled at Jesus by this kangaroo court is blasphemy. We know by the fact that Jesus was crucified that he was executed for some form of sedition. The Roman world was a giant geographically and culturally diverse empire with a plurality of religions that the modern world has never seen and as such, Rome avoided getting involved in petty religious squabbles. Blaspheming the God of the Jews would not have been a charge any Roman official would have respected, least of all Pontius Pilate. John's passion lacks this blasphemy narrative and has the crowd insisting to Pilate that he is a criminal without offering any proof. Paul is silent in reference to any authentic reason why Jesus was executed. Blasphemy was a bone of contention between Mark's community and the Jewish community, there may have even been trials for blasphemy in Mark's community's past which resulted in expulsion from the synagogue, which means it makes a lot of sense for Mark to portray Jesus as facing the same difficulty.

One part of this section that I want to address because it is really important to how we can understand Mark is the messianic confession contained in this narrative:

"Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?” But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus said, “I AM; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 14:60-62, emphasis added)

Jesus' silence throughout the passion is intended as a fulfillment of Isaiah 53:7 meaning that it is likely original to Mark's source passion. The problem is that Jesus' confession here is very out of place in the rest of Mark's narrative. As I mentioned above, Mark's gospel treats Jesus' identity as a secret that only his closest disciples are privy to, and even at the Transfiguration Jesus himself doesn't make any open claims about himself. It doesn't make any sense within the narrative of Mark that Jesus would openly admit he is the messiah to his enemies here, so why would Mark write this? The fact is, he didn't. The version we currently have of Mark is based on the best and earliest manuscripts we have available, however, that isn't the same as saying "the first copy of Mark". The earliest manuscript of Mark we have is one called Papyrus 45, an incomplete copy from the first half of the third century, well over a century after Mark was written, that doesn't even contain Mark 14. The earliest manuscripts that preserve this passage date to the fourth century, over two and a half centuries after Mark

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was written; two centuries gives a lot of opportunity for copying errors. As luck would have it though, Mark gives us an opportunity that we don't get with the other gospels: we actually have two good witnesses to Mark that were copied within a couple to a few decades of Mark's autograph; they're called the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke.

When you look at Jesus' confession in Mark's copyists (Matthew 26:64/Luke 22:70) neither preserves Mark's direct confession. Where Mark's text says "I am" (ego eimi), Matthew's responds "You say so" (lego hymin) and Luke's says "You say that I am" (hymeis legete hoti ego eimi). Both other gospels record the same words "you say". The original text of Mark said something similar to Luke's version, "you say that I am". This is an ironic statement (from the true definition of irony - expressing one's meaning by using language that would imply its opposite) meant to avoid answering the question and still answering it for the audience of the gospel; to put it more simply, Jesus is meant to seem as though he's saying "You said that, not me" but what he actually meant was "your scriptures say I am". Mark likes to use irony and metaphor to make his point whereas Luke is usually very literal which is why it's so likely that Luke preserves Mark's original narrative. In another mythological device Mark often uses it seems the high priest catches what Jesus is actually saying in a way his own disciples never did.

At some point in Mark's early history a copyist could have just missed the irony of the statement and thought that the priest's reaction to what Jesus said made no sense so he changed the text to make it clearer. More likely, however, he probably just made a very common copying error by copying down the high priest's question and when he looked back skipped to the beginning of the next line, copied down only the last half of Jesus' answer, and never realized his error. Unfortunately, all early manuscripts preserve the change so, barring the discovery of an older manuscript that doesn't, the bible will maintain the mistake. All I can do about that is tell other people about it and hope they spread the word.

The third and final part I want to focus on here is the story of freeing Barabbas. The story is related in the narrative of John:

After he had said this, he went out to the Jews again and told them, “I find no case against him. But you have a custom that I release someone for you at the Passover. Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” They shouted in reply, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a thief. Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. (John 19:39-40)

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This story is short and not particularly detailed in John; there's no sense in John of the theatricality we find in Mark. Pilate simply offers to release Jesus and the crowd insists on Barabbas, a simple thief (leistes), instead. I cannot stress enough that this event never happened. Honestly, can you even imagine the Romans allowing any random criminal to walk free just because it's a holiday? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. What this story actually is, is the creation of a parallel with the scapegoat ritual recorded in Leviticus:

He shall take the two goats and set them before the Lord at the entrance of the tent of meeting; and Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for a scapegoat. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for a scapegoat shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness. (Lev.16:7-10)

This was a ritual offering made by the high priest on behalf of all of Israel every year. John's passion has the narrative that Jesus is the sacrifice to atone for the sins of Israel and Barabbas is to be the scapegoat. This is also one of the reasons that the passion has the high priest condemning Jesus before his execution. John's story mirrors the Levitical ritual well: Jesus is presented as a sacrifice by the high priest and is selected, seemingly at random, from two available choices making it God's will that Jesus is sacrificed for the sins of Israel much in the same way the scapegoat is chosen.

Mark's narrative takes a very different tack and seizes the opportunity to expand on this same symbol. Here is the narrative Mark gives us:

Now at the festival he used to release a prisoner for them, anyone for whom they asked. Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection. So the crowd came and began to ask Pilate to do for them according to his custom. Then he answered them, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release Barabbas for them instead. Pilate spoke to them again, “Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” They shouted back, “Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified. (15:6-15)

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This rendition of the event makes it seem anything but random. Mark starts by establishing that Barabbas was a rebel and a murderer instead of just a simple thief. When Pilate asks them to release Jesus, Mark has the priests whipping up the the crowd to choose Barabbas instead and insisting Jesus be crucified. If we then look at this passage in light of the scapegoat ritual the priests have perverted the process by choosing the victim rather than allowing God to choose. Moreover, Mark has made the choice here between Jesus and a violent insurrectionist; the priests choose the violent rebel of course. The unspoken implication being made by this passage is that the scapegoat inherits the sins of Israel and is then supposed to be driven out of the city but the priests failed in this endeavour as well. Years later, during Mark's time, the priests and other authorities led a violent insurrection against Rome and were utterly destroyed.

Though there are other ways Mark diverges from the emphasis on Jewish scripture of his passion these are the most important in terms of changing the theme. Mark has modified his passion narrative to function also as a bitter recrimination of the Jewish authorities and all those that would sympathize with them. What Mark is saying within the trial narrative, without much subtlety I might add, is that the Jewish authorities threw their lot in with violent rebels and that God destroyed them for it. In Mark's mythology the chief priests were given every opportunity to avoid their fate but they did not take them. Even after trying Jesus and condemning him to death the priests still had the opportunity to drive the rebels out and did not. This is a shockingly blunt political statement on the part of Mark and his community and reflects the very intense emotions surrounding their split with the Jewish community.

What Mark started with was a passion story that memorialized the death of Jesus and underscored the importance and meaning of it that the Jesus followers had found within the holy traditions of Jewish culture. What Mark leaves us is a synthesis of this tradition with a symbolic retelling of the struggle of his own community. This is where Mark's brilliance as a myth-maker really shines through. The original passion must have been a liturgy his community had been practicing for decades but he found a way to make this ritual into a metaphor for the story of his people. It was brilliant, it was bold, and it was so very well executed that I have to take my hat off to this unknown evangelist, he told his story in a revolutionary way and his legacy made its mark across all of Christian history.

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Part 9

The Post-Resurrection Narrative of Mark.

One of the biggest questions that plagues the gospel of Mark that has been asked by everyone from amateurs to seasoned scholars is the question that comes up at the very end of Mark: why would anyone end a story like this? Although I made this portion into its own section because of it's size and complexity, in reality this is more like the next part of the passion narrative since the post-resurrection narrative is part of the passion. Since the questions and answers surrounding this particular literary snag are so different I thought it would be beneficial to give it its own section. For those reading, those who might not have any clue what I'm talking about, allow me to explain: the ending Mark has in the bible we currently use is not the original ending. The earliest manuscripts of Mark end at Mark 16:8

"So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

Which anyone who has read it could tell you is a very strange way to end this story. It is even stranger in the original language because it ends with "gar" which is a primary proposition meaning "assigning a reason" that is usually translated "for". This is an unusual word with which to end a sentence and Mark never uses it to end a sentence anywhere else, making it a very strange word to end his gospel on.

Ancient readers obviously thought so as well because later manuscripts begin to contain one of two endings, the longer of which is usually appended to the ending in most modern bibles:

The shorter ending:

And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

The longer ending:

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Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country and they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.

Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands and if they drink any deadly thing it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.”

Oddly enough the longer ending seems to trace its origin to an earlier era than the shorter one. The obvious question, which at least two later copyists also asked, is why the gospel of Mark would end in such a strange cliffhanger? The first observation anyone who heard this story would make is that the story couldn't have ended this way or there would be no gospel of Mark and no Markan community, there would be nothing but a few women with a weird ghost story they never told anyone. As it turns out, those questions might be the whole point of ending the gospel this way. Though there are many theories as to why Mark ends this way it is much like every other question within biblical criticism: most of the theories are rubbish, some are outlandish rubbish, and a couple or a few make sense.

I would like to start by addressing one of the more persistent of the rubbish theories: the theory that the resurrection of Jesus was a later tradition. Some of the more amateur enthusiasts latch on to the fact that the earliest copies of the earliest of the canonical gospels has no post-resurrection narrative to mean that belief in a resurrected Jesus was a later development within the Jesus movement; this theory does not match the knowable facts. First of all, Paul relates a post-resurrection narrative in his summation of the passion in 1 Corinthians:

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For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. (1Cor 15:3-7)

Again, I'll emphasize that Paul himself says this is a tradition he received, making it even earlier than this letter which is still a couple of decades earlier than Mark. This tradition also mentions Cephas (Peter) and James by name which is significant. Peter represented one of "The Pillars" (as Paul calls them), the leaders of the church located at the temple in Jerusalem; James was the leader of the Pillars and the putative head of the entire church.

1 Corinthians was likely written sometime after the meeting Paul had had with the Jerusalem Pillars he speaks of in Galatians but even if it weren't it's still relevant. In Galatians Paul speaks of his meeting with the Pillars to "lay before them the gospel I preach among the Gentiles [...] to ensure I was not running, or had not run, in vain" (2:2); in other words, Paul had to defend his version of the gospel before the leaders of the Jesus movement. Assumably this would have included at some point a discussion of the resurrection of Jesus since that was one of the core principles of Paul's gospel; to Paul, the salvation of humanity was not accomplished through the death of Jesus but through his resurrection. Even considering the spin Paul tries to put on this meeting it's pretty clear that it didn't go well for him; however, his disagreement with the Pillars centred on circumcision (and assumably other elements of Jewish law), not on his teaching of the resurrection.

Paul relates earlier in Galatians that eleven years before this meeting with the Pillars he had gone to Jerusalem and had stayed with Peter for fifteen days and had also seen James during that time (Gal:18-19). This first meeting happened in the thirties sometime and definitely predates every one of Paul's letters we now have. Sadly, Paul never mentioned in 1 Corinthians exactly who had handed the tradition of the resurrection down to him, however, given that the only two Pillars Paul mentions by name are also the only two men mentioned as witnesses in his recounting of the resurrection it isn't out of the realm of possibility that Peter and James may very well have been the ones who had originally told him. In any case, regardless of who related the resurrection story to Paul it seems the Pillars had no issue with the idea; after all, would Paul drop their names in his Resurrection story knowing they disagreed with it? Probably not. Whenever Paul talks about his opponents he is fairly careful not to name them specifically, likely to avoid cultivating specific enemies amongst the leaders

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of the movement. Therefore, it seems very unlikely Paul would risk dropping the names of Peter and James in a story unless they fully approved of it.

Given that the passion as we know it was so largely mined from Jewish scriptural tradition it is very unlikely that it originated from the Pauline community. The Jesus community that Paul belonged to was a widespread gentile community throughout Asia Minor, Achaea, Greece, and Macedonia and the people within it couldn't have been as interested in Jewish prophecies as the Jewish Christians were. As I discussed in the previous section, Paul's passion has influences within Greco-Roman culture with the tradition of the last supper, however, Paul emphasizes in his passage that Jesus died "according to the writings" and that he was raised "according to the writings", so his passion must also have had some basis in Jewish scripture as well. It should also be emphasized once again that the passion Paul is talking about was a part of his community's liturgy before Paul. All of this makes a fairly solid case that both Jewish and Gentile Christianity believed in the resurrection mythology of the passion story. As far as anyone can tell the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead was widespread and common within the earliest days of the Jesus community.

Beyond this argument there remains the fact that just because the Gospel of Mark may not have had a post-resurrection narrative does not mean Mark's community did not believe Jesus had been resurrected. Mark has Jesus specifically predict his own resurrection five times in his gospel (8:31, 9:9, 9:31, 10:33-34, 14:28) and if that weren't enough even the ending that remains to us has a young man in a white robe telling the women that Jesus had risen. It's safe to say that the Gospel of Mark as we have it in no way breaks the continuity we see in the early Jesus movement of believing in a resurrected Jesus.

There are plenty of other theories to explain the seemingly premature ending of Mark as well, but, as I mentioned earlier, most of them are silly. I've read people that suggest Mark stops so abruptly because it was written on a scroll; those people don't know how scrolls work. Some hypothesize that Mark died before he could finish, as if he just dropped dead while writing it out and someone pried it out from under his body and went, "Looks good! Let's leave it like it is". There's also conspiracy theories. One of the conspiracy theories is actually from a scholarly source and skirts the edge of this controversy. Though I personally am too skeptical to buy into this theory without much better evidence I'm going to talk about it briefly here because it has some very respectable supporters within the community of biblical scholarship and it gives a pretty good example of some of the strange controversies that can surround biblical origins.

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In the 1940's a scholar named Morton Smith was actually stuck in Mar Saba monastery awaiting the end of the war in order to return home and ended up returning later to help the monastery catalogue their library. The claim is that in 1958 Smith found a seventeenth century print copy of The Works of Ignatius of Antioch with a lost letter of Clement of Alexandria scrawled into the back leaf that spoke about an expanded copy of the Gospel of Mark which contained secret teachings meant only for the truly initiated believers. Unfortunately, the only copy of this inscription that remains is the copy Smith made via photograph; the inscribed copy of The Works of Ignatius of Antioch has since been lost. The letter claims that later on Mark added other parts to his narrative to create a gospel called "Secret Mark". The claim then made by supporters of this theory is that the copy of Mark we have today is the incomplete copy intended for the uninitiated which is why Mark's ending is missing. I won't get into how many different threads that could be pulled out of this theory and watch it unravel; to be fair, if all of the claims made by Smith and his supporters are true there still remains a lot of unanswered questions about the document's more ancient authenticity. One of the things I didn't touch on in the early sections here is that textual criticism (and really any kind of archeological endeavour) is plagued not just by modern opportunists but must also navigate the pitfalls of trying to avoid ancient forgers, charlatans, and opportunists as well. However, many scholars also believe the whole thing to be a forgery of Smith's.

There are really only two basic theories that sensibly explain the ending of Mark as we know it: either Mark ended his gospel at 16:8 intentionally for rhetorical reasons or Mark did have a post-resurrection narrative that was subsequently lost. Both of these theories are plausible and have fairly equal arguments for and against them. My intention here is to present both positions and some of the arguments involved and you can decide which is more compelling to you. I will say up front that I am more inclined to accept the "lost leaf" theory but it really is only a minor difference in my case. If the lost leaf theory were proven unambiguously false tomorrow I'd say to myself "interesting..." and move on with no sleep lost.

The theory that Mark originally ended his gospel at 16:8, what I'll call "the empty tomb ending" theory, posits that the strangeness of the ending was intentional in order to draw the audience in. The idea was to leave the audience confused by the cliffhanger ending and wanting more, leaving it open for the narrator to finish the story in whatever way she or he saw fit, to make the story personal, and to connect to the audience. This theory has the advantage of explaining the gospel as we currently know it. No conjecture is necessary as to what might be missing because in this theory the gospel of Mark is complete; actually, more than complete because some fool came along later and added an ending to it. I like this idea

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because I have the heart of a storyteller and there's something very optimistic about this theory that appeals to me. If it were up to me which were true I would actually pick this one. My feelings aside there are some very credible and serious critiques of this theory.

The most important critique of the empty tomb ending of Mark is that such a rhetorical device assumes an evangelical intent whereas the Gospel of Mark's narrative is fairly insular. The story we read in Mark speaks to the insiders of a community, defining the community by what they believe and justifying why it's superior to the beliefs of their critics. Almost everything in the gospel of Mark is written to appeal to the community for which it is written; it really doesn't read like something that would appeal well to most outsiders. Of course, there is an argument that it could appeal to outsiders who led similar lives to the insiders. Many of Jesus' sayings in Mark would resonate with the poor, the marginalized, and the persecuted outsiders of society. Marginalization and social upheaval was somewhat the rule rather than the exception for most people in what was the fairly recent expansion of the Roman Empire. Another good argument for the empty tomb ending along this vein is simply that the uncertainty of Mark's ending mirrored the uncertainty within the Markan community; it allowed them to relate to Jesus' earliest followers and challenged them to envision for themselves how to move forward.

The case could also be made that the community of Mark was so evangelistic that, despite experiencing the most difficult era of their history, continued to be committed to growing their movement. Forty to fifty years previous to Mark's writing no Jesus movement existed and by the Markan period Jesus communities were widespread in the Roman world, so obviously the Jesus movement was an evangelistic community par excellence. A little over nineteen centuries later we can assume that this must have happened because Markan theology plays a large role in the thought of Centrist Christianity; such a role would be unlikely without having a profound amount of social and political capital within the movement in the centuries following Mark's writing.

One large question also posed by this theory is, if the empty tomb ending was being used as a rhetorical device, why did Mark's copyists in Matthew and Luke disagree? Assuming Mark did end at the empty tomb, both of the later Evangelists who copied Mark found his narrative to be unsatisfying and added their own post-resurrection narratives to complete it. Arguably these two evangelists should have been able to recognize Mark's rhetorical intent as well as, if not better than, any modern interpreter and yet they opted to not use it themselves. This same problem was also picked up on by Mark's later copyists prompting them to add their own conclusion to the book: the longer and shorter endings we now have. It seems strange

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that Matthew and Luke would both deny themselves the rhetorical device Mark used, particularly in Luke's case since he could just as easily have included a post-resurrection narrative at the beginning of his gospel's companion volume, the Book of Acts (he did even include another post-resurrection appearance at the beginning of Acts); also, Luke ends the book of Acts with a similar rhetorical cliffhanger.

The argument can and should be made that Mark might have been a better and more subtle rhetorician than both Luke and Matthew. Mark often gets criticized for his cruder language and style but it should be kept in mind that using more accessible speech can be an effective rhetorical device as well, especially when your gospel is intended to be read to a crowd of believers who are trying to be disciples rather than philosophers. Mark's gospel is written in the popular tongue, is organized into short vignettes, shifts often from past tense to present tense to give the story more action, and escalates both the action and the tension throughout the narrative; if Matthew and Luke can be compared to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Mark is much more like J.K. Rowling. The simpler style Mark uses shouldn't tempt us into assuming he was a less capable author than the other canonical evangelists, after all, Mark cobbled together a masterful narrative out of fragments whereas, when Luke and Matthew wrote their own gospels they just stole Mark's narrative structure. It is therefore very plausible that Mark ended his gospel at the empty tomb for clever rhetorical reasons.

The converse theory that Mark originally did contain a post-resurrection narrative that was lost is usually called the "Lost Leaf" theory. This theory posits that sometime early in the Gospel of Mark's history the last page was lost and all of the remaining copies come down from that incomplete copy. The disadvantage of this theory is that there is no proof of this. Short of finding a manuscript of suitably ancient origin with the original ending somewhat intact there is no way to ever be sure; however, there are some very compelling reasons to believe it is the case. Of course, the most compelling argument for this theory is the strangeness of the empty tomb ending itself but there are a couple of other obvious arguments bound up in things that Mark says in his gospel and in the structure of the gospel itself.

In the final prophecy Jesus delivers about his resurrection he specifically says:

"But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” (14:28)

and when the women come upon the empty tomb the young man they find there says:

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“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” (16:6-7)

Both predict that Jesus will appear to the disciples in Galilee after his resurrection. It doesn't make much sense for Mark to predict a specific location where the disciples will see Jesus if his plan is to leave the ending of his gospel open for rhetorical effect; that would actually work totally against the purpose of such a rhetorical device. We already know from the apocalyptic passage of Chapter 13 that when Mark has Jesus predict something he likes to make sure those prophecies will come true. The question becomes then, why would Mark predict that the disciples would go to meet Jesus in Galilee and not have them meet him in Galilee? There is no good answer to that question.

Even though the two references to Galilee are impossible to explain well that doesn't, by itself, prove much about the "lost leaf" ending theory. However, couple those verses with a noticeable problem in the structure of the gospel and it really does make an excellent case. I'm not going to get too far into how Mark is structured because that could be a book in itself, but to understand what I'm going to say here I need to take a minute to explore and explain a rhetorical device called a "chiasmus". For ease in English I will use the anglicized terms 'chiasm' and 'chiasms' rather than the Greek. A chiasm is a rhetorical device that makes a statement or story by repeating the elements of the statement or story in forward and then reverse order. My favourite example of a simple chiasm is "the pure and simple truth is that the truth is rarely pure and never simple". Chiasms are particularly popular in oral cultures for their mnemonic properties; when a story reads with the same structure in the first half as the last half it makes it a lot easier to remember how it goes. The basic structure of a chiasm looks like this:

A). Introduction B). Exposition C). Main point, climax, or resolution of story B). Exposition that mirrors the earlier exposition. A). Conclusion that restates or recalls the introduction.

This is a basic structure, in actual use chiasms can be as short as Popeye's famous quote "I am what I am" and can be quite long with many mirrored points of exposition; the "B" sections of the above example could have dozens of points rather than just the one. The important

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thing to remember is that chiasms work differently than the narrative style we in the modern West are accustomed to: in a chiasm the climax of the story comes at the central point instead of towards the end.

Mark likes to use chiasms, in fact, he even creates chiasms by taking one narrative and inserting another one inside it; this is a device scholars of the New Testament name a "Markan Sandwich". The technical name of a Markan sandwich is a "textual interlocution"; an interlocution is a phenomenon where one narrative has been added to another narrative. There are many diverse representations of interlocutions and Markan sandwiches are just one of those types; they are also sometimes called a "Markan pericope". A Markan sandwich earns its name because of its fairly specific format; Markan sandwiches are short interlocutions that divide another fairly short story in half with symbolic effect and create a chiasm (more on Markan sandwiches in the Miscellany section). A good example of this is the cleansing of the temple/withering of the fig tree narrative in Mark (11:12-21):

A). Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

B). Then they came to Jerusalem.

C). And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.

D). He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”

C). And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.

B) And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

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A). In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.”

In this story Mark has inserted the cleansing of the temple inside the story of the withering of the fig tree (or he's wrapped the withering of the fig tree around the cleansing of the temple, however you like). Mark starts with Jesus cursing the fig tree, then they go into Jerusalem, then Jesus confronts the temple authorities by destroying the temple-related businesses, and the story reaches it's climax with Jesus quoting Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11 which simultaneously condemns the temple authorities and portrays Jesus as the voice of God, then the temple authorities plot to destroy Jesus, then they leave Jerusalem, then they discover the fig tree is withered. This is a perfect chiasm, they usually aren't this clear.

The main thing you need to know here is that Mark doesn't just like to use chiasms in his gospel, his entire gospel is a chiasm. Recall in the previous section where I mentioned that the transfiguration was in the centre of the gospel and that it wasn't a coincidence? This is why. Mark puts the most important moment in the centre of his gospel because his Gospel is a chiasm; well, actually it's almost a chiasm. I'm not going to get too far into the chiasm of Mark because no one really knows what exactly Mark's intentions were for his chiastic structure; some scholars narrow it down to a few main points but I've seen some lists that have fifty individual points. The basic structure is as follows:

A). Jesus appears, is baptized, and gathers his followers together in Gallilee

B). Jesus begins his ministry centred around Capernaum and challenges the Jewish authorities there. The authorities start plotting to kill Jesus (3:4)

C). Jesus delivers a long discourse

D). After the death of John the Baptist Jesus' travels are no longer centered around Capernaum but remains throughout the region of Galilee, Syria and the Trans-Jordan.

E). Jesus is transfigured on the mount before Peter, James, and John revealing his identity as the Son of God

D). Jesus and his followers travel south from Galilee toward Jerusalem. When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem he and his followers cleanse the temple.

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C). Jesus delivers a long discourse.

B). Jesus completes his ministry and the plot of the Jewish authorities to kill Jesus is realized in Jerusalem.

A). Jesus is resurrected.

The problem that is obvious here is that the conclusion of Mark's gospel doesn't mirror the beginning very well with its current ending. Mark should end with Jesus appearing in Galilee and gathering his disciples together again, which is exactly what is predicted in the earlier sections (14:28 and 16:6-7). By themselves these points are fairly small but when you consider together the strangeness of Mark's ending, the unfulfilled predictions of Jesus' meeting his disciples in Galilee, and the incomplete chiasm of Mark, it becomes a fairly convincing case that the original ending of Mark was lost.

The obvious question that comes up with the lost leaf theory is "if it did exist, what did the ending of Mark look like?". Yet again, we are left with the unique opportunity that Mark affords us: we have two good witnesses written within decades of Mark's autograph. Unfortunately, Matthew and Luke's narratives agree fairly well up until what is contained within Mark 16:8 and diverge from there on. There could be three main hypothesis for this: the last leaf of Mark could have been lost before either evangelist got their hands on a copy, it could have been lost before one of the two saw it but the other had it, or they both had the full copy of Mark but one didn't use Mark's post-resurrection narrative (you could give a fourth option: they both had it and neither used it, but the results are the same there as in option 1). Even though the hypothesis that the post-resurrection account of Mark is completely lost to us is still pretty likely there remains a chance that a form of it it is preserved in the post-resurrection account of Matthew. However, before we talk about that I should spend a minute on Luke and why it probably doesn't record any Markan post-resurrection material.

Mark's post-resurrection account, provided it did actually exist, would have been a fairly short narrative of Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee to close out the chiasm of Mark; this bears no resemblance to Luke's post-resurrection narrative. Luke's post-resurrection narrative is fairly long and contains no mention of Galilee at all. Luke's narrative, after it diverges from the empty tomb ending of Mark, mirrors some of the details of the first post-resurrection narrative of John (John ch.20). Both have Peter viewing the empty tomb, have Jesus appearing to the disciples suddenly inside a room with the greeting "peace be with

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you" (eirene hymin), have Jesus invite the disciples to touch him to confirm he has a physical body, have Jesus deliver a short benediction about the forgiveness of sins, and both take place in Jerusalem. Unlike Matthew's post-resurrection narrative, both Luke and John also have the people who see Jesus after his resurrection unable to recognize who he is until he reveals himself to them.

The question then follows if Luke had the complete copy of Mark or if incomplete copies were already in circulation? Luke was written sometime around the end of the first century or the beginning of the second giving Mark's ending plenty of time to get out of circulation. The possibility remains that Luke had a complete copy of Mark but used this other narrative because he preferred it; Luke only copies about half of the known portion of Mark into his narrative so the notion that he would have edited the post-resurrection narrative out in favour of his community's preferred version is unsurprising, especially considering Mark's version wouldn't have been very long.

Matthew's post-resurrection account is the more likely of the two to contain any material from Mark's. Despite the fact that Matthew's gospel is by far the longest of the canonical gospels (it's almost twice as long as Mark), and Matthew's Jesus is the most verbose (if you took only the words Jesus says in Matthew it would be about two thirds the length of Mark), Matthew's post-resurrection account is very brief and Jesus says almost nothing in it. The length of Matthew's post-resurrection account seems much more appropriate for Mark's gospel and it has Jesus reuniting with his disciples in Galilee as Mark's narrative predicts. It wouldn't be at all surprising to have Mark's account extant within the writing of Matthew as he is Mark's most diligent copyist; of Mark's six hundred and sixty known verses, over six hundred have parallels in Matthew. Even so, this isn't a clear case.

Even if we assume for the moment that Matthew does preserve Mark's post-resurrection narrative within his own, he definitely changed it. Matthew has a story in his post-resurrection narrative of the chief priests bribing the guards to lie and say that Jesus' followers stole his body that ends with the statement, "this story is reported among some Jews even today" (Matthew 28:11-15). Although Mark is demonstrably not afraid to recriminate his perceived enemies through symbol and metaphor he never breaks the continuity of his narrative to address the audience directly and he uses terms like "the scribes", "the pharisees", or "the priests" to describe Jesus' detractors. Matthew was a Jew writing for a Jewish community and when he uses the term "Jews" he's not using it with the same vitriol John has, he is referring to "some Jews" who aren't Jesus followers. The last sentence is something that Mark wouldn't use, nevertheless, the rest of this section takes place within the

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story's narrative and portrays "the chief priests" as nefarious characters in precisely the way Mark would.

Furthermore, in the other two events of this narrative, when Jesus appears to Mary and when he appears to his disciples, in both cases they worship Jesus. Mark doesn't write this way; nowhere in Mark is Jesus worshipped by his disciples. In fact, only one person worships Jesus in Mark, The Gerasene Demoniac (5:6), for reasons that I'll discuss in the miscellany section. In many points of Mark's narrative he has people being amazed by Jesus' acts but he keeps Jesus' identity secret in his story whereas Matthew has people worshipping Jesus fairly often. For instance this passage in Mark:

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!” Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. (Mark 1:40-42)

Becomes this when Matthew copies it:

and there was a leper who came to him and worshipped him, saying, 'Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.' He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, 'I do choose. Be made clean!' Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. (Matthew8:2-3)

Or this passage after Jesus walks on water:

MARK: "Then he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased. And they were utterly amazed" (6:51)

MATTHEW: When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” (14:33-34)

Or the passage Matthew added to his rendition of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter:

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But she came and worshipped him, saying, “Lord, help me.” (Matthew 15:25, compare to Mark 7:25-27 for how Matthew changed this narrative, or read my Miscellany section where I will explain it more fully)

Also, Matthew modifies Mark's narrative again and, where Mark has James and John requesting to sit at Jesus' right and left side, has the mother of James and John worshipping Jesus and making the request on their behalf:

MARK: James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” (Mark 10:35)

MATTHEW: Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to him with her sons and, worshipping him, she asked a favour of him. (Matthew 20:20)

As you can see, Matthew changes Mark's text often to have people worshipping Jesus. Matthew does this to suit his theological interpretation where Jesus is recognized as the son of God, quite literally, from day one.

The portion known as "The Great Commission" (Matthew 28:18-20) reads as something strange for Matthew. After Jesus says all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him he tells the eleven to "go out and make disciples of all nations" which is at odds with Matthew's anti-gentile sentiment elsewhere in the gospel; Matthew changed the Syrophoenician woman's story to have Jesus say "I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel", now he wants disciples to be made of all the gentile races? It's a bit weird and that statement would seem a lot more at home in Mark than Matthew. This passage does, however, close out the chiasm of Mark beautifully. Let me spell this out by comparing elements of the great commission to the themes from Mark's introduction point by point:

1). And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." Compares to: They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. (Mark 1:22)

2). "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations"

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Compared to Jesus' words: “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” (Mark 1:38)

3). "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" Compared to what John the Baptist says: "I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:8)

4). Here is Jesus' final statement in Matthew compared to his first statement in Mark: "teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you, and remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Compares to: Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:14)

Obviously these aren't perfect comparisons and that may have to do with Matthew's editing. For instance Mark's text could have only been "baptize them in the holy spirit" and Matthew added the Trinitarian view (there's also a credible theory that even Matthew's Trinity might have been added by later editors). Also, the wording "obey everything I have commanded you" seems much more like a Matthean statement than a Markan one. However, this could all also be totally wrong; one of the things you definitely have to guard against in any textual criticism is the danger of finding patterns because you are looking for them and not because they actually exist.

Finally, Matthew's post-resurrection account fits the structure of a Markan sandwich perfectly. If you read Matthew 28:5-20 you have this structure:

A). An angel appears to the women to tell them Jesus is not there and that they should go forth and tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee

B). Jesus appears to the women and he tells them not to be afraid

Begin pericope C). The guards go to the temple authorities and tell them what happened

D). The chief priests bribe the guards to say Jesus body was stolen, this reveals the motivation for the lie is fear rather than doubt.

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C). The guards leave to tell the lie. End pericope

B). Jesus appears to his disciples in Galilee and tells them all authority has been given to him.

A). Jesus tells the disciples to go forth and make disciples of all nations and that he is always with them

This fits the form of a Markan sandwich better than anything else Matthew writes. Obviously since Matthew used copies of both Mark and Q, as well as some material which is unique to his gospel which could have come from some other source as well, it isn't strange to see narratives being fused together in the gospel of Matthew. With at least three sources edited together into one cohesive narrative it is no surprise that Matthew's gospel is rife with pericopes; however, none of them bear out the same style as a Markan sandwich except this one spot.

Aside from the obvious items I pointed out the rest of the narrative reads as entirely in line with what Mark would write. In particular, the part where Matthew has Jesus appearing first to the women who came to his tomb, a detail not related in Paul's account, fits more into Mark's narrative with its pro-woman bias than in Matthew's gospel. If you remove the part where Matthew breaks the continuity of his narrative to make an aside to the audience (Matthew 28:15) and change the two parts where Jesus is worshipped to just having the people "amazed" by his appearance then Matthew's post-resurrection narrative fits Mark like an old sweater. You would be left with a post-resurrection narrative that has Jesus appearing first to the women that followed him who Mark portrays as the only followers that didn't desert Jesus at the end, has the chief priests corruptly plotting against Jesus' followers which is something we already know Mark adds to his narrative, and ends with Jesus appearing to the disciples in Galilee exactly as Mark predicted and delivering a speech that mirrors Mark's introductory passage. Furthermore, all of this is wrapped up in the form of a Markan sandwich. There is a chance we may be reading Mark's post-resurrection account somewhere behind Matthew's.

What does this mean? Did Mark have an ending and did Matthew copy it? Or is the lost leaf hypothesis wrong and Mark ended his gospel with a rhetorical fishhook to draw his audience in? Unfortunately, this is all conjectural at this point. Barring the discovery of new early manuscript evidence of Mark that has an as yet undiscovered ending we'll never know for

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certain that it actually had one. Furthermore if Mark truly did end at the empty tomb there's no proving it short of finding a copy of Mark that is demonstrably the autograph, something I would say is about as likely as finding Bigfoot; the odds of finding the autograph are astronomically low, the odds of proving it is the autograph would be functionally zero.

Nothing I have presented to you here should be considered definitive, rather, these are the three best hypotheses as to why Mark ends the way it does:

1). Mark ends at the empty tomb, leaving it open ended as a rhetorical device to draw the audience in.

2). The lost leaf theory, part 1 - the Gospel of Mark did have an ending but it is now lost to us.

3). The lost leaf theory, part 2 - the Gospel of Mark did have an ending and it is partially preserved in the post-resurrection account of Matthew.

Beyond these, every theory I've read about is one degree or another of hokum. As I said earlier, I prefer the first theory for sentimental reasons but for intellectual reasons the lost leaf hypothesis is more convincing. I leave it up to you to decide where exactly you come down on this issue.

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Conclusion

We have examined the three types of sources Mark used and the three visions of Jesus that came with that: a spiritual miracle worker, a wisdom sage, and a divine salvational figure. Mark's gospel combined not just those three sources but those three Jesuses. To Mark Jesus was a wisdom sage, a miracle worker, and a salvation figure but he was even more than the sum of all those things; to Mark and his community Jesus was the son of God. Mark weaves what had to be many different views of the life of Jesus and the meaning of his ministry into one novel view that our world now takes for granted. Today the view of Jesus' life that comes out of Mark is such a large part of Christianity that its strangeness -and boldness- is largely lost in the modern context. However, at that time the idea of the miraculously powerful and preternaturally wise son of the highest God who lived a life of humility, suffering, and death and then conquered all of that through his resurrection is so weird that it is a wonder it survived at all. This "Son of God" they believed in was just so strange.

Therein lies the greatest frustration to understanding the most ancient followers of Jesus: I know what most modern Christians are saying when they say Jesus is the son of God but that definitely was not what Mark meant. Jesus has been irretrievably altered by nearly two millennia of intervening theological development. I would very much love to pick the brain of the Markan community to see what they believed being the son of God meant to them. One thing was sure, to the Markan community Jesus was an absolutely unprecedented event, no prophet of the Jewish scriptures or demigod of the Pagan traditions could compare. Jesus was the one and only son of God meant specifically for their community.

In Jesus they saw a powerful supernatural figure meant for them because he was one of them. Despite having amazing power and wisdom he suffered like they did, he faced uncertainty like them, he was rejected by family and abandoned by friends just like they were. To them, Jesus was the most powerful figure to ever live who yet chose to live like them and show them how to live exemplary lives. The Greek demigods and heroes lived lives of greatness above the common people, even the Jewish prophets were -for the most part- men of power and esteem, but Jesus, who was greater than any of these to the community of Mark, had lived a life of common humility, troubles, and suffering. Given the world in which this community lived this was such an extremely bold reimagining of contemporary religion that it deserves more respect than it gets. This idea has reshaped our world over the intervening centuries. The Gospel of Mark is proof that a small group of people with a bold idea and passion can change everything, Is it any wonder I find this subject so compelling?

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Allow me to end this with a short list of caveats. This exposition is my attempt to walk even the most uninitiated through the real history of the Gospel of Mark. I have tried to give as much information as I can to help a person in such an endeavour, but I have not given all of the possible information. What I hope I have given here is an interesting read that covers the most reasonable theory of how the Gospel of Mark came to be. However, I really do want to make you aware of the fact that this is not the only theory nor is it the only reasonable theory. There are many other credible theories that would differ from the theories I've offered here. There are a variety of theories that scholars would suggest: that The Gospel of John is textually dependent on the Synoptics, that the Gospel of Thomas is dependent on the New Testament, that the author of Mark was aware of the Pauline writings, that Q and the Signs Gospel didn't exist, and more. Simply because I consider these theories less reasonable does not mean I consider them unreasonable.

There are plenty of unreasonable theories on how the New Testament was made but there are also a variety of reasonable but divergent theories. For the most part the Gospel of Mark comes together in basically the same way regardless of the theory used, by gathering previously existing sayings, miracle, and passion traditions to create a bios style gospel. Changes in source assumptions mainly alters the way in which these sources were used, not the types. Some theories would suggest that Mark didn't use sources and most of the gospel's material was created by its evangelist. Another theory suggests that Mark was almost entirely copied from a now lost earlier bios style gospel called "ur-Mark" and that Mark merely expanded and edited ur-Mark in much the same way Matthew did Mark; given that case ur-Mark would have been created in much the same way I just showed you the Gospel of Mark was. If you enjoyed what I wrote here I would encourage you not to stop, use this as a jumping off point to learn more.

Enjoy learning.

Be amazing.

Thanks for reading, Travis Benson.

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Part 10

Miscellany

This section is for the miscellaneous facts that are important to know but really don't fit perfectly into the rest of this narrative or require a little more attention than the rest. The point of this section is to have somewhere to put these orphan stories but also to have a section that I can expand by adding other points if I think of them later or if someone asks me to. These points will be organized loosely with numbers. I'll start with a section dedicated to Markan sandwiches.

Markan Sandwiches

Mark has an editorial habit that is particular to him that scholars call a "Markan sandwich"; this is a phenomenon where Mark divides a story at its mid point and inserts another story in the middle of it. These sandwiches are one of the easiest places to divine that Mark is editing the story to add a meaning specific to his community. I figured I should make a section for these sandwiches because there are three sections particularly in Mark that leave people somewhat confused. These parts are difficult for people to understand because of their symbolism and, when people are left to interpret these passages without the aid of a solid education on mythological themes, they invariably interpret them entirely wrong; or at least, not in the way Mark intended. In all Mark has nine of these sandwiches but I will only focus on three of them here because most of hem don't present anything problematic to the average reader. For instance, the healing of Jairus' daughter is sandwiched around the healing of a woman with a hemorrhage but nothing about that sandwich bothers most readers and people tend to not really notice its peculiar literary structure.

1). The healing of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter. (Mark7:24-30)

You may remember the discussion of this one in part 6, here I want to pay attention to the dialogue that's been inserted into the Healing at a Distance miracle. The exchange between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman in this passage is often taken as proof of Jesus' anti-gentile views. The first and most obvious objection to this idea is that Mark decides what Jesus' political views are in his gospel so the assumption that this passage represents the

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original views of Jesus is faulty from the start; however, even aside from that this is most emphatically not an anti-gentile passage, completely the opposite in fact. Most people assume this to be an anti-gentile narrative because most people prefer to read Matthew rather than Mark. Let's have a look in Mark first:

Now the woman was a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She entreated him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For your wisdom, go! The demon has left your daughter.” (7:26-29)

And now Matthew:

Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shrieking, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shrieking after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and worshipped him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” (Matthew 15:22-28)

As you can see, Matthew has changed this exchange quite a bit to fit his own particular anti-gentile bias. First, he changed the woman's ethnicity to Canaanite, because Syrophoenician was far too gentile for his sensitivities. He has her crying to the disciples; the word I translate as "shrieking" in Matthew is "ekrazen" which is best translated as "shriek like a crow". He added a section where Jesus completely ignores her and actually portrays the woman herself as if she were some mangy, stray dog baying after the disciples until they beg Jesus to "send her away, for she keeps shrieking after us" (the word here is "krazei", another form of ekrazen). At this point she approaches Jesus directly and the word that gets translated "worshipped" is "proskeuno" which translates as "came before him like a dog" (though, in fairness, this is the word Matthew uses for Jewish worshippers as well). This woman in Matthew is portrayed as so passive it borders on offensive and Jesus and his disciples' behaviour toward her (and by extension, all gentiles) is beyond offensive. Jesus and the woman then have their verbal exchange and Jesus tells her that her faith has healed her child. The important thing to remember is that Matthew copied this text from Mark and as

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such any change from Mark is a Matthean imposition on the text; as you'll see, it is a big imposition.

Mark's text in this passage is actually remarkably pro-gentile, a fact that Matthew didn't appreciate which led to his extensive redaction of it. The first thing you notice is that Mark specifies that the woman is a gentile and has no narrative about Jesus ignoring her or her grovelling before him. There's a good example here of how translators tend to harmonize the gospel accounts more than they should in English because the word in Mark that is translated in the NRSV as "begged" means something like "request" or "entreat" whereas the word in Matthew that is translated as "knelt before" means "came before him like a dog"; "begged" and "knelt before" sound fairly similar but the original Greek words could hardly paint a more different picture.

In Mark Jesus responds to the woman's entreaty by saying, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs" which is a reference to her being a gentile. Matthew's rendition doesn't contain "let the children be fed first" as that implies that Jesus' ministry is open to Gentiles as well as Jews, albeit to Jews first. This statement is very similar to a different saying that comes from Matthew and (presumably) Thomas. In Matthew we find this saying:

“Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you." (7:6)

This saying may very well be from Q source because it comes with the "judging others" discourse of Matthew 7:1-6 that has parallels in Luke 6:37-38,41-42. Being that Luke is a gentile writer and Matthew is an anti-gentile writer it is about the same likelihood that Luke would have edited that saying out as that Matthew would have put it in; although it doesn't fit that well with the "do not judge" statement that precedes it in Matthew. This verse has an assumed parallel in a damaged portion of Thomas as well; what remains of Thomas saying 93 reads:

"Don't give what is sacred to dogs, for they might throw them upon the manure pile. Don't throw pearls [to] pigs, or they might . . . it [. . .]."

the fact that this appears in Thomas which dates to the turn of the first century and Matthew which dates to the eighties of the first century tells us this comes from an earlier strata of

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sayings tradition, one that Mark might have known, one that might even have been the inspiration for Jesus' statement to the Syrophoenician woman.

The exchange that Jesus has with the Syrophoenician woman should be very familiar to the reader of Mark while at the same time having a very eye-opening difference. This is the model of adversarial chreia that Mark likes to use where a challenge is made and a pithy rejoinder is delivered to the challenger. Mark has Jesus besting his opponents in these pronouncements all over the gospel but this case is a little different; in this exchange Jesus gets bested by the Syrophoenician woman, have another look:

Challenge: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Response: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Nowhere else in Mark is Jesus on the losing side of a chreia. The exchange here is designed as a response to the anti-gentile sentiment that was likely being passed around in Jewish Christian circles, a sentiment that Mark's community no doubt would have been experiencing.

Jesus' response to the woman after she bests him is very complimentary:

“For this LOGON, go—the demon has left your daughter.”

That word, "Logos", is a word that has no analogue in English. I could write a dissertation on this one word and it's meaning, it is normally translated here as "saying" which is possibly the most paltry interpretation of this word you could have. "Logos" in Greek meant "word", "wisdom", "knowledge" and more. During the Greco-Roman period there was a whole religio-philosophical school of thought called Pythagoreanism that believed the divine principle that made the whole universe work was "logos". The beginning of the gospel of John is called the hymn to the logos because in that passage Jesus was the divine "logos" (word) sent from God for the salvation of the world. Finally, every English word that ends with the suffix "logy" comes from that Greek word, ie. psychology ="psyche" "logos" or "mind knowledge", anthropology = "anthropos" "logos" or "human knowledge", etc. Hopefully you get the picture that "saying" is probably not the best translation of "logos" in this context; Jesus isn't praising this woman for the words she's saying, he's praising her for her wisdom. What that translation should look like is:

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“Because of your wisdom, go—the demon has left your daughter.”

This is why Matthew changed the word "logos" to the word "pistis" (faith), because admitting her wisdom would mean giving her some equality with Jesus which would be unconscionable to Matthew, yet was exactly the point in Mark. Mark has Jesus crediting people's faith in other miracles (5:34,10:32) but here he credits her wisdom.

To sum this up in literal terms, Mark's rendition of this passage is entirely pro-gentile (and also fairly pro-woman). He has the woman, a known gentile, approach Jesus as a supplicant in a way that is not submissive and asking to heal her daughter. Jesus tells her that he shouldn't because she's a gentile and she retorts that the gentiles should get what the children of God don't want. Jesus is impressed enough by this response that he praises her wisdom and heals her daughter. It is a fairly common theme in the Gospel of Mark that outsiders make better disciples of Jesus than his actual disciples but no person in Mark is portrayed as quite so impressive as the Syrophoenician woman. This woman, in one short exchange, is portrayed as getting the better of Jesus in a way no Pharisee or priest does and understanding his ministry better than his disciples ever do. It is also no coincidence that this pro-gentile passage comes directly on the heels of Jesus' third discourse in Mark (7:1-23) which refutes the ritual cleanliness laws of Judaism and opposes Pharisaic traditions. Mark here is actually making a bold statement of inclusiveness for gentiles rather than its opposite.

As I said in the beginning, this passage is often quoted as proof of Jesus' anti-gentile bias because people tend to prefer Matthew to Mark. In point of fact, when people look to confirm that Jesus had an anti-gentile bias they tend to look almost exclusively to Matthew's narrative; as this examination proves, that is not a very good idea since Matthew himself is the one with the anti-gentile bias and is willing to change the text he copies into his gospel to reflect such. It is very important to remember that Mark's narrative doesn't necessarily represent Jesus' personality any better than Matthew's, only that in this case the anti-gentile bias was added by the later editor.

2). The Symbolism of the Legion Miracle. (Mark 5:1-20)

The healing of the Gerasene Demoniac, or "the Legion miracle", gives me a chance to talk about something that is actually very common in the Early Christian writings, including the New Testament: secretly seditious writings. This story is nowhere quite as seditious as the Revelation of John but Mark is, nonetheless, taking quite a risk. The use of symbol and

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metaphor is quite common in religious literature and Mark's gospel is no exception, however, in this case the symbol and metaphor serve a dual purpose. The Roman Empire did not have a modern attitude toward the free exercise of speech. If you wrote something that Rome didn't like they'd make good and sure that you didn't write a sequel and they would encourage everyone else from reading it; of course, the Romans would accomplish this by nailing your hands to some handy wood. So, if you wanted to write something seditious without yourself and all your friends coming down with a sudden case of genocide you had to be sure to write it in such a way that an outsider had no idea what it actually meant or it could be easily denied but the meaning was still obvious to those of the community. This miracle is an example of such.

This story is a bit different than the other Markan sandwiches I'll mention in the sense that there is no independent confirmation that either the story or the miracle in which it is sandwiched predate Mark. It seems likely that the miracle story would predate Mark but there is no outside indication of such. The narrative about "Legion", however, shows extensive editorial influence that almost definitely came from Mark. If this miracle was an earlier tradition it would have been nearly unrecognizable once Mark was finished with it.

The implication of this seditious passage is pretty obvious with the use of the name "Legion" for the possessed man. The strength of this story probably lies more in its deniability rather than its obscurity. A legion was a military unit of the Roman army that was comprised entirely of Roman citizens; non-citizens could only qualify to serve in auxiliary units. Mark portrays the Legion as a madman who "lived among the tombs" which could be a reference to the idea that in Judaism living amongst tombs made a person ritually unclean or could have been a reference to the fact that Gerasa was a Hellenistic city actually physically built on top of major burial ground. The story goes on to say he had often been chained but no one was able to restrain him any longer, which could very well be a reference to the wanton destruction of Jerusalem that occurred at the end of the Jewish War; according to Josephus, Titus had ordered that the temple not be destroyed but it was nevertheless. After this short exposition Mark inserts this story:

When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and worshipped before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torture me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding;

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and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.

To the casual reader this story is a bizarre economic and ecological disaster; imagine the impact of losing that much livestock as well as the effects of having thousands of dead swine in a water supply, is it any wonder they would want Jesus to leave? This leads a lot of modern readers to see this as both a very strange and very negative passage. In reality the passage is intended as symbolic of Jesus' spiritual authority being superior to Rome's military authority. Keep in mind that this story follows Jesus' discourse about the empire of God, an empire Mark and his community saw as a real alternative to the Roman empire, and Mark's first water miracle which is a symbolic apocalypse that establishes Jesus' authority over everything, including a storm (or the uncertainty and persecution that storm was a symbol of).

In this narrative the legion is portrayed as immediately afraid and submissive to Jesus, identifying him as the son of the most high God; assumably this is in reference to the Caesars, some of which were considered gods and sons of gods but not of "the most high God". He then begs Jesus not to torture him which is Mark's way of letting the audience know Jesus has absolute control over the legion, that even though the legion has been terrorizing everyone else they immediately recognize Jesus as the greater authority and beg for mercy in abject fear of his power. The legion asks Jesus to send them into a herd of swine and once he does the entire herd flees from Jesus and ends up drowning themselves in the sea. This whole narrative is a symbolic war where Jesus effortlessly defeats the Roman legion through the power of God.

The meaning of casting the legion out into a herd of pigs could be many things, it may just be a matter of humiliation, in relation to Gerasa being a largely gentile region, or because Romans are generally gentiles. Burton Mack in his book "Who Wrote The New Testament" makes the observation that the Roman Tenth Fretensis Legion's Emblem was a Boar; this was the legion that was based in Judea and Syria and one of them that participated in the destruction of the city and the temple. This story could very well be in reference to that legion and would fit with Mack's assumption that Mark might have been written in Syria. The part of Mark's apocalyptic discourse that refers to "the abomination of desolation" could very likely be in reference to a Roman legion whose banner was a wild pig destroying the Jewish temple and Josephus relates that they erected their flag within the ruins.

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Mark has used this story as a symbol to his audience that Jesus' power was both greater than the Roman military Empire and also that he was the solution to the affliction that was Roman rule. Everything we know from the internal cues of Mark paints a picture of largely poor and marginalized group that did not care for the Roman empire any more than they did for the Jewish authorities. Add to this the fact that the idea of "the Empire of God", an idea that is possibly the most widely attested concept from the earliest age of Christian tradition, is a slightly seditious idea to begin with and Mark is making a very audacious statement here. Even though this symbolic narrative would sound a bit silly to anyone who doesn't believe in it, to the community of Mark this was serious, they believed what it said. The community of Mark believed their God was greater than the Roman gods and their empire was more powerful than the Roman empire. The Roman empire had no sense of humour when it came to seditious religious groups; as the Jewish revolt shows, Rome wasn't above massacring people by the tens and hundreds of thousands to put down a rebellion and certainly wasn't above brutalizing hundreds to put down a potential rebellion. Make no mistake, Mark was risking his life writing something this incendiary.

3). The Withering of the Fig Tree. (11:12-21)

The withering of the fig tree miracle contained in Mark is another area that people have some trouble with. Most notably, Julia Sweeney in her excellent comedy routine/narration of her despiritual journey "Letting Go Of God", makes the observation that this miracle really does make Jesus seem like a bit of a jerk. Much like the passages with the Syrophoenician woman and the Gerasene Demoniac, the passage where Jesus goes out of his way to kill a fig tree because he's hungry and figs aren't in season is only weird until you understand what Mark was saying.

In the case of the fig tree, the story that gets sandwiched into this miracle is the cleansing of the temple. We know John's rendition of the cleansing of the temple doesn't include any reference to a fig tree (John 2:13-20) so the story of the tree is most likely the creation of Mark. In this case Mark is making the fig tree a symbol of the temple. It isn't a terribly difficult symbol to catch the meaning of: Jesus examines the fig tree to find it is not producing what he wants so he curses it, he and the disciples then go to the temple in Jerusalem to find it not producing what God wants so Jesus curses the Temple, then they return to Bethany and find the fig tree withered. The natural progression of the symbol Mark is using here is that it is Jesus' curse that eventually causes the destruction of the temple during Mark's day.

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The story of the fig tree fits well with the type of folk imagery that seems popular amongst the early followers of Jesus where disciples are like seeds and the kingdom is like a mustard bush. Mark has Peter notice that the fig tree is withered and that prompts Jesus to launch into a short speech about prayer and faith which ends with a verse that mirrors a Q saying from "The Lord's Prayer". Compare Mark's narrative:

Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. (11:25-26)

To the Q source:

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. (Matt 6:12)

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. (Luke 11:4)

The message Mark is getting across to his community is multifaceted. He is starting by saying that Jesus cursed the temple in the same way he cursed the fig tree and God answered that prayer in time. Obviously by the time Mark was written many things had happened in Mark's community that were unexpected by the disciples, the acrimonious split with the Jews and Jewish Christians, the death of many Jesus followers including prominent leaders, and certainly the Jewish war just to name a few. Mark is framing this story in that perspective as a message to maintain faith because the things his community prayed for would happen; the message Jesus delivers to Peter here is the one Mark is delivering to the community: keep the faith and forgive.

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Was Mark Written By A Woman?

Most people assume Mark was written by a man and the likelihood is that those people are right. Even today, across the world we live in, men have more easy access to education and are more encouraged to pursue education than women. The ancient world, in which education was so much rarer a commodity than it is today, was even more skewed toward male privilege. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility that Mark was written by a woman. The fact that women were less likely to be formally educated is very different than saying women were not formally educated. Archeological and historical records are rife with examples of women who achieved levels of accomplishment and public respect that defy both ancient prejudices against women and modern assumptions about the place of women in ancient cultures. Paul in his letters often greets women as prominent members of his community, including one named Junia in the closing chapter of Romans who he counts as "outstanding among the apostles". The second century pagan critic Celsus also mentions repeatedly that Christianity was comprised of mostly women and slaves.

The author of Mark shows a curious deference or even affinity to female figures throughout the gospel. In Mark, Jesus' opponents are always men and, of his true supporters, the male disciples are portrayed as buffoons and inconstant. In the end Jesus is abandoned by all but his female followers. Conversely, the women whom Jesus encounters in the gospel are portrayed in a positive light. Chiefly there are four places in Mark where women are prominently featured: the woman with a hemorrhage (5:24-34), the Syrophoenician woman (7:24-30), the woman who anoints Jesus (14:3-9), and the women who follow Jesus at the cross and his grave (15:40-41, 16:1-4). Even though this isn't specifically about Markan sandwiches it does bear mentioning that all four of those narratives are sandwiches; that tells us that these stories are an important part of Mark. I will go through these stories briefly and say a little about how they interrelate.

The first of these women that Jesus encounters is the woman with a hemorrhage whose story breaks the narrative of Jesus raising a little girl from the dead. The narrative makes clear that this woman has been afflicted for years, has seen many doctors, and spent all her money but had only gotten worse, yet she hears of Jesus and believes she will be made well if she only touches his clothes. When she does touch Jesus' clothes she is healed but Jesus immediately challenges: "who touched my clothes?". The woman comes forward "in fear and

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trembling" to admit what she has done. Compare this passage where a scared woman is challenged by a man and his entourage and admits what she has done to the passage at Jesus' trial where Peter is challenged by a servant girl and denies Jesus three times (14:66-71), to Mark this woman has much more courage than the greatest of the apostles. When she reveals herself to Jesus he defies expectation and says:

“Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

In this sentence Jesus calls her "daughter", something he never calls anyone else, then he praises her for her faith and sends her off with a benediction. This woman is being portrayed as a model for the faith for the Markan community

Having already spent a fair amount of exposition on the Syrophoenician woman I won't go through that story as much, but in the above section I wrote about her being a gentile, here I would like to focus more on the importance of her as a woman. In this story when she is challenged dismissively by Jesus she retorts with the right answer which implies she not only understands what Jesus is saying but she's sharper than expected. Compare this to the male disciples who constantly ask Jesus to explain what he means and miss the whole point of the Transfiguration; to Mark this woman is smarter than the disciples. After she answers his challenge Jesus once again defies expectation and says:

“Because of your wisdom, go—the demon has left your daughter.”

Jesus praises this woman for her wisdom and sends her on her way. This woman is portrayed as a model of wisdom to the Markan community.

The woman who anoints Jesus is a story with a lot of imagery and references packed into a very small package. The first thing you need to understand is that this is a reference back to the anointing of the Israelite kings. Normally these anointing were performed by the high prophet of Israel, in this case that office is replaced by a woman; this woman is filling some very big shoes. The "nard" she uses is imported from the Himalayas and the narrative says it could sell for more than three hundred denarii, which was a year's wages for a labourer. When the disciples see this it angers them that the money didn't go to the poor and they scold her for it; it seems that the disciples have no problem criticizing her despite her wealth and their low status within society. This time Jesus defies expectation once again and leaps to the woman's defence scolding the disciples instead, saying:

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“Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

This is a very resounding endorsement from Jesus. This time Jesus is praising her for what she has done for him. Mark portrays this woman as doing more for him than his disciples; compare this to the disciples not even being able to stay awake with him at the hour of his arrest. Mark is holding her up as a model of service to the Markan community.

In all three of these cases the women are praised by Jesus and held up as role models of faith, wisdom, and service. The disciples are not held up as role models in this way; if anything Jesus' male disciples are held up as cautionary tales of how not to be disciples. The most obvious thing that needs to be said about this is that all three of these role models were women and they didn't have to be. Mark could have made these stories about men; even if these stories weren't originally written by Mark it would have been a simple exercise in shifting pronouns to change their gender or he could have simply not included the stories at all. The fact that these three characters are women was intentional and it means something for Mark. The problem for the modern reader is that we have no idea what it might have meant and what Mark's intention was so we are left to conjecture.

There are plenty of good reasons for Mark to make the disciples of Jesus seem like a bunch of fools. If the book of Acts is anything to go by, the original companions of Jesus had become mythological figures in their own right only a couple or a few decades after Mark was written. Even in Paul's writings, which precede Mark's gospel by a couple decades, he counts apostles as the highest authority of the church (1Cor 12:28) and names some of his opponents "super-great apostles" (2Cor 11:5), which probably were those who had travelled with Jesus during his life. It's a natural progression for most new religions that a cult of celebrity grows up around those who knew the charismatic founder figure but it can be problematic as well. Setting other believers up as heroic figures tends to be an exercise in frustration for other believers because it's human nature to compare the idealized view of others to the extremely realistic view of the self. By bringing Jesus' disciples down to a much more attainable, even surpassable, standard Mark can actually provide a healthy dose of much needed encouragement to a community in hard times.

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It is also a consideration that the disciples of Jesus are portrayed as missing Jesus' message for a more political reason within Mark's context. The companions of Jesus, from what little we can gather of them from the traditions that remain to us and mostly what Paul says in his letters, represented the Jewish iteration of the Jesus movement. Mark's community seems to have been just recently on the painful side of an acrimonious split from the Jewish Jesus movement. Even though Mark in his gospel gives preferential treatment specifically to Peter, James, and John at many points, which implies they were probably important figures in his community's past, it is advantageous now to portray them as not understanding Jesus' message as a way of invalidating Jewish followers of Jesus in favour of his own community of disciples. As you can see, the demotion of Jesus' male followers is easily understandable and fits some very effective rhetorical purposes, however, the elevation of the women remains still mysterious.

Theories abound about the elevation of these three women, and I emphasize the word "theory", we will never be certain of Mark's motives. Combining the three elevated women with the many passages which paint Jesus' male followers in a negative light which culminates in all of the men deserting Jesus at the end and only the women remaining faithful followers creates a pretty obvious pro-female bias in this gospel. Mark even includes a passage when the guards seize Jesus where a young man eludes capture by slipping out of his clothes and fleeing naked which is probably symbolic of the male disciples' cowardice and lack of faith being "exposed" as they fled (14:51-52). This has led some people to come to the fairly likely conclusion that the Markan community was comprised of mostly women; from there the conjecture follows that possibly the community had women in very prominent roles and that the author of the gospel may very well have been a woman. This is not at all a ridiculous theory; though it remains unprovable I and many others would place this theory easily in the realm of possibility. Given the current woes of the community and Mark's predilection for symbolic recriminations this could be the evangelists way of condemning the men of the community for abandoning the faith when times got rough.

Of course, there are other possible explanations. For an example, as already discussed the Markan community was a gentile community and could very well have been based in a Hellenistic city with a thriving Goddess cult. The veneration of the Virgin Mary within Christianity can be traced back to the Council of Ephesus where political maneuvering had the council placed in Ephesus to produce the most favourable outcome for the Christians who venerated Mary. Ephesus was a city dedicated to the worship of the virgin goddess Artemis, which in turn meant that the veneration of the Virgin Mary was also very popular amongst the local Christians. The fact is, local cultures always have an effect on a religion. It isn't a

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coincidence that Central American Catholic iconography so prominently features human hearts (sometimes anatomically correct ones); once you consider the religious life of the Aztecs who populated the region previously that one becomes pretty obvious. It doesn't matter how different a religion is from its in situ culture, that culture will bleed through because the people who belong to the new religious community were still raised in and live in that culture; that culture suffuses their identity and in turn will colour their participation in the new religion. When we study religions the world over this trend of cultural appropriation is so commonplace that the groups that really stupefy us are the ones who manage to be part of any culture for an extended period and not have this happen. In the end Mark could be so pro-female because it was written by and for people who lived in a culture accustomed to the prominence of female figures in their cultural and religious mythology.

In the end we'll probably never know the underlying source of Mark's pro-female bias. There may be reasons for it that we can't even guess at. When the answer is lost to history it is the natural inclination of academics to examine the possibilities and create and refine our understanding based on what is most likely. Facts don't always work in the same way; sometimes the actual answer is so outlandish that it makes the more reasonable fiction seem preferable. However, in this case I think it is important to remember that Mark has a very pro-woman bias, especially in the face of so many people who would like to reimagine the bible as misogynistic and those who would be tempted to assume misogyny as the default setting of human history . It should be very important to keep in mind that Mark could very well have been Maria.

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5). Was Mark a Gnostic Gospel?

The short answer to this question would have to be no. If you've read this far you know I'm not going to leave you with just the short answer. Mark wasn't a gnostic gospel any more than it was a centrist gospel. If you wanted to categorize Mark the best you could do is to say Mark was an early gospel because it was written at a time when the Jesus community hadn't decided what they believed. Saying what Mark and his community believed is difficult because what we understand about early sectarian divisions within the Jesus movement are most likely post-Markan developments. The easiest division of major sectarian groups in the early movement is along the lines of what is called "Christology", or what groups believed was the nature of Jesus, and those have four major divisions (that we know of):

Adoptionist Christology - The belief that Jesus was a man like any other who became the Christ/Messiah because of his exemplary life. He was adopted as the son of God at some key event like his baptism or his death.

Docetic Christology - The belief that Jesus was not a man at all and did not even possess a physical body. He was a divine spirit who came to earth to enact God's will.

Gnostic Christology - The view that Jesus was a man and that Christ was a divine spirit but the two were separate. Gnosticism took the idea of mind/body dualism that was popular in the ancient world very much to heart and applied it also to the person of Jesus, almost as if the person Jesus was possessed by the spirit of Christ. Again this is just a general summation and some Gnostic groups were actually docetic but doceticism was not an exclusively gnostic phenomenon. Gnosticism was a religious tradition that predated Christianity much in the same way Jewish tradition did. Gnostic Christians tended to reject the Jewish God's association with Christianity; they saw the Jewish deity as a vengeful, evil god which was distinct from Christ's more loving and positive nature.

Centrist Christology- This group's ideological heirs are known from the Nicene creed as the "Orthodox Catholic Church". I find Burton Mack's term "Centrist" best describes them because their Christology was halfway between adoptionism and doceticism and opposed to the duality of Gnosticism. Centrist Christology believed Jesus was both fully man and fully God at the same time.

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These four ideological divisions had numerous sectarian divisions that we know of and likely many more that are forgotten to history. This argument about who were the authentic believers of the Jesus movement dominated the movement in the second century when archeology and history start to fill in the gaps of our knowledge better; however, during the period of Mark's writing we have little notion of how important these distinctions would have been. Who the true believers were was still very much a concern in that day, but the metaphysics of Jesus' true identity seems to be a later argument; the earliest movement seems more concerned with who is accurately living according to Jesus' message.

From Paul's writings we can gather that the main tensions for his community with outside communities were almost exclusively about how believers were to act. When it comes to the subject of Jesus Paul is not overly verbose but when considered in light of these sectarian divisions Paul seems to have no partisan affiliation at all. Just as examples, in his letter to the Galatians Paul refers to Jesus being born to a woman (Gal 4:4) the way an adoptionist would and in his letter to the Philippians he quotes an early Christian creed or song which refers to Jesus having the form of God but taking the form of a servant and allowing himself to be crucified (Phil 2:6-11) the way a docetian would. Paul seems to have no inkling of any of these Christological divisions. During Paul's day it seems that Christology was not a consideration, or at least not a serious one. Paul very much comes down on the side of Jesus being a spiritual reality but it doesn't seem to bother Paul at all to think of Jesus having had a physical body at one time. However, at the time Paul writes, it does seem very clear that Paul believes Jesus to be a spiritual being who is communicating with him revealing God's will (Gal 1:12-16) and that the Jesus movement is a spiritual movement; this is the cornerstone of Paul's theology, Paul rails against concerns "of the flesh" and "of the world" while exhorting all things "of the spirit" and "of Christ" (Gal 5:17-25).

By the early second century, the period directly after the authorship of the four canonical gospels, it seems that arguments about Christology have come to dominate the discourse of the movement. Marcion, who produced the first New Testament, was a docetian and rejected the idea of Jesus having any relation to the Hebrew God; his New Testament consisted only of some of Paul's letters and an "edited" copy of Luke. Since all we know of Marcion comes from his detractors it must be read with a grain of salt. Marcion himself believed his copy of Luke was the more original and that the others had been tainted by copyists adding their own theology to it; this could very well be the case, there are many precedents of copyists changing biblical passages for their own benefit.

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When we read the gospels themselves none of them overtly announce their Christological leanings, we are left only with what clues remain in the text. There are places in the Gospels that suggest Jesus has a physical body and others that don't. Most pointed of all the examples I could give are the post-resurrection accounts of both Luke and John. In these accounts Jesus' identity is concealed -even from Mary who knew him well- until he chooses to reveal himself and he can seemingly appear from nowhere and disappear just as readily; yet in both narratives Jesus goes out of his way to prove he has a physical body by eating fish in Luke and letting Thomas feel his wounds in John. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke similarly seem to simultaneously support Jesus' human nature and his spiritual nature. In both narratives Jesus is born to a woman which makes him human but go to great lengths to claim that woman was a virgin who had conceived through the spirit making Jesus' birth entirely miraculous and Jesus a spiritual being.

The temptation of these passages is to interpret the portrayal of Jesus' dual nature as early centrist christology, but one of the things that is really important in historical inquiry is to guard against a more full view of history effecting your bias. In this case we know that Centrist Christianity eventually won out in the ideological war and it is a natural instinct to both look back to find where Centrism began and also to find it where it may not have been just because we're looking. Remember that Gnostics believed Jesus had a dual nature as well, but that the two were separate. It is just as easy to hypothesize that the seemingly contradictory passages in the Gospels are exactly that: contradictory. It is entirely possible that these later Gospels preserve the uncertainty of the early movements trying to balance the notions of whether Jesus was a man or a spirit and not being able to come to one or the other conclusion; possibly they may have been bending between disagreeing docetian and adoptionist elements in their own communities and all the spectrum in between. This seems like it is more the case since if these gospels did have a clearly defined christology they wouldn't read as so unclear on the subject.

The later gospels might represent the tension between different beliefs but Mark's provenance puts it in an earlier era, one that is approximately halfway between Paul's writings and the writing of Luke and John, what does Mark's gospel tell us? Mark's narrative seems just as fluid on the issue of Christology as Paul's letters. It is probably easier to speak first on issues that Mark definitely didn't agree with. The first and most important distinction that must be made is that Mark had no conception of the virgin birth (if you'll permit the pun) and no other miraculous event accompanying Jesus' birth. In fact, Mark has Jesus' family and friends showing up to collect him because they believe he has gone insane (3:21) or has an unclean spirit (3:30) and later has his relatives rejecting him as a prophet (6:4); it's obvious

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that in Mark Jesus' family has no clue of his messianic destiny. Any miraculous birth narrative would not make sense to the rest of Mark's narrative because of these verses which is why the later gospels who copied Mark omitted or edited them. The story of Jesus in Mark begins at his baptism where God declares Jesus to be his son. In Mark this passage suggests this is a revelation to Jesus unlike the other gospels where it is a revelation to everyone else but no surprise to Jesus. This has led many scholars to conclude that Mark was an adoptionist gospel and admittedly they may have a point. However, it seems more likely that Christological assumptions were not part of Mark's concerns and were made by others at a later date; just as Marcion might have assumed Luke and Paul's docetian tendencies, others might have assumed Mark's adoptionist tendencies.

Another belief that Mark seems to entirely eschew is any form of the Trinitarian view of later centrism. Trinitarian theology, where God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are the same entity is a definite post-new testament theological development and all of the gospels disagree when you actually read them critically; however, Mark is probably the most difficult gospel in which to "square the circle" of Trinitarian theology. Mark has no miraculous birth narrative and has Jesus being unsure of himself at times, particularly during his prayer in the garden (14:34-36); this is a very different narrative than Matthew and Luke where Jesus is recognized as the son of God from the day he's born and John 1:1-18 where he is co-eternal with God. This makes Mark hard to reconcile with Centrist theology, but in all likelihood centrism didn't exist even in its most basic form until after Mark was written. Centrist theology tends to have an unfair advantage in biblical scholarship because of its vaunted status as the sect that won the battle of history. Every permutation of modern Christianity comes from the centrist school of thought and so do many of the scholars who study the bible which leaves us with a serious bias in favour of the Centrist view amongst academics. Likewise, because most of what we know of Gnosticism comes from their centrist critics we have a bias against Gnosticism. Since the discovery of the treasure trove of Gnostic literature known as "The Nag Hammadi Codices" there has been a concentrated effort in some scholarly circles to redeem Gnosticism but the effort is fairly slow; this movement still faces a lot of resistance from the Centrist crowd that still view Gnosticism as irredeemably heterodox rather than an intriguing topic of study. I think this is probably the saddest thing I can tell you about biblical scholarship: that there is a crowd of academics that still feel the need to argue against and denigrate a sect of Christianity that has been dead for over a millennia. The main difference between the two that is meaningful to this discussion is that while Centrism took time to develop and likely didn't exist when Mark was written, Gnosticism was a separate religion and predates The Jesus movement; the only question is

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how long did it take for Gnosticism to develop within the Jesus movement? Depending on the answer to that question Mark could have been influenced by early gnostic thought.

In the study of Christianity what we know about the various Jesus movements starts to get clearer beginning in the middle of the second century. We know for certain that by then Gnostics were operating and were being criticized by the early centrist heresiologists. The thing to keep in mind is that heresiologists don't criticize small fringe groups, they criticize groups that are widespread and influential enough to offer a credible threat to their own group. As time goes on the criticism of Gnosticism doesn't wane, it continues and gets stronger; this tells us that Gnostic Christianity's rise to prominence continues along with the rise of Centrist Christianity. At some points, particularly during the third century, it seems that Gnosticism was just as large and influential as Centrism within the early Christian movement. Given this it isn't out of the realm of possibility that Gnostic thought within Christianity is old enough to have influenced the gospel of Mark but still far from a sure thing. That being said, there is a lot within the gospel of Mark for Gnostics to like and we know from ancient sources that the Gnostics did like the gospel of Mark.

The main feature of Gnosticism as a religion separate from Christianity, and the main influence of Gnosticism on its Christian permutation, is the emphasis on "secret knowledge". Gnostic comes from the Greek word "gnosis" which means "knowledge" and Gnostics believed that some form of special knowledge was the path to spiritual fulfilment. However, this knowledge was different than conventional intellectual and philosophical knowledge, the knowledge Gnostics sought was beyond the scope of the mundane and could only be gleaned through spiritual revelation. If you've read the previous sections (or if you've read the gospel of Mark in any depth) you can already see where the gospel of Mark would appeal to this sensibility. Mark's narrative portrays the message of Jesus and the meaning of his life, death, and resurrection as the secret that only the disciples -and Mark's audience- are privy to. This idea is so appealing from a Gnostic point of view that it has led some to wonder if Mark is, in fact, an early Gnostic gospel. I see this as probably jumping the gun a little since the idea that a religious in-group would claim to have special knowledge that makes their beliefs superior to all others is hardly rare.

One of the other main features of Gnostic theology that is conferred upon Christian Gnosticism is the duality of physical and spiritual reality. Gnosticism saw physical reality as evil, degenerate, or irredeemably flawed and spiritual reality as perfect; to them the origin of everything that was wrong with life and the world was the separation from spiritual reality. The way this influences the Christology of later Gnostic Christianity is that they didn't view

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Christ as a physical person. This takes one of two permutations: Gnostics are either fully docetian or believe that Christ is a spirit that inhabited a human body; as far as we know the second of those two is the more common belief. If you consider the belief that Christ was a spirit inhabiting a human body reading the gospel of Mark actually takes on a very interesting interpretation.

If you read Mark's narrative of Jesus' baptism again (1:9-12) you have Jesus coming out of the water to see "the heavens dividing and the spirit descending upon him like a dove". The voice of God then says to Jesus "you are my son, the beloved! In you I am pleased!". After this exchange the narrative says: "immediately the spirit drove him out into the desert". Note how, in that passage the spirit comes down to Jesus but even after that is treated as a separate entity. This passage would have presented some serious difficulty for Centrist interpreters, after all, how do you justify God having to tell Jesus he is his son if Jesus is God; both Matthew and Luke edit this passage to seem more like a revelation to the crowd rather than one to Jesus himself. Gnostics would have read this passage as the moment the spirit of Christ entered the body of Jesus; it wouldn't have been at all problematic for Gnostics the way it is for Centrists.

Jesus' death in the Gospel of Mark also presents a narrative that is fairly pleasing to the Gnostic interpreter. If you read Mark 13:11 Jesus tells his disciples when they are brought to trial that they should not prepare beforehand but to say whatever the Holy Spirit leads them to say at that moment. When we look at Jesus' trials later in the gospel, before the Sanhedrin Jesus makes a very bold statement about himself with a defiant apocalyptic pronouncement included, however, before Pilate all he says in his defence is "so you say" and makes no further answer to the accusations. If you read these passages critically it seems like a very drastic change in Jesus, that he would be so bold before the Sanhedrin yet so meek before Pilate. Jesus says nothing else throughout the indignity of his crucifixion in this gospel until finally, shortly before his death, he cries out "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?". This is another passage that presents a serious hurdle for centrist apologists, why would Jesus say such a thing if Jesus were God? However, Gnostics would have read this and found a passage that fit seamlessly with their view: they would have seen it as the spirit of Christ abandoning Jesus after the trial before the Sanhedrin. The later Gnostic literature maintains this idea, usually having Christ trick someone else to be crucified in his place.

Even though Mark may read as a very pleasing narrative to the Gnostic interpreter, that doesn't mean Mark was written by a Gnostic. The gospel would read well to an adoptionist interpreter as well. Mark must also have been pleasing enough to the later Centrist

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interpreters that they included it in their official scriptural canon; this fact alone is a pretty good argument against the idea that Mark was a Gnostic gospel, the Centrists were so opposed to Gnosticism by the fourth century that they weren't very likely to include a Gnostic gospel in their canonical writings. In a full examination of the facts as we know them it is very unlikely that the gospel of Mark had any Gnostic influence in its writing; however, because Gnosticism predates Mark's authorship, its influence on Mark's theology can't be ruled out completely.

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Appendix 1: Johannine and Markan

Miracles Harmony

A gospel "harmony" is a document that compares parallel texts of two gospels to show the reader their similarities and differences directly. In the case of the common miracle traditions of Mark and John I have presented John's text on the left and in its original order because John's miracle stories are longer. The Markan text is presented to the right and wherever the order of events is different between the two texts Mark's text has been modified and left in italics to show that it has been moved. All verses have retained their original numbering for ease of following along. I have changed the format of the original by separating each into individual verses for ease of reading a harmony text. The format also leaves a few empty spots because trying to create a PDF with parallel columns is a giant pain in the posterior.

All harmonies start with a title in bold which lists which miracle it is in the chronology of each gospel: ie, (J6/M15) means it is the sixth miracle in John and the fifteenth in Mark. Below that is the verse numbers from the original texts. All text in this appendix is from the "Word English Bible".

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J/M1. Healing at a distance: (J2/M12)

John 4:46-53

46 Jesus came therefore again to Cana of Galilee, where he made the water into wine. There was a certain nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum.

47 When he heard that Jesus had come out of Judea into Galilee, he went to him, and begged him that he would come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death.

48 Jesus therefore said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders, you will in no way believe.”.

49 The nobleman said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.”.

50 Jesus said to him, “Go your way. Your son lives.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him, and he went his way.

51 As he was now going down, his servants met him and reported, saying “Your child lives!”.

52 So he inquired of them the hour when he began to get better. They said therefore to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour, the fever left him.”

53 So the father knew that it was at that hour in which Jesus said to him, “Your son lives.” He believed, as did his whole house.

Mark 7:25-30

25 For a woman, whose little daughter had an unclean spirit, having heard of him, came and fell down at his feet.

26 Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by race. She begged him that he would cast the demon out of her daughter.

M27 But Jesus said to her, “Let the children be filled first, for it is not appropriate to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”.

M28 But she answered him, “Yes, Lord. Yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”.

M29 He said to her, “For this saying, go your way. The demon has gone out of your daughter.”

M30 She went away to her house, and found the child having been laid on the bed, with the demon gone out.

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J/M2. Healing a paralytic: (J3/M4)

John 5:2-16 (omitting John 5:4 because most early manuscripts do not have it)

2 Now in Jerusalem by the sheep gate, there is a pool, which is called in Hebrew, “Bethesda”, having five porches.

3 In these lay a great multitude of those who were sick, blind, lame, or paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water;

5 A certain man was there, who had been sick for thirty-eight years.

6 When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been sick for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to be made well?”.

7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, another steps down before me.”

8 Jesus said to him, “Arise, take up your mat, and walk.”

9 Immediately, the man was made well, and took up his mat and walked. Now it was the Sabbath on that day.

Mark 2:3-12

3 Four people came, carrying a paralytic to him.

4 When they could not come near to him for the crowd, they removed the roof where he was. When they had broken it up, they let down the mat that the paralytic was lying on

8 Immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you reason these things in your hearts?

9 Which is easier, to tell the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven;’ or to say, ‘Arise, and take up your bed, and walk?’,

10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—

11 “I tell you, arise, take up your mat, and go to your house.”

12 He arose, and immediately took up the mat, and went out in front of them all; so that they were all amazed, and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

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10 So the Jews said to him who was cured, “It is the Sabbath. It is not lawful for you to carry the mat.”.

11 He answered them, “He who made me well, the same said to me, ‘Take up your mat, and walk.’”.

12 Then they asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your mat, and walk’?".

13 But he who was healed didn’t know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, a crowd being in the place.

14 Afterward Jesus found him in the temple, and said to him, “Behold, you are made well. Sin no more, so that nothing worse happens to you.”.

15 The man went away, and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.

16 For this cause the Jews persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill him, because he did these things on the Sabbath.

17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, so I am working, too.”.

19 For this cause therefore the Jews sought all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God.

5 Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven you.”

6 But there were some of the scribes sitting there, and reasoning in their hearts,

7 “Why does this man speak blasphemies like that? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

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J/M3. Feeding the five thousand. (J4/M10)

John 6:1-12

1 After these things, Jesus went away to the other side of the sea of Galilee, which is also called the Sea of Tiberias.

2 A great multitude followed him, because they saw his signs which he did on those who were sick.

3 Jesus went up into the mountain, and he sat there with his disciples.

4 Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was at hand.

5Jesus therefore lifting up his eyes, and seeing that a great multitude was coming to him, said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread, that these may eat?”.

6 This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.

7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that everyone of them may receive a little.”

8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him,

9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these among so many?”

Mark 6:32-44

32 They went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.

33 They saw them going, and many recognized him and ran there on foot from all the cities. They arrived before them and came together to him.

34 Jesus came out, saw a great multitude, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things.

35 When it was late in the day, his disciples came to him, and said, “This place is deserted, and it is late in the day.

36 Send them away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages, and buy themselves bread, for they have nothing to eat.”

37 But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They asked him, “Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give them something to eat?”

38 He said to them, “How many loaves do you have? Go see.” When they knew, they said, “Five, and two fish.”

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10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in that place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand.

11 Jesus took the loaves; and having given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to those who were sitting down; likewise also of the fish as much as they desired.

12 When they were filled, he said to his disciples, “Gather up the broken pieces which are left over, that nothing be lost.”.

13 So they gathered them up, and filled twelve baskets with broken pieces from the five barley loaves, which were left over by those who had eaten.

14 When therefore the people saw the sign which Jesus did, they said, “This is truly the prophet who comes into the world.”

39 He commanded them that everyone should sit down in groups on the green grass.

M40 They sat down in ranks, by hundreds and by fifties.

44 Those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.

41 He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, he blessed and broke the loaves, and he gave to his disciples to set before them, and he divided the two fish among them all.

42 They all ate, and were filled.

43 They took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and also of the fish.

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J/M4. Walking on water (J5/M11)

John 6:16-26

15 Jesus therefore, perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force, to make him king, withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

16 When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea,

17 and they entered into the boat, and were going over the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not come to them.

18 The sea was tossed by a great wind blowing.

19 When therefore they had rowed about twenty-five or thirty stadia, they saw Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing near to the boat; and they were afraid.

20 But he said to them, “It is I. Don’t be afraid.”.

21 They were willing therefore to receive him into the boat. Immediately the boat was at the land where they were going.

22 On the next day, the multitude that stood on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other boat there, except the one in which his disciples had embarked, and that Jesus hadn’t entered with his disciples into the boat, but his disciples had gone away alone.

Mark6:45-52

45 Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat, and to go ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he himself sent the multitude away.

46 After he had taken leave of them, he went up the mountain to pray.

47 When evening had come, the boat was in the midst of the sea, and he was alone on the land.

48 Seeing them distressed in rowing, for the wind was contrary to them, about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea, and he would have passed by them,

49 but they, when they saw him walking on the sea, supposed that it was a ghost, and cried out;

50 for they all saw him, and were troubled. But he immediately spoke with them, and said to them, “Cheer up! It is I! Don’t be afraid.”.

51 He got into the boat with them; and the wind ceased, and they were very amazed among themselves, and marvelled;

53 When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret, and moored to the shore.

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23 However boats from Tiberias came near to the place where they ate the bread after the Lord had given thanks.

24 When the multitude therefore saw that Jesus wasn’t there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats, and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”

26 Jesus answered them, “Most certainly I tell you, you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves, and were filled.

54 When they had come out of the boat, immediately the people recognized him,

55 and ran around that whole region, and began to bring those who were sick, on their mats, to where they heard he was.

52 for they hadn’t understood about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

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J/M5. Healing of a blind man. (J6/M15)

John 9: 1-11

1 As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth.

2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

3 Jesus answered, “Neither did this man sin, nor his parents; but, that the works of God might be revealed in him.

4 I must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day. The night is coming, when no one can work.

5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, anointed the blind man’s eyes with the mud,

7 and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So he went away, washed, and came back seeing.

8 The neighbours therefore, and those who saw that he was blind before, said, “Isn’t this he who sat and begged?”.

Mark 8:22-26

22 He came to Bethsaida. They brought a blind man to him, and begged him to touch him.

23 He took hold of the blind man by the hand, and brought him out of the village. When he had spit on his eyes, and laid his hands on him, he asked him if he saw anything.

24 He looked up, and said, “I see men; for I see them like trees walking.”.

25 Then again he laid his hands on his eyes. He looked intently, and was restored, and saw everyone clearly.

26 He sent him away to his house, saying, “Don’t enter into the village, nor tell anyone in the village.”

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9 Others were saying, “It is he.” Still others were saying, “He looks like him.” He said, “I am he.”.

10 They therefore were asking him, “How were your eyes opened?”.

11 He answered, “A man called Jesus made mud, anointed my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash.’ So I went away and washed, and I received sight.”

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J/M6. The raising from the dead. (J7/M9).

John 11:1-45

1 Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus from Bethany, of the village of Mary and her sister, Martha.

2 It was that Mary who had anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother, Lazarus, was sick.

3 The sisters therefore sent to him, saying, “Lord, behold, he for whom you have great affection is sick.”

4 But when Jesus heard it, he said, “This sickness is not to death, but for the glory of God, that God’s Son may be glorified by it.”

5 Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.

6 When therefore he heard that he was sick, he stayed two days in the place where he was.

7 Then after this he said to the disciples, “Let’s go into Judea again.”

8 The disciples told him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and are you going there again?”

9 Jesus answered, “Aren’t there twelve hours of daylight? If a man walks in the day, he doesn’t stumble, because he sees the light of this world.

10 But if a man walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light isn’t in him.”

11 He said these things, and after that, he said to them, “Our friend, Lazarus, has fallen asleep, but I am going so that I may awake him out of sleep.”.

12 The disciples therefore said, “Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will recover.”.

Mark 5:22-23/35-43

22 Behold, one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, came; and seeing him, he fell at his feet,

23 and begged him much, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Please come and lay your hands on her, that she may be made healthy, and live.”

35 While he was still speaking, people came from the synagogue ruler’s house saying, “Your daughter is dead. Why bother the Teacher any more?”.

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13 Now Jesus had spoken of his death, but they thought that he spoke of taking rest in sleep.

14 So Jesus said to them plainly then, “Lazarus is dead."

15 I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, so that you may believe. Nevertheless, let’s go to him.”

16 Thomas therefore, who is called Didymus, said to his fellow disciples, “Let’s go also, that we may die with him.”

17 So when Jesus came, he found that he had been in the tomb four days already.

18 Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about fifteen stadia away.

19 Many of the Jews had joined the women around Martha and Mary, to console them concerning their brother.

20 Then when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary stayed in the house.

21 Therefore Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.

22 Even now I know that, whatever you ask of God, God will give you.”

23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”.

24 Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”.

37 He allowed no one to follow him, except Peter, James, and John the brother of James.

38 He came to the synagogue ruler’s house, and he saw an uproar, weeping, and great wailing.

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25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies.

26 Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

27 She said to him, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, God’s Son, he who comes into the world.”

28 When she had said this, she went away, and called Mary, her sister, secretly, saying, “The Teacher is here, and is calling you.”

29 When she heard this, she arose quickly, and went to him.

30 Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was in the place where Martha met him.

31 Then the Jews who were with her in the house, and were consoling her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up quickly and went out, followed her, saying, “She is going to the tomb to weep there.”

32 Therefore when Mary came to where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews weeping who came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,

34 and said, “Where have you laid him?” They told him, “Lord, come and see.”

35 Jesus wept.

36 The Jews therefore said, “See how much affection he had for him!”

37 Some of them said, “Couldn’t this man, who opened the eyes of him who was blind, have also kept this man from dying?”

36 But Jesus, when he heard the message spoken, immediately said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Don’t be afraid, only believe."

40 They ridiculed him. But he, having put them all out, took the father of the child, her mother, and those who were with him, and went in where the child was lying.

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38 Jesus therefore, again groaning in himself, came to the tomb. Now it was a cave, and a stone lay against it.

39 Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of him who was dead, said to him, “Lord, by this time there is a stench, for he has been dead four days.”

40 Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed, you would see God’s glory?”

41 So they took away the stone from the place where the dead man was lying. Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, “Father, I thank you that you listened to me.

42 I know that you always listen to me, but because of the multitude that stands around I said this, that they may believe that you sent me.”

43 When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

44 He who was dead came out, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Free him, and let him go.”

45 Therefore many of the Jews, who came to Mary and saw what Jesus did, believed in him.

46 But some of them went away to the Pharisees, and told them the things which Jesus had done.

41 Taking the child by the hand, he said to her, “Talitha cumi!” which means, being interpreted, “Girl, I tell you, get up!”.

42 Immediately the girl rose up and walked, for she was twelve years old. They were amazed with great amazement.

43 He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and commanded that something should be given to her to eat.

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Appendix 2: Markan Sayings Traditions.

This is where I have separated all of the sayings contained within Mark into one collection. The sayings are presented in their original Markan order. Again the text has been separated into verses and I have separated out and numbered the sayings. I put this collection in the NRSV translation because it is better but copyright only allows for a certain amount of the text to be copied at any time.

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Markan Sayings Traditions. NRSV

INTRODUCTORY SAYINGS.

1). Mark 1:15

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."

2). Mark 1:17

17 Jesus said to them, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people."

3). Mark 1:38

38 He answered, "Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do."

4). Mark 1:44 (embedded in the miracle of healing a leper)

44 and said to him, "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them."

5). Mark 2:7-11

7 "Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

8 At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, "Why do you raise such questions in your hearts?

9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Stand up and take your mat and walk'?

10 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" — he said to the paralytic —

11 "I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home."

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FIRST DIALECTIC DISCOURSEThis discourse focuses largely on arguing on issues of Jewish law with other authorities of the day.

6). Mark 2:16-17

16 When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, "Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

17 When Jesus heard this, he said to them, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.

7). Mark 2:18-22

18 Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?"

19 Jesus said to them, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast.

20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.

21 "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.

22 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins."

8). Mark 2:23-28

23 One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain.

24 The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?"

25 And he said to them, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?

26 He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions."

27 Then he said to them, "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath;

28 so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath." END FIRST DISCOURSE

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9). Mark 3:4 (embedded in a miracle)

4 Then he said to them, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?"

SECOND DISCOURSEThis discourse is about the kingdom of God and the Jesus community as Mark saw it.

10). Mark 3:22-30

22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, "He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons."

23 And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan?

24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.

26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.

27 But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.

28 "Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter;

29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" —

30 for they had said, "He has an unclean spirit."

11). Mark 3:30-35

30 for they had said, "He has an unclean spirit."

31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.

32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, "Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you."

33 And he replied, "Who are my mother and my brothers?" 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers!

35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

12). Mark 4:2-9

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2 He began to teach them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them:

3 "Listen! A sower went out to sow.

4 And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up.

5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil.

6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away.

7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.

8 Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."

9 And he said, "Let anyone with ears to hear listen!"

13). Mark 4:10-20

10 When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables.

11 And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables;

12 in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.'"

13 And he said to them, "Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?

14 The sower sows the word.

15 These are the ones on the path where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them.

16 And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: when they hear the word, they immediately receive it with joy.

17 But they have no root, and endure only for a while; then, when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away.

18 And others are those sown among the thorns: these are the ones who hear the word,

19 but the cares of the world, and the lure of wealth, and the desire for other things come in and choke the word, and it yields nothing.

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20 And these are the ones sown on the good soil: they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold."

14). Mark 4:21-23

21 He said to them, "Is a lamp brought in to be put under the bushel basket, or under the bed, and not on the lampstand?

22 For there is nothing hidden, except to be disclosed; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.

23 Let anyone with ears to hear listen!"

15). Mark 4:24-25

24 And he said to them, "Pay attention to what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and still more will be given you.

25 For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away."

16). Mark 4:26-29

26 He also said, "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground,

27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.

28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come."

17). Mark 4:30-34

30 He also said, "With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable will we use for it?

31 It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth;

32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it;

34 he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.

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END SECOND DISCOURSE.

A PROPHET IS WITHOUT HONOUR

18). Mark 6:4

4 Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house."

SHAKE THE DUST FROM YOUR SANDALS.

19). Mark 6:10-11

10 He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.

11 If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them."

THIRD DISCOURSE

20). Mark 7:5-13

5 So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?"

6 He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 'This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;

7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.'

8 You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition."

9 Then he said to them, "You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!

10 For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and, 'Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.'

11 But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, 'Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban' (that is, an offering to God) —

12 then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother,

13 thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this."

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21). Mark 7:14-16

14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, "Listen to me, all of you, and understand:

15 there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile."

[16 If anyone has ears to hear listen!"] (this appendix is not in all manuscripts)

22). Mark 7:17-23

17 When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable.

18 He said to them, "Then do you also fail to understand? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile,

19 since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?" (Thus he declared all foods clean.)

20 And he said, "It is what comes out of a person that defiles.

21 For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder,

22 adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person."

END THIRD DISCOURSE

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HEALING OF A SYRO-PHOENICIAN WOMAN'S DAUGHTER.

23). Mark 7:26-29

26 Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

27 He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

28 But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs."

29 Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go — the demon has left your daughter."

FOURTH DISCOURSE

24). Mark 8:11-12

11 The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, asking him for a sign from heaven, to test him.

12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, "Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation."

25). Mark 8:14-21

14 Now the disciples had forgotten to bring any bread; and they had only one loaf with them in the boat.

15 And he cautioned them, saying, "Watch out — beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod."

16 They said to one another, "It is because we have no bread."

17 And becoming aware of it, Jesus said to them, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened?

18 Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? And do you not remember?

19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?" They said to him, "Twelve."

20 "And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?" And they said to him, "Seven."

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21 Then he said to them, "Do you not yet understand?"

26). Mark 8:27-30

27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that I am?"

28 And they answered him, "John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."

29 He asked them, "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answered him, "You are the Messiah."

30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

27). Mark 8:32-33

32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

28). Mark 8:34-38

34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

29). Mark 9:1

1 And he said to them, "Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power."

THE REVELATION ENDS WITH JESUS' TRANSFIGURATION.

30). Mark 9:11-13

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11 Then they asked him, "Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?"

12 He said to them, "Elijah is indeed coming first to restore all things. How then is it written about the Son of Man, that he is to go through many sufferings and be treated with contempt?

13 But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, as it is written about him."

END FOURTH DISCOURSE

31). Mark 9:23 (embedded in a miracle)

23 Jesus said to him, "If you are able! — All things can be done for the one who believes."

FIFTH DISCOURSEThis discourse is directed to how the disciples should act and what the church should be like.

32). Mark 9:31

31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again."

33). Mark 9:33-37

33 Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the way?"

34 But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.

35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."

36 Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them,

37 "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.

34). Mark 9:38-42

38 John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us."

39 But Jesus said, "Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.

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40 Whoever is not against us is for us.

41 For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.

35). Mark 9:42

42 If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

36). Mark 9:43-48

43 If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire

[44 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.]

45 And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.

[46 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.]

47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell,

48 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.

37). Mark 9:49-50

49 "For everyone will be salted with fire.

50 Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

38). Mark 10:2-9

2 Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"

3 He answered them, "What did Moses command you?"

4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her."

5 But Jesus said to them, "Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.

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6 But from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female.'

7 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife,

8 and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate."

39). Mark 10:10-12

10 Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter.

11 He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;

12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."

40). Mark 10:13-16

13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them.

14 But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.

15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it."

16 And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

41). Mark 10:17-22

17 As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

18 Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.

19 You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honour your father and mother.'

20 He said to him, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth."

21 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, "You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."

22 When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

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42). Mark 10:23-27

23 Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!"

24 And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!

25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

26 They were greatly astounded and said to one another, "Then who can be saved?"

27 Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

43). Mark 10:28-31

28 Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you."

29 Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news,

30 who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age — houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions — and in the age to come eternal life.

31 But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first."

44). Mark 10:32-34

32 They were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them; they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid. He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him,

33 saying, "See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles;

34 they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again."

45). Mark 10:35-41

35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, "Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you."

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36 And he said to them, "What is it you want me to do for you?"

37 And they said to him, "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory."

38 But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"

39 They replied, "We are able." Then Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized;

40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared."

41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John.

46). Mark 10:42-45

42 So Jesus called them and said to them, "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.

43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,

44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.

45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many."

END DIALECTIC DISCOURSE.

47). Mark 11:17 (embedded in the cleansing of the temple)

17 He was teaching and saying, "Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations'? But you have made it a den of robbers."

SIXTH DISCOURSE48). Mark 11:22-26

22 Jesus answered them, "Have faith in God.

23 Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.

24 So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

25 "Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.

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[26 but if you do not forgive neither will your father forgive you]

49). Mark 11:27-33

27 Again they came to Jerusalem. As he was walking in the temple, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders came to him

28 and said, "By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them?"

29 Jesus said to them, "I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things.

30 Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin? Answer me."

31 They argued with one another, "If we say, 'From heaven,' he will say, 'Why then did you not believe him?'

32 But shall we say, 'Of human origin'?" — they were afraid of the crowd, for all regarded John as truly a prophet.

33 So they answered Jesus, "We do not know." And Jesus said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things."

50). Mark 12:1-11

1 Then he began to speak to them in parables. "A man planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a pit for the wine press, and built a watchtower; then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.

2 When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants to collect from them his share of the produce of the vineyard.

3 But they seized him, and beat him, and sent him away empty-handed.

4 And again he sent another slave to them; this one they beat over the head and insulted.

5 Then he sent another, and that one they killed. And so it was with many others; some they beat, and others they killed.

6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'

7 But those tenants said to one another, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.'

8 So they seized him, killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

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9 What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

10 Have you not read this scripture: 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;

11 this was the LORD's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?"

12 When they realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowd. So they left him and went away.

51). Mark 12:14-17

14 And they came and said to him, "Teacher, we know that you are sincere, and show deference to no one; for you do not regard people with partiality, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?

15 Should we pay them, or should we not?" But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, "Why are you putting me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me see it."

16 And they brought one. Then he said to them, "Whose head is this, and whose title?" They answered, "The emperor's."

17 Jesus said to them, "Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor's, and to God the things that are God's." And they were utterly amazed at him.

52). Mark 12:18-27

18 Some Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him and asked him a question, saying,

19 "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.

20 There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children;

21 and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise;

22 none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died.

23 In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had married her."

24 Jesus said to them, "Is not this the reason you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?

25 For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

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26 And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'?

27 He is God not of the dead, but of the living; you are quite wrong."

53). Mark 12:28-34

28 One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, "Which commandment is the first of all?"

29 Jesus answered, "The first is, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one;

30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'

31 The second is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

32 Then the scribe said to him, "You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that 'he is one, and besides him there is no other';

33 and 'to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,' and 'to love one's neighbor as oneself,' — this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices."

34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." After that no one dared to ask him any question.

54). Mark 12:35-37

35 While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, "How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David?

36 David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared, 'The Lord said to my Lord, "Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet."'

37 David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?" And the large crowd was listening to him with delight.

55). Mark 12:38-40

38 As he taught, he said, "Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces,

39 and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets!

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40 They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation."

56). Mark 12:41-44

41 He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums.

42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny.

43 Then he called his disciples and said to them, "Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury.

44 For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on."

END SIXTH DISCOURSE

APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE

57). Mark 13:1-2

1 As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!"

2 Then Jesus asked him, "Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down."

58). Mark 13:3-6

3 When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, 4 "Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?" 5 Then Jesus began to say to them, "Beware that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will come in my name and say, 'I am he!' and they will lead many astray.

59). Mark 13:7-8

7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come.

8 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

60). Mark 13:9-11

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9 "As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them.

10 And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations.

11 When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.

61.). Mark 13:12-13

12 Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death;

13 and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

62). Mark 13:14-20

14 "But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains;

15 the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away;

16 the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat.

17 Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days!

18 Pray that it may not be in winter.

19 For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be.

20 And if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he has cut short those days.

63). Mark 13:21-22

21 And if anyone says to you at that time, 'Look! Here is the Messiah!' or 'Look! There he is!' — do not believe it.

22 False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.

64). Mark 13:23-27

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23 But be alert; I have already told you everything.

24 "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,

25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

26 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory.

27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

65). Mark 13:28

28 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates."

66). Mark 13:30-33

30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

32 "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

67). Mark 13:34-37

34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.

35 Therefore, keep awake — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,

36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."

END APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE

ANOINTING OF JESUS' FEET

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68). Mark 14:6-9

6 But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me.

7 For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me.

8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial.

9 Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her."

LAST SUPPER

69). Mark 14:17-21

17 When it was evening, he came with the twelve.

18 And when they had taken their places and were eating, Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me."

19 They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, "Surely, not I?"

20 He said to them, "It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread into the bowl with me.

21 For the Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born."

70). Mark 14:22-25

22 While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body."

23 Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it.

24 He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.

25 Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God."

71). Mark 14:27-28

27 And Jesus said to them, "You will all become deserters; for it is written, 'I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.'

28 But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee."

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72). Mark 14:36

36 He said, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want."

73). Mark 14:58

58 "We heard him say, 'I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.'"

74). Mark 14:61-62

61 But he was silent and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?"

62 Jesus said, "I am; and 'you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power,' and 'coming with the clouds of heaven.'"

75). Mark 15:34

34 At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

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Appendix 3: Harmony of Markan and Thomean

Sayings Traditions.

This is another harmony, this time putting the common sayings within Thomas and Mark side by side for easy comparison. This harmony puts Mark's sayings in the left and Thomas' in the right and wherever the order of a Thomean saying has been disturbed I have placed it in italics for emphasis. Each comparison has a number and lists the saying from Mark (using both the biblical verse numbers and my number from appendix 2) and the number of the saying within Thomas. This appendix is also formatted into individual verses and has some spacing issues to deal with the difficulty of trying to format parallel columns. This appendix is also presented using the Word English Bible in the Markan column and the Scholar's Translation from The Complete Gospels, by Robert J Miller, et al for the Thomean material.

Each sayings comparison is numbered with a list of the relevant sayings at the title in bold. Since, on occasion the Markan material has more than one saying that compares from Thomas the specific saying is indicated with an underlined title directly above it.

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Thomas/Mark early sayings tradition.

1). Mark 7 - 2:18-22

Mark 7

18 John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, and they came and asked him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”

19 Jesus said to them, “Can the groomsmen fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they can’t fast."

20 But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then will they fast in that day.

21 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, or else the patch shrinks and the new tears away from the old, and a worse hole is made

22 No one puts new wine into old wineskins, or else the new wine will burst the skins, and the wine pours out, and the skins will be destroyed; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins.”

Thomas 104 and 47

Thomas 104

They said to Jesus, "Come, let us pray today, and let us fast."

Jesus said, "What sin have I committed, or how have I been undone? Rather, when the groom leaves the bridal suite, then let people fast and pray."

Thomas 47

1 Jesus said, "A person cannot mount two horses or bend two bows.

2 And a slave cannot serve two masters, otherwise that slave will honor the one and offend the other."

3 "Nobody drinks aged wine and immediately wants to drink young wine.

5 An old patch is not sewn onto a new garment, since it would create a tear."

4 Young wine is not poured into old wineskins, or they might break, and aged wine is not poured into a new wineskin, or it might spoil.

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2). Mark 10 - 3:22-30

Mark 10

22 The scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul,” and, “By the prince of the demons he casts out the demons.”

23 He summoned them, and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan?

24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

26 If Satan has risen up against himself, and is divided, he can’t stand, but has an end.

27 But no one can enter into the house of the strong man to plunder, unless he first binds the strong man; and then he will plunder his house.

28 Most certainly I tell you, all sins of the descendants of man will be forgiven, including their blasphemies with which they may blaspheme;

29 but whoever may blaspheme against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation.”

Thomas 35 and Thomas 44

Thomas 35

1 Jesus said, "One can't enter a strong man's house and take it by force without tying his hands.

2 Then one can loot his house."

Thomas 44

Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit will not be forgiven, either on earth or in heaven."

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3). Mark 11 - 3:30-5

Mark 11

30 —because they said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

31 His mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to him, calling him.

32 A multitude was sitting around him, and they told him, “Behold, your mother, your brothers, and your sisters are outside looking for you.”

33 He answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”

34 Looking around at those who sat around him, he said, “Behold, my mother and my brothers!

35 For whoever does the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.”

Thomas 99

Thomas 99

The disciples said to him, "Your brothers and your mother are standing outside."

He said to them, "Those here who do what my Father wants are my brothers and my mother. They are the ones who will enter my Father's domain."

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4). Mark 12 - 4:2-9

Mark 12

2 He taught them many things in parables, and told them in his teaching,

3 “Listen! Behold, the farmer went out to sow,

4 and as he sowed, some seed fell by the road, and the birds came and devoured it.

5 Others fell on the rocky ground, where it had little soil, and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of soil.

6 When the sun had risen, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away.

7 Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.

8 Others fell into the good ground, and yielded fruit, growing up and increasing. Some produced thirty times, some sixty times, and some one hundred times as much.”

9 He said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Thomas 9

Thomas 9

1 Jesus said, "Look, the sower went out, took a handful (of seeds), and scattered (them).

2 Some fell on the road, and the birds came and gathered them.

3 Others fell on rock, and they didn't take root in the soil and didn't produce heads of grain.

4 Others fell on thorns, and they choked the seeds and worms ate them.

5 And others fell on good soil, and it produced a good crop: it yielded sixty per measure and one hundred twenty per measure.

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5). Mark 13 - 4:10-12

Mark 13

10 When he was alone, those who were around him with the twelve asked him about the parables.

11 He said to them, “To you is given the mystery of the Kingdom of God, but to those who are outside, all things are done in parables,

12 that ‘seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest perhaps they should turn again, and their sins should be forgiven them.’”

Thomas 62

Thomas 62

Jesus said, "I disclose my mysteries to those [who are worthy] of [my] mysteries. Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing."

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6). Mark 14 - 4:21-23

Mark 14

21 He said to them, “Is the lamp brought to be put under a basket or under a bed? Isn’t it put on a stand?

22 For there is nothing hidden, except that it should be made known; neither was anything made secret, but that it should come to light.

23 If any man has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Thomas 33 and Thomas 6

Thomas 33

1 Jesus said, "What you will hear in your ear, in the other ear proclaim from your rooftops.

2 After all, no one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, nor does one put it in a hidden place. 'Rather, one puts it on a lampstand so that all who come and go will see its light."

Thomas 6

1 His disciples asked him and said to him, "Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?"

2Jesus said, "Don't lie,

3 and don't do what you hate,

4because all things are disclosed before heaven.

5After all, there is nothing hidden that won't be revealed,

6 and there is nothing covered up that will remain undisclosed."

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7). Mark 16 - 4:26-29

Mark 4

26 He said, “The Kingdom of God is as if a man should cast seed on the earth,

27 and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring up and grow, he doesn’t know how.

28 For the earth bears fruit: first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.

29 But when the fruit is ripe, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Thomas 21

Thomas 21

1 Mary said to Jesus, "What are your disciples like?"

2He said, They are like little children living in a field that is not theirs.

3When the owners of the field come, they will say, "Give us back our field."

4 They take off their clothes in front of them in order to give it back to them, and they return their field to them.

5 For this reason I say, if the owners of a house know that a thief is coming, they will be on guard before the thief arrives, and will not let the thief break into their house (their domain) and steal their possessions.

6 As for you, then, be on guard against the world.

7Prepare yourselves with great strength, so the robbers can't find a way to get to you, for the trouble you expect will come.

8 Let there be among you a person who understands.

9When the crop ripened, he came quickly carrying a sickle and harvested it.

10Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!

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8). Mark 17 - 4:30-34

Mark 17

30 He said, “How will we liken the Kingdom of God? Or with what parable will we illustrate it?

31 It’s like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, though it is less than all the seeds that are on the earth,

32 yet when it is sown, grows up, and becomes greater than all the herbs, and puts out great branches, so that the birds of the sky can lodge under its shadow.”

33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it.

34 Without a parable he didn’t speak to them; but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

9). Mark 18 - 6:4

Mark 18

4 Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own relatives, and in his own house.”

Thomas 20

Thomas 20

1 The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us what Heaven's imperial rule is like."

2 He said to them, It's like a mustard seed.

3(It's) the smallest of all seeds,

4but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large branch and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.

Thomas 31

Thomas 31

1 Jesus said, "No prophet is welcome on his home turf;

2 doctors don't cure those who know them."

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10). Mark 19 - 6:10-11

Mark 19

10 He said to them, “Wherever you enter into a house, stay there until you depart from there.

11 Whoever will not receive you nor hear you, as you depart from there, shake off the dust that is under your feet for a testimony against them. Assuredly, I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city!”

11). Mark 21 - 7:14-16,

Mark 21

14 He called all the multitude to himself, and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.

15 There is nothing from outside of the man, that going into him can defile him; but the things which proceed out of the man are those that defile the man.

16 If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Thomas 14:1-4

Thomas 14

1 Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves,

2and if you pray, you will be condemned,

3 and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.

4When you go into any region and walk about in the countryside, when people take you in, eat what they serve you and heal the sick among them.

Thomas 14:5

Thomas 14:5

5After all, what goes into your mouth won't defile you; what comes out of your mouth will."

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12). Mark 26 - 8:27-30

Mark 26

27 Jesus went out, with his disciples, into the villages of Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?”

28 They told him, “John the Baptizer, and others say Elijah, but others: one of the prophets.”

29 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.”

30 He commanded them that they should tell no one about him.

Thomas 13

Thomas 13

1 Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I am like."

2Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a just angel."

3 Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."

4Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."

5 Jesus said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."

6 And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.

7When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"

8 Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you."

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13). Mark 28 - 8:34-38

Mark 28

34 He called the multitude to himself with his disciples, and said to them, “Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

35 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; and whoever will lose his life for my sake and the sake of the Good News will save it.

36 For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?

37 For what will a man give in exchange for his life?

38 For whoever will be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man also will be ashamed of him, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Thomas 55

Thomas 55

1 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple,

2 and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

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14). Mark 40 - 10:13-16

Mark 40

13 They were bringing to him little children, that he should touch them, but the disciples rebuked those who were bringing them.

14 But when Jesus saw it, he was moved with indignation, and said to them, “Allow the little children to come to me! Don’t forbid them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

15 Most certainly I tell you, whoever will not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child, he will in no way enter into it.”

16 He took them in his arms, and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

Thomas 22

Thomas 22

1 Jesus saw some babies nursing.

2He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) domain."

3They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) domain as babies?"

4 Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower,

5 and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female,

6 when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image,

7 then you will enter [the (Father's) domain]."

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15). Mark 43 - 10:28-31

Mark 43

28 Peter began to tell him, “Behold, we have left all, and have followed you.”

29 Jesus said, “Most certainly I tell you, there is no one who has, left house, or brothers, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or land, for my sake, and for the sake of the Good News,

30 but he will receive one hundred times more now in this time, houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, and land, with persecutions; and in the age to come eternal life.

31 But many who are first will be last; and the last first.”

Thomas 55 and Thomas 4

Thomas 55

1 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple,

2 and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."

Thomas 4

1 Jesus said, "The person old in days won't hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.

2 For many of the first will be last,

3 and will become a single one."

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16). Mark 49 - 11:22-26

Mark 49

22 Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God.

23 For most certainly I tell you, whoever may tell this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and doesn’t doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is happening; he shall have whatever he says.

24 Therefore I tell you, all things whatever you pray and ask for, believe that you have received them, and you shall have them.

25 Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father, who is in heaven, may also forgive you your transgressions.

26 But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your transgressions.”

Thomas 48

Thomas 48

Jesus said, "If two make peace with each other in a single house, they will say to the mountain, 'Move from here!' and it will move."

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17). Mark 50 - 12:1-11

Mark 50

1 He began to speak to them in parables. “A man planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it, dug a pit for the wine press, built a tower, rented it out to a farmer, and went into another country.

2 When it was time, he sent a servant to the farmer to get from the farmer his share of the fruit of the vineyard.

3 They took him, beat him, and sent him away empty.

4 Again, he sent another servant to them; and they threw stones at him, wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully treated.

5 Again he sent another; and they killed him; and many others, beating some, and killing some.

6 Therefore still having one, his beloved son, he sent him last to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

7 But those farmers said among themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’

8 They took him, killed him, and cast him out of the vineyard.

9 What therefore will the lord of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the farmers, and will give the vineyard to others.

10 Haven’t you even read this Scripture: ‘The stone which the builders rejected, the same was made the head of the corner.

11 This was from the Lord, it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

Thomas 65 and Thomas 66

Thomas 65

1 He said, "A [. . .] person owned a vineyard and rented it to some farmers, so they could work it and he could collect its crop from them.

2He sent his slave so the farmers would give him the vineyard's crop.

3They grabbed him, beat him, and almost killed him, and the slave returned and told his master.

4 His master said, "Perhaps he didn't know them."

5He sent another slave, and the farmers beat that one as well.

6Then the master sent his son and said, "Perhaps they'll show my son some respect."

7Because the farmers knew that he was the heir to the vineyard, they grabbed him and killed him.

8 Anyone here with two ears had better listen!"

Thomas 66

Jesus said, "Show me the stone that the builders rejected: that is the keystone."

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18). Mark 51 - 12:14-17

Mark 51

14 When they had come, they asked him, “Teacher, we know that you are honest, and don’t defer to anyone; for you aren’t partial to anyone, but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?

15 Shall we give, or shall we not give?” But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said to them, “Why do you test me? Bring me a denarius, that I may see it.”

16 They brought it. He said to them, “Whose is this image and inscription?” They said to him, “Caesar’s.”

17 Jesus answered them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” They marvelled greatly at him.

Thomas 100

Thomas 100

1 They showed Jesus a gold coin and said to him, "The Roman emperor's people demand taxes from us."

2 He said to them, "Give the emperor what belongs to the emperor,

3 give God what belongs to God,

4 and give me what is mine.

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19). Mark 53 - 12:28-34

Mark 53

28 One of the scribes came, and heard them questioning together. Knowing that he had answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the greatest of all?”

29 Jesus answered, “The greatest is, ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one:

30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’This is the first commandment.

31 The second is like this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’There is no other commandment greater than these.”

32 The scribe said to him, “Truly, teacher, you have said well that he is one, and there is none other but he

33 and to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbor as himself, is more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” No one dared ask him any question after that.

Thomas 25

1 Jesus said, "Love your friends like your own soul,

2 protect them like the pupil of your eye."

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20). Mark 62 - 13:14-20

Mark 62

14 But when you see the abomination of desolation,spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains,

15 and let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter in, to take anything out of his house.

16 Let him who is in the field not return back to take his cloak.

17 But woe to those who are with child and to those who nurse babies in those days!

18 Pray that your flight won’t be in the winter.

19 For in those days there will be oppression, such as there has not been the like from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be.

20 Unless the Lord had shortened the days, no flesh would have been saved; but for the sake of the chosen ones, whom he picked out, he shortened the days.

Thomas 79

Thomas 79

1 A woman in the crowd said to him, "Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you."

2 He said to [her], "Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it.

3 For there will be days when you will say, 'Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.'"

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21). Mark 63 - 13:21-22

Mark 63

21 Then if anyone tells you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it.

22 For there will arise false christs and false prophets, and will show signs and wonders, that they may lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones.

Thomas 113

Thomas 113

1 His disciples said to him, "When will the (Father's) imperial rule come?"

2 "It will not come by watching for it.

3 It will not be said, 'Look, here!' or 'Look, there!' 'Rather, the Father's imperial rule is spread out upon the earth, and people don't see it."

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22). Mark 66 - 13:30-33

Mark 66

30 Most certainly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things happen.

31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

32 But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

33 Watch, keep alert, and pray; for you don’t know when the time is.

23). Mark 73 - 14:56-59

Mark 73

56 For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony didn’t agree with each other.

57 Some stood up, and gave false testimony against him, saying,

58 “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands.’”

59 Even so, their testimony did not agree.

Thomas 111 Thomas 111

2 and whoever is living from the living one will not see death."

1 Jesus said, "The heavens and the earth will roll up in your presence,

3 Does not Jesus say, "Those who have found themselves, of them the world is not worthy"?

Thomas 71

Thomas 71

1 Jesus said, "I will destroy [this] house, and no one will be able to build it [. . .]."