Introduction to Mark

We begin with Mark because Mark was the first gospel to be written. How do we know that? There are several important pieces of evidence that support this conclusion.

There are 661 verses in Mark. Ninety percent of these verses also appear in Matthew, fifty percent of them appear in Luke. If Matthew was written first as many Christians believe and Mark was derived from Matthew, why does Mark not contain a virgin birth story or a Sermon on the Mount? Mark’s omission of these prominent stories is best explained by the proposition that Mark’s gospel came first.

There is also a great deal of evidence that the writers of Matthew and Luke edited material they received from Mark. Mistakes in grammar are corrected. More importantly, stories are changed.

The story of Jesus’ baptism by John at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry presented a real problem for the early Church because only sinners were baptized. Read Mark’s version of the story (1:9-11). Matthew takes this story and changes it (see Matthew 3: 13-15). In Matthew’s version, John tries to talk Jesus out of being baptized. John further suggests that Jesus is the one who should be baptizing him. In Luke (3:21-22), the writer reduces the impact of the story. We don’t see it happening. We only hear about it.

Matthew and Luke also edit Mark’s obvious mistakes. In the Passion Narrative, Mark (15:43) makes Joseph of Arimathea a member of the Sanhedrin that convicted Jesus. He also points out that Joseph is a follower of Jesus. The problem comes in 14:64 when Mark says that all members of the Sanhedrin vote to convict Jesus. This would include Joseph. Matthew corrects the problem by taking Joseph out of the Sanhedrin (Matthew 27: 57-58). The verdict remains unanimous, but Joseph does not vote. Luke makes Joseph a member of the Sanhedrin who voted against conviction (Luke 23:50-51). The decision was not unanimous according to Luke. Matthew and Luke correct Mark in different ways in order to achieve consistency.

Please read the passages cited above. It won’t take but half an hour. It’s important that you see for yourself Mark’s material being edited. The writers of the New Testament gospels were first and foremost editors. These blogs will present examples of subtle and not so subtle editorial changes that occur throughout the New Testament. Figuring out the meaning of these changes is the work of New Testament scholarship. It’s fun.

A final argument supporting the idea that Mark’s gospel was written first is a matter of literary style. Mark developed many of his stories like an oreo cookie (see Mark 11: 15-33). The main story contains within it a minor story. Event A is introduced, event B is introduced and finished, and event A is concluded. The purpose of event B is to illustrate and embellish the meaning of event A. Mark has nine such story complexes. Matthew repeats five, Luke four. If Matthew was written first, you would expect that he would have included as many if not more of these unique story complexes.

A second and related question pertains to authorship. Who wrote Mark? The only honest answer is that we do not know. Some scholars have presented theories as to the author of Mark, but the evidence is speculative and not very convincing. There is no hard historical data to help in this matter.

For me, the identity of the author is not important. What is important is the fact that whomever the author was he was not an eye witness to the events he reports. There is a great deal of evidence to support this conclusion.

To begin with, the earliest manuscripts of Mark were written in Greek. Gospels were written because churches wanted a written account of Jesus’ ministry and great deeds for their worship. It took several years for the Christian church to move from its origins in Palestine to the Hellenistic world where Greek was the universal language. This time frame made it unlikely for eye witnesses to still be around.

Within the gospel, there are many inexact and sometimes inaccurate descriptions of Palestinian geography which suggests that the author of Mark had never traveled there. The audience for the gospel was clearly non-Palestinian and not Jewish. Read the story in Mark where the author reports on one of Jesus’ well known confrontations with the Pharisees (7: 1-13). Note that the author explains the religious significance of Jewish purity rules for his readers (verses 3-5). Such an explanation would not be necessary in Palestine before a Jewish audience. In verse five, he refers to the Jews as them, suggesting that they are different from the people for whom the gospel is addressed.

The final introductory question pertains to date of writing. Most New Testament scholars date the writing of Mark within a narrow range of years between 68 and 70 C.E.

The dating of New Testament materials is fraught with difficulty because writers did not date their work, and because the gospels contain little hard historical data to provide accurate reference points. In the case of Mark, the consensus year of 70 is chosen because of dramatic historical events which appear to echo or resonate throughout the gospel. In 66 C.E. the Jews of Palestine revolted against Rome. The rebellion was not put down until 73 C.E. In 69-70 C.E., the mass murder of tens of thousands of Jews took place. After that time, Jews that survived were exiled from Palestine and scattered throughout the Hellenistic world.

For many Jews, these horrible events signaled the end of the world. This theme plays a prominent role in Mark, and is the subject of a future blog. Mark never makes specific reference to this Roman invasion; however, the vivid tone of his gospel echoes these events. The Roman invasion provides a backdrop for many of Mark’s stories that helps to explain the tone of immediacy of the coming kingdom and the dark pessimism. That’s the main argument for a date of 70 C.E. It’s all the evidence we have. Dating the gospels is an inexact art!

In preparation for beginning a more detailed study of Mark, please read through the gospel in its entirety. Do this in one sitting as if you were reading a gripping novel. It shouldn’t take more than a few hours.

This exercise will introduce you to the genre of ancient biography. Note that the author of Mark has no interest in what Jesus looks like, his early childhood, members of his family, or whether Jesus was married. The focus of ancient biographies was identity. Who was this person, what made him great? In my next blog, I will provide Mark’s answer to these questions.

The Biblical Literacy Project

September 11th was a wake-up call for many, a life changing event. For me, it was a day of lost opportunity. My publisher had arranged book signings for my two novels in several major bookstores in the Charlotte North Carolina metropolitan area. It was an opportunity to take the sales of these books to a new level.

The drive to Charlotte from our home in the North Carolina mountains takes about two hours. When I arrived at the first store at 9:45 a.m., the news was both horrifying and shocking. People were glued to television sets throughout the store. Few customers were interested in buying books, no one was interested in conversation with an author. My four appearances were cancelled.

On the drive home, I reflected on the events of the day. They were scary, deeply disturbing, hard to believe. As a self-declared religious scientist, the one thought that kept coming back to me was that a religion of certainty is extremely dangerous. Radical Islam has both distorted the teachings of Mohammad, and lashed out in ways that are very dangerous for the peace and security of the world. In acting this way, the Islamic terrorists violate both the teachings and the spirit of their great founder.

A corollary to this idea also occurred to me on that trip home: fundamentalist Christianity has produced similar negative consequences. If religious people of all stripes are honest with themselves, you cannot escape the conclusion that religion has more often been the cause of societal and global problems than the solution. In the case of Christianity, the examples of the Crusades, the Christian inspired anti-Semitism in Europe that allowed Nazism to develop and thrive (a future blog topic), Rwanda, the recent violence between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia, and gay bashing (another future blog entry) readily come to mind.

On that trip home, I vowed to fight religious fundamentalism. If God is transcendent, beyond human definition and control, black and white answers to religious questions are not possible. Religious scripture in all its manifestations is a human creation. Scriptural literalism can be hazardous to the health of your neighbor, a situation that flies in the face of Jesus’ great teaching on the subject, and the similar teachings of all of the world’s spiritual founders.

The Biblical Literacy Project will fight this problem as it relates to the New Testament. We will proceed book by book. In many ways, the weekly entries posted each Monday morning will serve as an introduction to the New Testament. I will focus on the central themes that dominate each New Testament writing, and the religious issues that derive from these writings that interest me. I hope that the blog entries will be both informative and provocative.

I am not a New Testament scholar with certifiable credentials. I spent most of my career as a university professor with a Ph.D. in Latin American politics from Tulane University. On the other hand, the study of the New Testament has been my passion for the last forty years. I have taught an adult Sunday school class in two Protestant churches. I have also written a book on these issues entitled The Case Against Evangelical Christianity published by Charles River Press.


There is no better way to present this material than in a blog because a blog allows for written feedback, responses from you the reader, that are shared and available to all readers of the blog. Because I am not an expert on these questions, I hope you will be encouraged to respond. The wonderful thing is that no one is an expert when it comes to a transcendent God. Such a God is discovered in mystery, in an encounter of awe and wonder. Human writings can never capture this experience. Instead the best we can do is write about the experience in ways that reflect our many limitations as human beings.

In developing my positions on New Testament issues, I will cite biblical references to illustrate the major points I make. These references will come from The Jerusalem Bible, a book I purchased more than forty years ago at the recommendation of the college professor teaching the New Testament course in which I was enrolled. The Jerusalem Bible is written in a contemporary literary style, which may mean that the text will vary somewhat from the one you are using. This should not present a problem; but if it does, you will have entered the realm of New Testament scholarship. Discovering an accurate rendering of the text is often the first task in interpreting a New Testament passage.

So please join me in this collective attempt at illumination. We begin next week with Mark. For those of you who come on board once the blog is in progress, I recommend that you start at the beginning with “An Introduction to Mark.” Later blog entries will assume information introduced in earlier blogs.