What Does Mark Say About Jesus

[Sheila Cast]

TheGospel of Mark[a] is the second of the four canonical gospels and one of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from his baptism by John the Baptist to his death, the burial of his body, and the discovery of his empty tomb. It portrays Jesus as a teacher, an exorcist, a healer, and a miracle worker, though it does not mention a miraculous birth or divine pre-existence.[3] He refers to himself as the Son of Man. He is called the Son of God but keeps his messianic nature secret; even his disciples fail to understand him.[4] All this is in keeping with the Christian interpretation of prophecy, which is believed to foretell the fate of the messiah as suffering servant.[5]

Most critical scholars reject the early church tradition linking the gospel to John Mark,[6][7][8] who was a companion of Saint Peter, and it is generally agreed that it was written anonymously for a gentile audience, probably in Rome, sometime shortly before or after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.[9][10]

The Gospel of Mark was written in Greek, for a gentile audience, and probably in Rome, although Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), and southern Syria have also been suggested.[18][19]

The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are a subset of the ancient genre of bios, or ancient biography.[20] Ancient biographies were concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory, and also included morals, rhetoric, propaganda and kerygma (preaching) in their works.[21] Like all the synoptic gospels, the purpose of writing was to strengthen the faith of those who already believed, as opposed to serving as a tractate for missionary conversion.[22] Christian churches were small communities of believers, often based on households (an autocratic patriarch plus extended family, slaves, freedmen, and other clients), and the evangelists often wrote on two levels: one the "historical" presentation of the story of Jesus, the other dealing with the concerns of the author's own day. Thus the proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:14 and the following verses, for example, mixes the terms Jesus would have used as a 1st-century Jew ("kingdom of God") and those of the early church ("believe", "gospel").[23]

Christianity began within Judaism, with a Christian "church" (or ἐκκλησία, ekklesia, meaning 'assembly') that arose shortly after Jesus's death when some of his followers claimed to have witnessed him risen from the dead.[24] From the outset, Christians depended heavily on Jewish literature, supporting their convictions through the Jewish scriptures.[25] Those convictions involved a nucleus of key concepts: the messiah, the son of God and the son of man, the suffering servant, the Day of the Lord, and the kingdom of God. Uniting these ideas was the common thread of apocalyptic expectation: Both Jews and Christians believed that the end of history was at hand, that God would very soon come to punish their enemies and establish his own rule, and that they were at the centre of his plans. Christians read the Jewish scripture as a figure or type of Jesus Christ, so that the goal of Christian literature became an experience of the living Christ.[26] The new movement spread around the eastern Mediterranean and to Rome and further west, and assumed a distinct identity, although the groups within it remained extremely diverse.[24]

The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear a striking resemblance to each other, so much so that their contents can easily be set side by side in parallel columns. The fact that they share so much material verbatim and yet also exhibit important differences has led to several hypotheses explaining their interdependence, a phenomenon termed the synoptic problem.

Up until the 19th century the gospel of Mark was traditionally placed second, and sometimes fourth, in the Christian canon, as an abridgement of Matthew. The Church has consequently derived its view of Jesus primarily from Matthew, secondarily from John, and only distantly from Mark. However, in the 19th century, Mark came to be viewed by many scholars as the earliest of the four gospels, and as a source used by both Matthew and Luke. It is widely accepted that this was the first gospel (Marcan Priority) and was used as a source by both Matthew and Luke,[27] who agree with each other in their sequence of stories and events only when they also agree with Mark.[28] The hypothesis of Marcan priority continues to be held by the majority of scholars today, and there is a new recognition of the author as an artist and theologian using a range of literary devices to convey his conception of Jesus as the authoritative yet suffering Son of God.[29]

When in the 19th century it became widely accepted that Mark was the earliest of the gospels it was assumed that it was therefore the most reliable source for the historical Jesus, but the idea that Mark could be used to reconstruct the historical Jesus suffered two severe blows in the early part of the 20th century, first when William Wrede argued strongly that the "Messianic Secret" motif in Mark was a creation of the early church rather than a reflection of the historical Jesus, and in 1919 when Karl Ludwig Schmidt further undermined its historicity with his argument that the links between episodes are the invention of the writer, meaning that it cannot be taken as a reliable guide to the chronology of Jesus' mission: both claims are widely accepted today.[30] Since about 1950 there has been a growing consensus that the primary purpose of the author of Mark was to announce a message rather than to report history,[31] but it is nevertheless still seen as the most reliable of the four in terms of its overall description of Jesus's life and ministry.[32]

The earliest extant Greek manuscripts of Mark, codices Vaticanus (which contains a large blank space in the column after 16:8) and Sinaiticus, end at Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing in fear from the empty tomb. The majority of recent scholars believe this to be the original ending,[40] and that this is supported by statements from the early Church Fathers Eusebius and Jerome.[41] The "shorter ending", found in a small number of manuscripts, tells how the women told "those around Peter" all that the angel had commanded and how the message of eternal life (or "proclamation of eternal salvation") was then sent out by Jesus himself; it differs from the rest of Mark both in style and in its understanding of Jesus and is almost universally considered a spurious addition; the overwhelming majority of manuscripts have the "longer ending", with accounts of the resurrected Jesus, the commissioning of the disciples to proclaim the gospel, and Christ's ascension.[41] In deference to its importance within the manuscript tradition, the New Testament critical editors enclose the longer ending in brackets.[42]

Mark contains twenty accounts of miracles and healings, accounting for almost a third of the gospel and half of the first ten chapters, more, proportionally, than in any other gospel.[47] In the gospels as a whole, Jesus' miracles, prophecies, etc., are presented as evidence of God's rule, but Mark's descriptions of Jesus' healings are a partial exception to this, as his methods, using spittle to heal blindness[48] and magic formulae,[49] were those of a magician.[50][51] This is the charge the Jewish religious leaders bring against Jesus: they say he is performing exorcisms with the aid of an evil spirit[52] and calling up the spirit of John the Baptist.[53][50] "There was [...] no period in the history of the [Roman] empire in which the magician was not considered an enemy of society," subject to penalties ranging from exile to death, says Classical scholar Ramsay MacMullen.[54] All the gospels defend Jesus against the charge, which, if true, would contradict their ultimate claims for him. The point of the Beelzebub incident in Mark[55] is to set forth Jesus' claims to be an instrument of God, not Satan.[56]

Christology means a doctrine or understanding concerning the person or nature of Christ.[58] In the New Testament writings it is frequently conveyed through the titles applied to Jesus. Most scholars agree that "Son of God" is the most important of these titles in Mark. It appears on the lips of God himself at the baptism and the transfiguration, and is Jesus' own self-designation.[59] These and other instances provide reliable evidence of how the evangelist perceived Jesus, but it is not clear just what the title meant to Mark and his 1st-century audience.[60] Where it appears in the Hebrew scriptures it meant Israel as God's people, or the king at his coronation, or angels, as well as the suffering righteous man.[61] In Hellenistic culture the same phrase meant a "divine man", a supernatural being. There is little evidence that "son of God" was a title for the messiah in 1st century Judaism, and the attributes that Mark describes in Jesus are much more those of the Hellenistic miracle-working "divine man" than of the Jewish Davidic messiah.[60]

Mark also calls Jesus "christos" (Christ), translating the Hebrew "messiah," (anointed person).[66] In the Old Testament the term messiah ("anointed one") described prophets, priests and kings; by the time of Jesus, with the kingdom long vanished, it had come to mean an eschatological king (a king who would come at the end of time), one who would be entirely human though far greater than all God's previous messengers to Israel, endowed with miraculous powers, free from sin, ruling in justice and glory (as described in, for example, the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish work from this period).[67] The most important occurrences are in the context of Jesus' death and suffering, suggesting that, for Mark, Jesus can only be fully understood in that context.[66]

Eschatology means the study of the end-times, and the Jews expected the messiah to be an eschatological figure, a deliverer who would appear at the end of the age to usher in an earthly kingdom.[73] The earliest Jewish Christian community saw Jesus as a messiah in this Jewish sense, a human figure appointed by God as his earthly regent; but they also believed in Jesus' resurrection and exaltation to heaven, and for this reason they also viewed him as God's agent (the "son of God") who would return in glory ushering in the Kingdom of God.[74]

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