Drawn to the Gospels

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Jay Sidebotham. Drawn to the Gospels

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This book is dedicated to Frances,who after many years of marriage remains kind enoughto chuckle at my cartoons.

Introduction

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This year in church, Year B, we will focus on the gospel attributed to Mark. It’s not the first of the four gospels, in terms of its order in the canon, but most scholars agree that it is the earliest. It seems that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke used Mark as a basis for their writing, building on a basic outline and then adding other material.

What do we know about Mark? We don’t know a whole lot, and it doesn’t help that there are a few characters in the New Testament named Mark. He is not listed as one of the twelve disciples, though some have wondered if he is the mysterious young man who runs away naked in the Garden of Gethsemane. (See Mark 14, now that we have your interest. Please note that we provide no illustrations of this event.) The gospel is the shortest, which also serves as an argument for its chronological priority. There’s an urgency about telling the story. Mark gets right into it in the first verse, saying that this is the gospel. We first meet Jesus as adult. Mark seems uninterested in the stories of Jesus’s birth. And the word “immediately” appears repeatedly throughout the gospel. It’s not hard to understand why other gospel writers felt like they wanted to build on Mark’s account.

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