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Introduction

The Book of Mark

Every family has stories that are told over and over again. At family gatherings or reunions, the stories are pulled out and retold by an ever-aging community. Some of the newer additions to the clan hear the stories for the first time. Others hear them and start smiling even before the end comes.

These veterans are so familiar with the events that are being described, or at least with the telling of them, that they could relate the story themselves. Each one could tell it in their own way; different memories would come to the surface, different details. Each story would be colored by perspective.

Like an old oil painting, each time the story is told another layer of texture and color is added by the artist of the day. After years of painting, the canvas is both rich with color and layered not only with tradition but with the accumulation of the artists’ interpretations.

The book we now call The Gospel of Mark is such a painting. Scholars have examined the pigments in detail. After careful examination, these scholars tell us that this particular canvas seems to be the oldest of the four canvases we call the four Gospels. When Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels, they seem to have actually had access to the canvas that was Mark’s Gospel. They used it as a model and added their own mixture of oils.

Modern biblical scholarship sometimes gets so focused on trying to determine each of the color pigments and their layered effect, and the big picture gets so separated into its elements, that the story the picture originally tried to tell becomes lost in the details. A sentence from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets can be diagrammed on a piece of paper. The forms of grammar and sentence structure become clear, but the beauty and deep meaning of the poem fades.

This does not mean that the sacred text should not be seen for its layered reality. Not to do so ignores the way the Bible is written and edited. I have studied this writing and editing and find it fascinating and full of marvelous findings. It is appropriate to study the details that make up the texture of the canvas because not to do so can sometimes lead to rigid statements which begin “The Bible says. . . .” Such lack of study can lead to misunderstandings and may also result in the loss of much of the beauty and deep meaning of the Bible.

I want for us to get close enough to the Gospel of Mark to see that it is a layered canvas, but I do not want to lose the wonderful flavor of the family reunion story. Sure, my telling of family stories may be different from my grandmother’s telling of the same stories, but the meaning and reason for telling them are the same.

Mark’s family first put brush to canvas around 70 AD. The benchmark for this dating is the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. This event made the same impact on the Jewish/Christian community back then as would the destruction of the Capitol building in Washington, DC, in our time.

Some of the brush strokes on the canvas reflect this particular time in history and the pigments themselves do not seem to be much older than 70 AD. This means that the story had been told at family gatherings for around thirty years before someone decided to actually put oil to canvas. The Gospel of Mark is not then a portrait of Jesus painted by someone who was there making sketches during his lifetime. There are too many details left out for that to be true.

The edition of the Gospel of Mark that we have is the picture painted by the family telling the story as they had been hearing it for over thirty years. It is not the original painting but the end result of many layers of colors that had been blended together over the years. That is just the way it is.