Mark 2:13

"Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them"

Once again, a single verse that could contain a whole story. If you're skimming, it's just "Jesus preached". But if you were making a film, you can imagine a whole scene here.

Maybe someone happened along, and spoke to Jesus, and Jesus replied, and someone else overhead, and said that was interesting, and they began to debate. And then a couple of other people saw something going on, and one of them came over, and the other ran back to get a friend, and ran into a bunch of other people, and told them that preacher they'd heard about was just getting into an argument about theology, and they rushed over. And Jesus is just looking around for something to stand on, when you get a montage sequence of people leaping up, kicking over chairs, scuffing stones with sandles, rushing along the beach... A crowd has gathered, Jesus straining to retain some sanity in the discussion...

Wow, now I want to make a humorous but pro-Jesus film of the gospels. Wow, that would be controvertial :)

Mark 2:14

"As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him"

One of the little facts everyone hears when someone first starts to "explain" the new testament is that "tax collector" isn't just annoying. Honestly, nowadays, most middle class UK people I know just have money disappear from their paycheck. I understand it may be a lot more annoying in America, where apparently it's a lot more common to have to guess badly and then have to make a massive payment at the end of the year, or discover you've been overpaying all year. But apparently, all this land was _occupied_. So anyone collecting tax was working for the government, ie. the one imposed from Rome, that most people didn't want.

In fact, a quick google says (unsurprisingly in retrospect), everyone didn't give a scrupulously accurate 22% to the government. Rather, tax collectors paid the government up front, and then strode around seeing how much they could extract from people as a return on their investment. I don't know how specifically accurate that is, but it's easy to forget that without modern records and communications, taxes can often be a lot more of an ad-hoc thing.

For that matter, what is this "booth"? Is this where people came to pay taxes? Or is it somewhere people are supposed to pay tolls? Why is it next to a lake -- are we in a town at this point?

Also, why did everyone have two names?