Mark 3:1-6

My gospel readthrough is falling very behind. I skipped the end of chapter 2, which I didn't have anything to say about, and here's the beginning of chapter 3. Not all of this is in Mark, I'm taking some of it from the description of the same incident in Matthew.

This is related to the "picking grain on the sabbath" thing. Jesus goes to a synagogue where some proto-Rabbis who disagree with him hang out. It's not clear if this is coincidence, or he's deliberately letting them have a swing at him in order to win the argument.

There's a man with a shrivelled hand. Reading between the lines, it seems the proto-Rabbis, as told by one of Jesus' disciples in a story designed to make Jesus look good, deliberately draw this to Jesus' attention. Presumably it destroys Jesus' mystique if he refuses to heal someone who needs it, but if they can trap him into breaking the sabbath laws they can denounce or possibly arrest him.

It must be really frustrating it some chav[1] turns up in the cathedral and disrupts all the services and tells you you're doing it all wrong. Even if he's right, it's unsurprising people didn't like it.

Unsurprisingly, Jesus heals him anyway, and gives a short homily of halacha-fu which convinces the crowd Jesus is (a) channelling miracles (b) devout law-follower and (c) quick-thinking and turns them to his side, continuing the popular insurrection. The pharisees go off to plot Jesus' downfall (presumably this was written by someone who knew the crucifixion story[2]).

Analysis

So what do we know?

Implicitly, healing (or related things) were forbidden on the sabbath. Anyway with a greater talmudic knowledge want to comment?

In Matthew, Jesus draws a parallel with pulling a sheep out when it's stuck in a ditch. So implicitly, humanitarian acts of that sort were accepted at the time. But this changed?

If I recall correctly, in modern Judaism, anything life-saving is almost always allowed, and people who keep Sabbath laws generally interpret the exceptions fairly broadly to include any urgent medical activity. Anyone want to expand on that? Do most people apply it to sheep?

Footnotes

[1] I debated saying "yokel", but I feel class prejudice is more alive against "chav" than "yokel" these days, and I want to put the disagreeable view the people in charge might have had about Jesus in terms modern people would have a visceral reaction to.

[2] Freudian slip of the week: "crucifiction".

Mark 3:7-12

Content

Jesus goes to the lake.
People from several specifically named nearby regions flock to him.
People were crowding him because of his reputation for healing, so he went out on a boat.
Unclean spirits fell down before him crying out "you are the son of God". He said "Yes, but don't tell anyone!"

Analysis

I don't have much to say about this. I wonder if it evolved from something like, some unsung scribe had before him/her a reported story that happened to Jesus which was basically "Jesus left the town and went out on a boat" but they knew this story was supposed to convey (i) Jesus was very popular (ii) Jesus was the son of God, so they tried to deduce the missing bits.

Why would he have gone out in a boat? Because he was being crowded because he was popular.

How much detail do we have on "popular". Well, it was pretty widespread, lets say from "Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon".

How did people know he was the son of God? Because the evil spirits fled from him.

Why did lots of people still deny it? Because he, um, told everyone to keep it a secret.

Why did he not tell anyone? Not sure.

But that's complete speculation, I don't think it did happen like that.

Gym: 16min

Today I (cycled to work AND) jogged for 16 minutes continually, up from 1 minute a few months ago. I feel really good, but trying to restrain the impatience to get up to 20min and 30min, when I feel I could say I could jog without stretching the truth.

I didn't bring my headphones, so the main challenge was staying distracted enough to ignore the good-muscle-pain, although by the end I was starting to feel I was running up against my cardio limit and my tendon-risk-limit.

Although, while I'm getting used to going to the gym, I still keep feeling like an interloper -- maybe this is for people fitter or thinner or richer or posher or more confident or better than me. I don't think that's true; I have every reason to go to a gym (or exercise in another way, whichever I prefer). But I still keep having to squash my hindbrain down.