Gospel of Mark

[jack]

Several friends have been reading their way through various religious books recently. Recently reading some stuff on wikipedia impelled me to skip ahead and start skimming through the gospels. Last time I opened a bible, I didn't even know the basics (Mark probably earliest, Matthew aimed at Jewish Christians, etc,) which I checked out on wikipedia, and having a vague background framework made it easy to at least skim all the way through.

Below is a vague summary of Mark.

* Jesus is a preacher
* Jesus is compared to Elijah and other prophets
* Jesus casts evil spirits out of people
* Jesus performs various other miracles, leading people to say "wow, who is this guy?"
* Jesus commands his disciples to cast evil spirits out of people
* Jesus says sins are forgiven (but so does John?)
* Jesus reaches out to the poor and sinners
* Jesus hints God is on the way, and we need to get our act together
* Jesus predicts the destruction of the Temple
* Jesus overthrows much Jewish tradition: repenting your sins, being good, following Jesus is more important than following cleanliness laws, respecting Sabbath, etc.
* Jesus says people will rise from death on the day of resurrection. This was apparently open for debate by the theology of the time. Jesus says we will rise like angels, and not have things like marriage.
* In Nazareth Jesus was known as a carpenter, son of Mary, brother of etc, and they seemed to have no hint of his divinity before he turned up, and rejected him. And he failed to perform any miracles there.
* Jesus bases teachings on (a) analogies (b) assertion (c) commandments and examples from old testament prophets
* Jesus chats to Moses and Elijah. Jesus fulfils specific prophecies about the Jewish messiah, notably the preceedingment of Elijah
* Jesus predicts that he will be handed over to people who will kill him, and three days later will rise back into life
* Jesus claims he is the Messiah
* Much blame is put on the chief priests
* Jesus is crucified. There is miraculous darkness, Jesus dies, and the curtain in the temple torn in two, and Jesus is generally recognised as the Messiah after all.
* Jospeh of Arimethea buries Jesus.
* Several women, mostly called Mary, go to the tomb to annoint Jesus. (Details?) They discover the stone is already rolled away, and a young man in a white robe tells them Jesus is raised. They run away.

Comments

[scribb1e.livejournal.com]

Yay! I seem to have started a meme.

Jesus overthrows much Jewish tradition: repenting your sins, being good, following Jesus is more important than following cleanliness laws, respecting Sabbath, etc.

I'm not sure that is overthrowing tradition. It's very much in the tradition of the previous prophets that you need to repent and be good, and that following all the rules for sacrifice is no good unless you also only worship God.

For example, Micah (who I've just finished reading) says:

Micah 6:7-8

7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

8 He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

Calls to repent are all over the place, eg in Jonah 3 8:10

8 "But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish."

10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

(not actually here)

[liv]

Also, the Jewish "tradition" that Jesus was supposed to be overthrowing wasn't actually a tradition at that time, it was a new meme in the process of being developed. This is why Jesus keeps having arguments with the Pharisees. The Pharisees wanted the emphasis to be on cleanliness and sabbath observance, and Jesus / the early Christians wanted the emphasis to be on following Jesus and depending on God's forgiveness. (I would leave "being good" out of it, because both sides believed that their way was good.) Both of them are justifiable if you pick the right bits of the Old Testament, but both of them are pretty novel, radically unBiblical concepts of how to practise religion as well.

Arguably the Pharisees won, in that their way of doing things became normative Judaism from about 100 to 1700. But you could equally argue that Jesus won, because his way of doing things turned into Christianity which took over the Roman empire and thence the world. It just didn't get called Judaism any more, because of that inconvenient converting all the Gentiles thing.

Re: (not actually here)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I means laws rather than tradition generally. Indeed. There's lots of passages that go something like:

Pharisee: Ah, but in paragraph 5183, subsection 2, it says you're not supposed to do that.
Jesus: Pish-tosh! Moses said, blah blah blah! Also, ZOT!

The first not necessarily being what everyone thought. (Indeed, lots of them have the feel of being added in later, as a retrospective rebuttal to arguments in the later schism between Pharisees and Christians.)

He does feel like previous prophets. But what I mean is that presumably lots of those laws were adhered to by ordinary people, but that Jesus did seem to adopt a more holistic than legalistic approach to them, abandoning the details to keep the general spirit.

Re: (not actually here)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Why do you think they've been added later?

I'd expect Jesus to sound a lot like the prophets, the prophets were meant to be God's mouthpiece on earth, and Jesus also fulfilled that function.

Re: (not actually here)

[nameandnature]

In Jesus: a short biography, Martin Forward (who's a Christian, but not an evangelical who's committed to the historicity of the entire text) says:

As the gospels stand, much of the material about Jesus's dealings with the Pharisees reflects the controversies of the generation following the destruction of the Temple in 70. Even so, there is no reason to doubt that Jesus had serious disagreements with his contemporaries about the scope and distribution of God's covenant grace; he interpreted the Torah to maximize God's forgiving and generous love.

I'd recommend the book: it's quite short and pretty interesting. He dates Mark to shortly after 70, and the other gospels to before 100, FWIW.