Gospel of Mark Readthrough : 1:1 - 1:3
Jan. 9th, 2012 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackText: John the Baptist Prepares the Way
(1) The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, (2) as it is written in Isaiah the prophet "I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way. (3). "a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him'"
Commentary
I've always been an atheist, more or less. (I went to a Church of England primary school, and my secondary school often had some form of prayer at big gatherings, but I unconcernedly followed my parents' lead that you just did it, like driving on the left, but you didn't think it MEANT anything. I remember very occasional moments of confusion "wait, the moon AND God are in the sky? does he float around like a ghost, and if so, where does he go to the bathroom?" but not worse than anything else children learn about. But basically, the question of religion never came up for 18 years, which I'm fairly happy with[1].)
When I was younger, I several times tried to read the bible, from the beginning. Unsurprisingly, this ill-thought-out idea never got very far, and every time ran aground somewhere in Genesis, sometimes on the first page :) I never thought to start with one of the bits that's actually reasonably narrative. However, after introspecting about the hand-washing bit of Mark, I decided to have a browse through the whole gospel.
I've skimmed bits of gospels, but I've almost never really read more than a couple of pages in order. The thing that struck me the most is that it is reasonably coherent. If you try and map the whole bible onto one consistent whole, you need a massive system of how to interpret it. But Mark represents a reasonable narrative of a guy who got baptised, got a bunch of followers, did a bunch of preaching, did a bunch of miracles, foreshadowed a big disaster, got betrayed, got dead, came back to life, lived in heaven happily ever after.
Unfortunately, the whole "read the gospel in order" idea is starting to founder in the first sentence, as you'd sort of need to have read Isiah first and ask if his description of a messiah is more of an expression of hope about an end to the babylonian occupation, or a literal prediction of a future, or both.
Regardless of what Jews and Christians would think, it seems that the author writing the gospel thought Jesus was fulfilling the descriptions of Isiah.
OK, this isn't going fast. It looks like the next post will be a description of all of the other things that aren' at the beginning, but the one aftet that will move on to the baptism, and after that it may speed up a bit :)
(1) The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, (2) as it is written in Isaiah the prophet "I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way. (3). "a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him'"
Commentary
I've always been an atheist, more or less. (I went to a Church of England primary school, and my secondary school often had some form of prayer at big gatherings, but I unconcernedly followed my parents' lead that you just did it, like driving on the left, but you didn't think it MEANT anything. I remember very occasional moments of confusion "wait, the moon AND God are in the sky? does he float around like a ghost, and if so, where does he go to the bathroom?" but not worse than anything else children learn about. But basically, the question of religion never came up for 18 years, which I'm fairly happy with[1].)
When I was younger, I several times tried to read the bible, from the beginning. Unsurprisingly, this ill-thought-out idea never got very far, and every time ran aground somewhere in Genesis, sometimes on the first page :) I never thought to start with one of the bits that's actually reasonably narrative. However, after introspecting about the hand-washing bit of Mark, I decided to have a browse through the whole gospel.
I've skimmed bits of gospels, but I've almost never really read more than a couple of pages in order. The thing that struck me the most is that it is reasonably coherent. If you try and map the whole bible onto one consistent whole, you need a massive system of how to interpret it. But Mark represents a reasonable narrative of a guy who got baptised, got a bunch of followers, did a bunch of preaching, did a bunch of miracles, foreshadowed a big disaster, got betrayed, got dead, came back to life, lived in heaven happily ever after.
Unfortunately, the whole "read the gospel in order" idea is starting to founder in the first sentence, as you'd sort of need to have read Isiah first and ask if his description of a messiah is more of an expression of hope about an end to the babylonian occupation, or a literal prediction of a future, or both.
Regardless of what Jews and Christians would think, it seems that the author writing the gospel thought Jesus was fulfilling the descriptions of Isiah.
OK, this isn't going fast. It looks like the next post will be a description of all of the other things that aren' at the beginning, but the one aftet that will move on to the baptism, and after that it may speed up a bit :)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 10:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 08:56 am (UTC)I got a lot further in childhood reading-the-Bible-all-the-way-through, but I don't think it helped much. I was left with nightmares about Judith and Revelations, a confused picture of bright colours from Ezekiel, and a dislike of Paul. Oh, and a desire to see the desert. The gospels were much clarified by a sensible RE teacher: an elderly spinster Quaker who was completely unperturbed by adolescent boys' jokes and who had a vivid and unsentimental view of what the events could have been like. We would check back the references to prophesies as they came up in the texts, and follow the links within them, and discuss a little of the background of the older books. She also had examples of the later gospels for comparison, plus Josephus etc for historical placing.She was very keen on context, including the social and political environment, as necessary for understanding.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 10:17 am (UTC)Of course, Paine was 1737-1809, so presumably vast volumes of ink have been spilled on the subject since then by all sorts of people.
[1] Make sure to include the first 'a', it's a spelling mistake I often want to make.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-10 10:53 am (UTC):) Oops, thank you.
the Gospels misrepresented the contents of Isaiah[1], in order to make the prophecies fit the events
This was the bit I didn't feel competent to explain :) Wikipedia has a whole section on it, which surprisingly doesn't look terrible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_7:14)
AIUI most Jews traditionally assume that Isiah was talking about events at the time, and don't think it had anything to do with an eventual messiah at all, whereas Mark obviously thought it referred to Jesus. But I'm not sure I understand enough to mention it without really offending someone.
See also the whole almah/parthenos (young woman/virgin) mess that Dawkins likes to reference.
Yeah. Although this seems to be confusing. My most direct interpretation would be:
* Isaiah makes a prophecy about a son of a "young woman"
* Jesus turns up. No-one knows anything about a virgin birth.
* Later on, someone with some but less knowledge of Hebrew misinterprets Isaiah and digs up some evidence that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born.
But OTOH, even if Isaiah did predict a virgin birth, there still has to be (supposed) evidence that there was one, so if he didn't, that (supposed) evidence is still relevant.