Reasoning Through the Bible
Taking a cue from Paul, Reasoning Through the Bible is an expository style walk through the Scriptures that tells you what the Bible says. Reviewing both Old and New Testament books, as well as topical subjects, the hosts methodically show how Scripture is one cohesive story. Critical Thinking with a little bit of theology and apologetics and you have what this podcast is about. Just like Paul on Mars Hill, Christianity today must address woke, deconstruction, and progressive Christianity, all topics that are addressed if we go purposefully through the Bible. Join Glenn and Steve weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as they reason with you through the Bible.
Reasoning Through the Bible
S1 || Mark's Gospel Through Action and Sacrifice || Introduction to Mark || Session 1
What if the Gospel of Mark wasn't the first Gospel penned? Join us as we challenge traditional assumptions and unravel the mystery behind the order of the synoptic Gospels. Together with insights from scholar Etta Lineman, we explore the unique characteristics of Mark's fast-paced narrative, its powerful portrayal of Jesus as the suffering servant, and its appeal to a Roman audience fascinated by action and accomplishments. This episode promises to shed light on the scholarly debates and the potential influence of Mark's concise style driven by the intended audience and purpose. Get ready to embark on an exciting exploration of the Gospel's messages, as we invite you to journey with us through the action-packed and spiritually enriching narrative of Mark.
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May God Bless you!! - Glenn and Steve
Welcome to Reasoning Through the Bible. We have a ministry that we go, verse by verse, through the Word of God. Today we're starting the Gospel of Mark and just like to remind all of our listeners to go to our website, where we have free resources. Our ministry is here to support you and your church in the sense that we provide methods for you to take materials and go teach others who can then teach others as well. We have free lesson plans and other materials for all of not only the Gospel of Mark but all of the other books that we've studied. So go to our website and look that up. Our ministry does verse-by-verse Bible study, and even phrase-by-phrase. My name's Glenn and I'm here with Steve, so today we're going to do an introduction to the Gospel of Mark and Steve. I'm kind of excited because this is going to be a great book. It's, of course, one of the four Gospels and it's going to be a book that's sort of fast in your seatbelt because it moves kind of quick.
Speaker 2:That is the thing that impressed me in prepping for this, glenn is that it is a fast-paced, fast-moving book. I'm looking forward to getting it Some overview.
Speaker 1:Before we jump into exegeting the passage, let's talk for a minute about the four Gospels. Of course there's Matthew, mark, luke and John. Mark is the second one and there are some overlap between them. Many of the things that are in Mark are also in Matthew and Luke. This leaves Bible teachers and scholars wondering did one of them copy from the other? Or why is there so much? Or almost all of the events in Mark are also in Matthew and Luke, but there's differences. There's things that are unique to each of the Gospels that are not in the others. The scholars have wondered for many hundreds of years about who copied from who. Was there any copying done? Which one was first?
Speaker 1:What I've heard more often than not seems to be the most popular view is that Mark was written first. I tend to reject the grounds upon which many of the teachers make that decision. Mark, of course, is shorter and it has fewer of the long speeches. Of course Matthew has long speeches and John has long speeches, and Luke has some elaborations on things and Mark has none of that. It's shorter, less words, less chapters.
Speaker 1:Many of the Bible commentators over the years have held well, it's shorter and therefore they view it as simpler, the idea that documents evolved, the way that biological evolution happens, which is start out simple and then go to more complex. I just reject that whole philosophy by saying, well, it was shorter, therefore it was first. There's other reasons I think they hold that. But bottom line, steve, I don't think there's any way to know who started first. There was some of the early church fathers going back to the second century that said that Matthew was first. It would seem to me they were closer to it. They would know more than we do. I just think that a lot of the reasoning behind holding that Mark was first is just kind of a flawed grounds for making those conclusions.
Speaker 2:I would agree with that. I think, if you look at the audience, as to who this book is aimed at will give you more of a reason on why it's concise and why it's written the way that it is, Meaning that there's long discourses which you mentioned aren't there. The genealogy of Jesus isn't there. Well, that's because he's not writing to Jewish believers Primarily. He's writing to Gentile believers and they don't want to know or not necessarily interested in the genealogy like the Jewish believers would be. So those type of indicators in the text, I think, give us some reasons as to why it's more concise than some of the other books.
Speaker 1:The question then does arise and this is, I think, part of the motivation behind asking these questions is there is a lot of commonality between the various Gospels, but once you get down into the details, what you find is that there's actually several major differences. A good treatment of and a good scholarly level evaluation can be found in the work of Etta Lineman. Etta Lineman was a disciple and a student of Rudolf Bultmann, a thoroughgoing liberal theologian that taught that there were these sources out there that were turned into myth. Etta Lineman taught all these things for years until she had a conversion experience and asked all of her readers and listeners to throw out everything she ever did and then, in the later parts of her life, rewrote a couple of books. That was a great evaluation of the differences and similarities between the synoptic gospels. Those of our listeners that would want to dive in deeper into the relation between the Synoptic Gospels Matthew, mark and Luke, I would just refer you to the work of Etta Leneman.
Speaker 1:Some church fathers taught there was some similarities in the sense that Matthew may have been first. I remember one scholar thinking and speculating that it's very possible that Matthew and Luke wrote first and then Peter used them as sources and Mark was a disciple of Peter. It's entirely possible. This one man's speculation is as good as anyone's, but he speculated that Peter was reading and doing a series of lectures from Matthew and Luke and Mark was just writing down what Peter did in lectures. Nevertheless, none of us really know. What we do know is that it matches with what we would get with eyewitness accounts. Different eyewitnesses notice different things and emphasize different things. By the time any of the Gospels were written of size different things. By the time any of the Gospels were written, the apostles had been teaching these sayings and teaching these scenarios from Jesus' life for years. You could see some commonalities just from that, from eyewitness accounts being held by the apostles over time. Nobody truly knows.
Speaker 2:I also think that because we have these eyewitness accounts or at least it's written that way from a perspective of eyewitnesses we've already established that John Mark was a follower or disciple of Peter and that he's probably depicting some of Peter's account.
Speaker 2:I think the general outline follows Peter's message to Cornelius in Caesarea. There's those indicators in there. But when you have the way it's written as far as eyewitness accounts, I think you kind of get the feeling that one of the reasons to write this down is that Peter's going to be gone and all these disciples are going to be gone. They're under Nero's persecution, depending upon when you date that it was written. So you get this feeling that, hey, something needs to be written down. These disciples are going around Peter mainly they're conveying the gospel to people. They're starting churches around, much like what Paul did. They're going to be gone at some point in time. We need to have some sort of a written account from them that can be passed on to the next generation of believers. And I think Mark kind of approaches it that way with these kind of like reporter-like writings of eyewitness accounts.
Speaker 1:It's probably a good time to address some of the questions that arise, at least in modern day. There's skeptics and critics out there today that would raise the accusation that none of the four gospels claim authorship. Therefore, so say these critics, no one really knows who wrote them. There is no verse in Mark or Matthew or Luke that says I Mark or I Matthew wrote this on this date and I was in this town when I wrote it. That doesn't exist in any of them. The modern skeptics and critics would say well, they're anonymous and we don't really know where they came from or who wrote them. We would reject that entirely, simply because that question and those accusations against the Gospels are really a modern, skeptical and critical question and was not ever questioned in the early years of the church. When we look at from the mid-60s AD until the 300s, being a Christian was a capital punishment. It was illegal in ancient Rome to be a Christian. Christians in those days really put their life on the line From the early church fathers. They were unanimous that the traditional authors wrote the Gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John. There is no early church father that questioned the traditional authorship anywhere and going back as early as 130 AD. The church fathers held Mark to be the author of this gospel. There's really no evidence, ancient or modern, that anyone else wrote the Gospels. The modern question that questioned the authorship is truly just born out of a spirit of criticism. It is not based in evidence simply because there is no evidence that would lead us to question the traditional authorship of the Gospels.
Speaker 1:There is also some evidence that would show why they didn't interject themselves into the story. In the case of Mark, if we look at him, he's the John Mark that was mentioned several times in the New Testament and he just wasn't there. He was getting his information from Peter. Peter was there. Mark doesn't interject himself in the story simply because he was writing down what Peter taught. Who's the point of the story? Is Jesus? It wasn't lifting themselves up saying, oh look, I was there, I was with him, I'm special because I. No, they were pointing towards Jesus. What does John the Baptist say? He must increase, I must decrease.
Speaker 1:They always wanted to put the emphasis on Christ and not bragging on the fact that they were there. If someone were to forge a gospel which there were some forgeries that happened in the ancient world people would write things and attribute the writing to some other, more famous person, so it would be more widespread. The document would be spread around more widely. So if somebody were to have forged a biography of Jesus and want to attribute it to someone so that the forgery would get spread around, they wouldn't have picked a second or tertiary person like John Mark. John Mark is one of the people that was not very prominent at all. Matter of fact, he was on Paul's missionary journey and abandoned him. Paul criticized him for it. So it seems like you wouldn't pick somebody like Mark to be the author when Mark was someone who had failed Paul on a missionary journey and was sent away. You would have picked Bartholomew, one of the apostles that nobody really knew about, but you could say, hey, I was there.
Speaker 2:Not only did he abandon Paul on the missionary journey, but it caused a division between him and Barnabas because John Mark was Barnabas's cousin. So on the next missionary journey that they were making, barnabas says let's bring Mark again and Paul says no, that caused Barnabas to take Mark and for them to go separate from Paul. Paul took somebody else on that next missionary journey. So, yeah, at that particular time it had caused a split between Paul and Barnabas, and the backstory on that is that Barnabas brought Paul into the fold because of what he was doing with the gospel to the Gentiles. Yeah, it doesn't seem at that point in time that you would pick somebody that had caused a division like that to have one of these Gospels.
Speaker 1:Well, let's explore for a minute who this man, mark, is, and what do we know about him from the Gospels you alluded to?
Speaker 1:He was Barnabas' cousin. Colossians 4.10 tells us that 1 Peter 5.13, peter refers to Mark as my son and that gives us a hint that it's very possible that Mark came to be a Christian through the efforts of Peter. That's why Peter would say hey, my son and Paul used this language of other people, so it would seem to be that people, so it would seem to be that Mark was led to Christ through Peter. Early church fathers said that Mark was Peter's interpreter, his translator. That's why we would see these clues throughout Mark, where he would explain or translate some words, and it would explain how Mark would follow Peter around and know everything he said. The early church fathers accepted the gospel of Mark simply because they knew he was a disciple of Peter and had followed Peter around for quite a number of years. We really could call it Peter's gospel as documented by Mark, but nevertheless that's our name that we have for it today is the gospel according to Mark.
Speaker 2:For all we know, Peter could have asked him to write this down and to give an account of what they're doing.
Speaker 1:Historian Martin Hengel says this about Mark's gospel. He says I do not know any other work in Greek which has so many Aramaic or Hebrew words and formulae in so narrow a space, as does the second gospel, what he's saying there. And this historian is saying he knows of nothing in the ancient world that has so many things about Hebrewisms and Aramaic phrasings and Aramaic style of writing and Hebrew style of writing than any other thing in Greek. This really tells us the source of this information was Hebrew. The source of this information was a Jewish person that grew up in the land of Israel, that knew the Hebrew and Judaic customs. Therefore, we conclude that Mark was educated enough to accurately translate the things that would have been occurring in and around Israel in those days and in and around the speeches that Peter would give, translate that and document it carefully into this gospel. That's what we have here. It's really a fantastic gospel.
Speaker 1:Let's touch for a minute on the distinctions between this gospel and the others. Of course, matthew was written to the Jews and presents Jesus as king. He has genealogies in the front because the king has to have a heritage. The king of Israel had to come from David and had to come from Abraham. Matthew presents the genealogies, his credentials to be king. Matthew spoke a lot about prophecy and Jesus being a fulfillment of prophecy.
Speaker 1:Mark is very different. Mark was written to the Roman world and the Roman world didn't really care who your father, your great-grandfather, your ancestors was. They worried about what you could do, what you could accomplish, what were your talents and skills, what could you do. Mark is written to Romans and he presents Jesus as the suffering servant. He spends most of his book telling what Jesus was going and doing. A lot of action in Mark.
Speaker 1:Luke was Greek and he wrote to the Greeks. He presented Jesus as the perfect man and spent a lot of his time talking about history and documenting historical things that the Greeks were interested in. John, of course, was written later and was written to the church and has a very flavor of okay, I'm writing this for the church and presents Jesus as God, although we typically think of the Gospel of John as being the gospel that has the primary evidence of the deity of Christ, of Jesus being God Almighty. But when we really get into Mark, steve, what we're going to find is the deity of Christ is presented in every single chapter in Mark. It's shot through from beginning to end, with Jesus as God Almighty. We're going to see that as we go through the book. It's going to be quite a ride.
Speaker 2:That, and it's also presenting Jesus as the suffering Jesus. He's depicted as the Son of God, the Son of man. He's also depicted as Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One, and he's depicted as the Lord. So that is a primary theme that we're going to see in Mark of who Jesus is. You kind of think that writing to Gentile Christians? What is it that they have come out of? They have come out of a polytheistic background many, many gods. Now they worship one God and Jesus Christ is that. So we see Mark emphasizing that in this gospel that he's writing to these Gentile Christians in Rome.
Speaker 1:When we look at Matthew, we see Matthew as a tax collector and was accustomed to writing down details. We have long speeches of Jesus in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Those three chapters are all one big long speech. Matthew 24 and 25, long chapters is one big long speech. In John, we have five chapters. Chapters 13 through 17 of John are all one big long speech.
Speaker 1:In Mark we have none of that. We have no long speeches, we have a few short ones and a few isolated sayings, but we have many, many miracles and actions and going and doing. Mark is the gospel of action. He's immediately going here and immediately going there and there's a lot of focus on what Jesus does. Mark presents Jesus through Jesus's actions. In Mark there's no genealogy. There's no birth scene, no childhood of Jesus.
Speaker 1:The very first chapter in Mark, jesus shows up as an adult already doing things. There's a lot of action and a lot of accomplishment. The word and appears more than 900 times in Mark and this happened and they went there. Then they went there and this happened. The word immediately appears 40 times in Mark Immediately. This happened and they immediately went there. There are 18 miracles in Mark. So there's a lot of going and doing a lot of accomplishments. Mark was writing to an audience that was interested in what Jesus was able to accomplish. So it really does. As you read it, it has a sense of urgency, it has a fast pace to it. It really is sort of fasten your seatbelt time or else you're going to fall off the bus. It's moving quickly. Jesus is moving quickly in this gospel and I just find it to be a very fun book to study.
Speaker 2:Most of the action also takes place up in the area of Galilee and out of Capernaum where Jesus' kind of headquarters were in that area. He makes a little side trip up a little bit further to Tyre and Sidon, but most of the action takes place there around the Galilee area. And then towards the end of the book, jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, has the triumphal entry and then we have the trial and his death. Really kind of reads like a Greek tragedy, glenn. Trial and his death really kind of reads like a Greek tragedy, glenn, in that you have Jesus's success but yet there's hostility against him. You have his triumph and conflict are depicted side by side. You have his disciples that recognize him as being the Christ, the anointed one, the son of God.
Speaker 2:In the second part we see that Jesus announces his coming death to his disciples and the reasons why, and then he travels to Jerusalem. He's tried, he's put to death, tried by the Roman governor at the time and also the Jewish leadership. But then the third act comes, the overture and what happens. But then the third act comes, the overture and what happens. Jesus is risen and now he has defeated both his enemies. He's defeated death and he has defeated Satan. It's a very hot type of a narrative that is fast-paced and fast-moving, something that you would maybe expect in a play type form.
Speaker 1:One of the great things about Mark is because of all this action and all this fast pace, we can apply it to our lives quite easily. Many times, the doctrinal and theological books are stimulating. But okay, how do I apply that to my life? Sometimes people struggle. In Mark, the application to our lives just falls right in our lap because it's so human.
Speaker 1:Matter of fact, one of the major themes in Mark is Jesus's interaction with other humans. One of the things that he does is he interacts with a large number of very, very different types of people. As we go through, we're going to see Jesus interacting with his disciples, with Jewish religious leaders, with crowds of different people from different cities. He interacts with Gentiles. He interacts with Satan and Satan's demons. He interacts with people from his hometown. He interacts with a man with leprosy, a blind person, a lame person. He raises a dead girl. He interacts with rich rulers and poor widows. There's a long string of people that he's interacting with, and we learn about Jesus by his methods and how he interacts with all these various different kinds of people. And, of course, the next one in line is me and you, and we always ask the question of what am I going to do when I interact with Jesus. What am I going to do with him and what's he going to tell me? Well, we'll see that before we get out of the book.
Speaker 1:The next major theme that we see in Mark is the works that he does. We learn who Jesus is not only by the people he interacts with, but by the works that he does. Jesus in this gospel he controls nature, he calms the seas. Jesus commands demons. Jesus overcomes temptation. Jesus forgives sins. Jesus heals the sick. He raises the dead.
Speaker 1:Through the entire book, jesus is in complete and total control of all of the creation, meaning the nature and the people, and he's in control of all of these circumstances. I just find that to be really interesting because you would think, as he interacts with all these people, that there'd be some things that were happening to him. But no, it's really Jesus controlling and commanding all of these people in all these circumstances. The style is and the language is very vivid. The stories describe people well. It's real easy to put ourselves into the narrative. We can see ourselves in the boat in the sea, with the wind blowing. Your clothes are almost wet. When you get to that point. It's very easy to follow, but it has very deep and very profound message, wouldn't you agree, steve? Steve McLaughlin, I do agree.
Speaker 2:One of these things that some of the skeptics bring up is that, oh, this couldn't have been written by somebody that was, in that area, a common person, because they were uneducated people or at least illiterate, meaning that they couldn't read or couldn't write uneducated people, or at least illiterate, meaning that they couldn't read or couldn't write. But we are talking about a Jewish person and there was literacy within the Jewish people. They went to synagogues, they had scribes that passed down their oral traditions, wrote them down and also the Torah and the Law of Moses and all of the Hebrew scriptures. We also see in the Old Testament that many of the Jewish people have rise to prominence in various governments, with Joseph being an example, with Nehemiah being an example, a cupbearer, and with Daniel also rising to prominence. That was through God showing favor on him.
Speaker 2:So I think that, in general, the broad brush that this type of Greek or this type of story couldn't have been written by these disciples of Jesus doesn't really hold water on the surface, because we really don't know for certain that they couldn't read or write. That's just something that the skeptics want to bring up in a very broad brush, but we see here, through the writing of Mark that he does know how to write, and with the other gospels and also with the other letters that we have from Paul. There were people that could write Greek and that could write it very eloquently at times.
Speaker 1:Oh, the style here is written by someone who really understands how to communicate Very vivid style. The language again tells us that Mark knew different languages. We'll see him translate for us right before our eyes several times in this book. The other just study tip along those lines that I would give to our listeners is this is a really good book to take a step back and learn how to study Scripture. Mark is a great book for that, simply because when we look at Scripture, it's inspired Word of God, it's God-breathed. Look at scripture it's inspired word of God, it's God breathed.
Speaker 1:And everything in here is for a reason. The words that are used, the style of the language, the placement of the words, which words are repeated all these things are here for a reason. Nothing's here by accident. We can take a gospel of Mark, because it's fairly straightforward to understand, and we can look for literary devices that the Lord, god, put in here for our benefit. Repeated words is one, or patterns to the events. Is there a connection between the healing of this person and the healing of that person? Contrasts and things like that. When it says therefore, then there's a conclusion, it's drawing a conclusion. Well, why? What is the? Therefore? Therefore Changes in what is said and where they go. Why are they going there? Why are they leaving here? All of these things are really good study tips that if we just read it and look for patterns, then great meaning will jump off the page at us.
Speaker 1:Our Bible's focused so much on individual sentences and it really helps us that we can refer to chapter 7, verse 6, or something like that. Right, but we tend to, in theology, open to a chapter, any verse, and focus on that verse In doing so. Yeah, that's helpful, but we miss the flow, and the flow is part of the inspiration. The flow of the book is really part of what God is trying to explain to us. Hopefully in this, steve, when we start at the beginning and go all the way through, we'll be able to communicate some of that flow.
Speaker 1:Just in chapter 1, the word immediately appears more than a dozen times Verse 10, verse 12, verse 18, verse 20, verse 21,. Immediately they went here and then immediately they went there, and immediately this happens, it has a sense of urgency in this book. He generally doesn't give us any sense throughout any of the book on how long Jesus spent at any one place. Rather, jesus is just always moving, always immediately going to the next place or encountering the next person. Mark gives very little sense that Jesus stayed anywhere. Now we know he did. It's just. This is the style of Mark and he's trying to communicate something here. I've told this, steve, to people that are new Christians, which is fasten your seatbelt and put on your helmet, because it's going to be quite a ride If we go into the Christian life. That's what we see sometimes is it's quite a ride, yeah it is, and Mark's going to be a great ride.
Speaker 2:Mark also, in the Greek, uses the present tense quite often. That gives that flavor of an eyewitness account. So yeah, Mark, another gospel, and I think it's going to be a great adventure for us to go through it. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker 1:We can split Mark into two halves. The first half is Jesus communicating himself to his followers. It leads up to chapter 8, verse 29,. When Peter makes the confession, you are the Christ. At that point they've realized who he is. That's the end of the first half of the book. The second half of the book leads towards the cross. 60% of the gospel of Mark is the last week of his life, where he's getting ready to go to the cross. That really tells us a lot about where the emphasis is. If we had to have a key verse in the entire book, it would be Mark 10. 45 says this. For even the son of man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom. For many, Steve, that's the focus of the book is that Jesus came to serve and give his life as a ransom. We're going to see that it's going to be another great study.
Speaker 2:Great study and a lot of action is going to happen in the very first 13 verses of the first chapter. Looking forward to getting in. Thank you for watching and listening. We ask you to come back as we begin to reason through the gospel of Mark and, as always, may God bless you.
