Mark — themes & analysis

Mark's gospel runs faster than the other three. The favourite word is kai euthus, kai euthos, kai euthys — and immediately, and at once, and straightaway — and it appears more than forty times in sixteen chapters. The first chapter alone uses it eleven times. Jesus is baptized and immediately the heavens tear open; immediately the Spirit drives him into the wilderness; he calls the first disciples and they immediately leave their nets; they go to Capernaum and immediately on the Sabbath he enters the synagogue; the unclean spirit cries out and immediately he comes out of the man; immediately his fame spreads through all the surrounding region.

What the speed does is refuse the reader the comfortable distance of contemplation. The other three gospels arrange the material at different paces — Matthew gives long discourses, Luke gives long travel narratives, John gives sustained dialogues — and the reader can pause inside the arrangement. Mark refuses to pause. The episodes follow each other without transition; the connectives are kai (and) and kai euthus (and immediately) where Greek narrative would normally use particles indicating logical or temporal relation. The effect, in Mark's Greek, is paratactic and breathless, the way a witness who has just come from the scene speaks.

The argument the speed makes is that the announcement of Jesus is news, in the sense in which urgent news is told. The very title of the book — euangelion, the gospel, literally the good announcement — is a word that in the Roman world was used for the proclamation of military victories and imperial accessions. Mark uses it in 1:1 to introduce his book and in 1:14–15 to summarize what Jesus preaches: the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel. The genre Mark invents is the genre of urgent announcement. The speed is the form's first feature, and Mark is the only gospel where the speed has not been slowed by literary smoothing.

Where to follow it: Mark 1 (eleven uses in one chapter), Mark 4 (parables slowing the pace), Mark 14 (the first sustained slowing — Gethsemane).

One of the most distinctive features of Mark's gospel is the pattern that William Wrede in 1901 called the messianic secret. Throughout the gospel, when the demons recognize Jesus and shout out his identity — I know who you are, the Holy One of God (1:24); you are the Son of God (3:11); what have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? (5:7) — Jesus immediately silences them. When he heals the leper, he charges him to say nothing to anyone (1:44). After the transfiguration, he charges Peter, James, and John to tell no one what they had seen until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead (9:9). The pattern runs through the gospel and is clearly a deliberate compositional decision.

The theological work the secret does is to refuse premature recognition of Jesus' identity. The demons can name him correctly — Son of the Most High God — but their naming is not yet the right naming, because they are naming him as a powerful exorcist, not as the suffering Messiah who will go up to Jerusalem and be killed. Even Peter, when he confesses Jesus as the Christ in chapter 8, is given the strictest charge to tell no one — and immediately afterward is rebuked as Satan when he objects to the prediction of suffering. Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of men.

The secret is broken at exactly two moments, both at the cross. The first is the trial: Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? Jesus answers, I am. It is the only place in Mark where Jesus accepts a christological title in his own voice without qualifying or silencing it. The second is the centurion at the foot of the cross: Truly this man was the Son of God (15:39). The centurion is the only human being in Mark's gospel to make the confession, and he does so at the moment of Jesus' death. The pattern is exact. The identity kept secret for fifteen chapters is finally announced in the immediate context of the death — because in Mark's gospel, the death is what the identity means.

Where to follow it: Mark 1 (first silencing of the demons), Mark 8 (Peter's confession and the rebuke), Mark 9 (the transfiguration charge), Mark 15 (the centurion's confession).

If the demons in Mark's gospel know exactly who Jesus is and are silenced, the disciples are with Jesus throughout and do not understand him. They are with him for the storm at sea in chapter 4, and after he calms it they say who then is this, that even the wind and sea obey him? — a year into the ministry. They are with him for the feeding of the five thousand in chapter 6, and the gospel says explicitly in 6:52 that they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. After the second feeding of the four thousand in chapter 8, they are in the boat worrying that they have only one loaf — and Jesus launches into the longest string of questions in the gospel: Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear?

The incomprehension is not an accident of characterisation. After Caesarea Philippi, each of the three Passion predictions is followed by an episode in which the disciples reveal they have heard the words and missed the point. After the first prediction, Peter rebukes Jesus and is called Satan. After the second, the disciples are arguing about who is the greatest. After the third, James and John ask for the seats at his right and left in glory. At Gethsemane, Jesus asks them to watch with him; they sleep. At the arrest, they all desert him and flee. Peter's denials are described in detail. At the cross, the named witnesses watching from afar are the women who had followed from Galilee.

The gospel's portrait of the disciples has been read in different ways. The early-church reading was that they represent the believers who must learn slowly and through failure. More recent readings hold both: the disciples are exemplary in their being-with Jesus and in their failure to understand him, and the gospel's structural argument is that the failure is the believer's, not just theirs. The gospel ends at 16:8 with the women also failing — fleeing in fear, having said nothing to anyone. The reader is left at the empty tomb with the announcement made and no one yet having carried it. The next sentence is the reader's.

Where to follow it: Mark 4 (who then is this?), Mark 6 (they did not understand the loaves), Mark 8 (do you not yet understand?), Mark 14 (they all desert him).

The Passion narrative in Mark's gospel is the longest sustained piece of slow narration in the book. Where the rest of the gospel runs at the speed of kai euthus, the events of chapters 14 and 15 are given in detail and at length. The anointing at Bethany, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the arrest, the trial before the Sanhedrin, the trial before Pilate, the mocking, the crucifixion, the cry of dereliction, the death, the centurion's confession, the burial — each is given its due. The slowing is structural. The gospel that has been racing has arrived at what it has been racing toward.

The crucifixion itself is given in three timed acts, each marked by the hour. They crucified him at the third hour. From the sixth hour there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. At the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani — which is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The cry is in Aramaic; Mark transliterates and then translates. It is the opening line of Psalm 22. Jesus utters a loud cry and breathes his last. The curtain of the temple is torn in two, from top to bottom.

And then the centurion who was standing facing him, when he saw that he thus breathed his last, said, Truly this man was the Son of God. He is a Roman officer, a Gentile, a representative of the empire that has just executed Jesus, and he is the first and only human being in Mark's gospel to confess Jesus as Son of God. The disciples have been with Jesus for sixteen chapters and have not got it; the centurion has been at the foot of the cross for three hours and has. The confession is the climax of the gospel's christological argument. The identity that has been the secret all along is finally announced by a human voice at the moment of the death — because the death is what the title means.

Where to follow it: Mark 14 (Gethsemane and the arrest), Mark 15 (the crucifixion and the centurion).

The Gospel of Mark, in the oldest and best manuscripts, ends at 16:8. Three women — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome — come to the tomb very early on the first day of the week. They enter, see a young man in white who tells them Jesus has risen and to go and tell the disciples and Peter that he is going before them to Galilee. And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Ephobounto gar — for they were afraid — ends a sentence with the conjunction gar (for), which is unusual in Greek. It ends the gospel without a resurrection appearance, without the women obeying, without Galilee being reached.

Later scribes were uncomfortable with the ending; the longer ending (16:9–20) is a second-century addition that adds resurrection appearances and a brief commission, and there is also a shorter ending in some manuscripts. The argument for the originality of the ending at 16:8 is decisive on textual grounds — the verse 8 ending is in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus; the longer ending uses a different vocabulary; and multiple competing endings in the manuscript tradition is the pattern that develops when an unsatisfactory ending is being supplemented by later hands.

What the gospel does, by ending at 16:8, is hand the resurrection back to the reader. The young man's announcement is given. He is not here; he has risen; he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. Galilee is where the gospel began. The reader who has followed from chapter 1 has been at Capernaum, at the lake, on the mountain, at the foot of the cross. The instruction sends the reader back to Galilee — to the beginning of the gospel — to find the risen Jesus where the calling of the disciples and the first kai euthus had happened. The empty tomb does not close the story; it opens it. The gospel ends at 16:8, and the next sentence is the reader's.

Where to follow it: Mark 16 (the empty tomb and the ending at fear).