Christianity
The Earliest Gospel, Mark
Abstract
Vitually none of the modern translations [of the New Testament] can be trusted to bear the weight that is put on them.John Bowden, SCM
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, December 01, 1998
The Gospel of Mark
The missionaries to the gentiles spread stories about Jesus by preaching the “kerygma”, “that which is proclaimed”, the main characteristic of a gospel. That is how the sayings and deeds of Jesus got to Rome where someone wrote a gospel, to be attributed to Mark, between 65-71 AD. Mark’s gospel was anonymous until a second-century tradition linked a “Mark” mentioned in the epistle 1 Peter 5:13 with the gospel.
The gospel of Mark is considered the first written gospel, it has “priority” over Luke and Matthew because they used Mark in composing their own gospels twenty or so years later. They were more complete works and written in better Greek, so the early Church preferred them and neglected Mark. Mark is theologically the most primitive of the gospels, though Matthew is the most Palestinian.
Mark’s gospel is simple, clumsy and breathless—everything happening “immediately—the author joins “pericopes” with the Greek word “euthus” meaning “immediately”, or “straightaway”. It suggests Mark is not familiar with Greek, simply meaning to say “then”. No one has yet thought of a reason why such a crude and clumsy work could have been adopted by the church while elegant writers like Matthew and Luke had already published their own versions. Mark’s gospel must have been retained because it was the first one.
Mark is, according to Eusebius, writing around the beginning of the third century but quoting Papias who wrote about 130 AD, the interpreter and companion of Peter in his later travels. Perhaps Mark translated lessons given in Aramaic by Peter for the Greek speakers in the audience. At any rate Papias says he recorded in no particular order the old man’s memories of the acts and sayings of Jesus. Mark was therefore not first hand. He had not known Jesus, but from Peter’s sermons and anecdotes he was able to write his gospel shortly after Peter’s death in about 64 AD.
The passages in Mark related in the third person plural might have been Peter’s own words. Some of the adjacent material seems so closely related to it that, sensibly, it too should be included with that thought to have been Peter’s. The rest of the material in Mark seems to be in well arranged blocks or pericopes suggesting already collected pre-Marcan material. Inasmuch as Peter must have followed the Nazarene tradition in his sermons and the other material, being very early, can hardly have lost much of its original content, Mark should be closest to the true story of the Nazarenes.
Difficulties with the testimony of Papias are that Peter has no special significance in Mark’s book and Mark’s theology is Hellenized like Paul’s. Matthew, the singularly Jewish gospel, uses Mark lending some credence to the view that Mark must have been based on the testimony of an authoritative Jewish figure—Peter—and possibly Peter emulated Jesus in his modesty, feeling little need to play up his own role. When Paul’s influence waxed the gospel would have been edited to suit his outlook. It seems to have assumed a shape close to the present one by about 90 AD.
Mark had been written down “in no particular order” but later was tampered with by editorial additions and rearrangements. In the version which we now have there is a broad chronology leading from Galilee to Jerusalem, and then to the events leading to the crucifixion, but individual episodes cannot be assumed to be in the correct order. It gives a description of the work and movements of the Nazarene band but its true meaning has been thinly disguised to anyone who cared to believe other than the Christian gloss.
Significantly, since Mark’s is considered the earliest gospel, the last twelve verses are not original—these last verses cannot be the recollections of Peter. Peter’s story ends with the message of a young man in a white robe, the garment of the fully initiated Essene, sitting in Jesus’s tomb that Jesus is risen and gone ahead of them to Galilee. Whereupon the disciples fled in fear and said nothing to anyone. No appearances! No ascension! A later editor, considering the ending inappropriate, added the last eight verses in which Jesus appeared all over the place and then rose into heaven to be received at the right hand of God. How many Christians realize that all these essential notions of their religion are absent from the earliest version of Jesus’s life?
New Testament Greek is called “koine”, which might be considered as meaning “common” or “colloquial”. It was not classical or even refined Greek, and has given Christian translators a marvellous time in making up translations of abstruse words—perhaps vulgarities or profanities or just bad grammar and misunderstandings—as words that suit them. Mark writes in this colloquial Greek not the more refined classical Greek of an educated man. He includes Latinisms suggesting the influence of Rome—Marcus was a very common Roman name at that time. He seemed unfamiliar with the country of Palestine or common Jewish customs, scholars giving the following examples:
- Dalmanutha referred to in Mark 8:10 does not exist by that name, though it seems to be the same as Magdala of Matthew 15:39 properly rendered Magadan
- in Mark 5:1 the country of the Gerasenes extends to the Sea of Galilee but Gerasene is really some forty miles from the lake, behind the mountains in what is now Jordan and then was the country of the ten Greek cities called Decapolis
- he describes the town of Bethsaida in Mark 8:26 as a village
- he invents Jewish proceedings
- he confuses references to the Herodian family in Mark 6:17
- he thought the appearance of Jesus before the High Priest was a trial not the committal hearing that it was
- he thought a wife could divorce a husband contrary to Jewish law in Mark 10:12.
Though some of these anomalies might be explained, it seems Mark either was not a Jew or, if he was, was so thoroughly Hellenized he retained few traces of his Jewish roots. He could have been a gentile, judging from his name and his Latinisms, possibly a Roman Christian convert with no direct experience of Palestine, and writing in Rome for a gentile readership. Confirmation that Mark was a pagan convert comes in the Acts of Barnabas supposedly written by John Mark himself. He writes:
I John, accompanying the holy apostles Barnabas and Paul, being formerly a servant of Cyrillus the high priest of Jupiter, but now having received the gift of the Holy Spirit through Paul and Barnabas and Silos, who were worthy of the calling, and who baptized me in Iconium. After I was baptized, then, I saw a certain man standing clothed in white raiment, and he said to me: Be of good courage, John, for assuredly thy name shall be changed to Mark, and thy glory shall be proclaimed in all the world. The darkness in thee has passed away from thee, and there has been given to thee understanding to know the mysteries of God.
Note the symbols of Essenism, baptism, white garments and hidden mysteries of God. Jupiter is the Roman name of Zeus, and, in his gospel, Mark tries to flatter the Romans and denigrate the Jews it being composed when Jewish nationalism was a nuisance in the empire and Christians had to be distanced from the Jews. The missionaries were trying to get converts among the gentiles of the Roman Empire so the Romans in the story had to be blameless. There are several signs of this.
- Paul and the authors of Matthew and Luke accept the descent of Jesus from David but Mark ignores it dissociating Jesus from any claims to the throne of Israel
- He calls the disciple, Simon, a Cananaean to avoid the word “Zealot”
- He relates the story of the tribute money apparently to acknowledge Caesar’s authority not reject it
- He puts the responsibility of the death of Jesus on the Jews and relieves Pilate of it by inventing the custom of releasing a prisoner, a custom which is otherwise unknown and most unlikely
- The divinity of Jesus is first recognized in Mark by a Roman
- He inserts the passage attributed to Jesus that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin to indicate that Jesus acknowledged his rejection by his family and countrymen. But it rests uneasily with his brother James and thereafter his nephew succeeding him as the head of the Nazarenes
- He runs down the apostles appointed by Jesus—they are stupid, weak, argumentative, vain, treacherous, cowardly—all part of the process of dissociating the Son of God from the Jews, and excusing the character of the early Christians.
Writing a couple of decades later when Jewish nationalism had ceased to be an issue, Luke has no need to be as cautious. Roman distaste for the Jews had faded and Josephus had published his Jewish War as a warning to potential hotheads in Palestine. Jews were no longer a threat and poor and illiterate Christian converts would not have understood references to them.
Mark includes as part of chapter 13 what was originally an Essene explanation of the signs of the coming kingdom now garbled with a Christian prophecy of God’s punishment of the Jews inserted after the fall of Jerusalem.
Mark’s gospel has a false ending—the so-called Markan Appendix—the final verses of Mark (Mk 16:9-16:20), the post-resurrection accounts, are false, having been added a long time after the original composition:
- many manuscripts end at Mark 16:8, many have just two sentences added to the end of Mark 16:8, some have both the two sentences and the twelve verses, some have another addition to Mark 16:14, the “Frear Logion”
- Eusebius and Jerome in the fourth century did not know of the added twelve verses
- the style and vocabulary cannot possibly be first century.
The fourth-century AD Codex Sinaiticus is the only ancient Greek manuscript that contains the entire New Testament. It does not however have the Markan Appendix. In Secrets of Mount Sinai, James Bentley made this observation:
The scribe who brought Mark’s Gospel to an end in Codex Sinaiticus had no doubt that it finished at chapter 16, verse 8. He underlined the text with a fine artistic squiggle, and wrote, “The Gospel according to Mark”. Immediately following begins the Gospel of Luke.
James H Charlesworth has pointed out that Codex Syriacus (a fifth-century translation), Codex Vaticanus (mid-fourth century), and Codex Bobiensis (fourth or fifth-century Latin) are all early manuscripts that exclude the Marcan Appendix. About 100 early Armenian translations and the two oldest Georgian translations also omitted the appendix. Manuscripts written after Sinaiticus and Vaticanus have been found that contained the Marcan Appendix but with scribal notes in the margins that said the verses were not in older copies. Others have dots or asterisks by the verses to mark them as different.
None of the variant endings were the work of the original writer. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary notes that the longer ending, traditionally designated Mark 16:9-20, differs in vocabulary and style from the rest of the gospel, is absent from the best and earliest manuscripts now available, and was absent from manuscripts in patristic times. It is most likely a second-century compendium of appearance stories based primarily on Luke 24, with some influence from John 20. The shorter ending consists of the women’s reports to Peter and Jesus’s commissioning of the disciples to preach the gospel. The non-Marcan language and the weak manuscript evidence indicate that this passage did not close the gospel. The addition at Mark 16:14 of the longer ending is a late gloss aimed at softening the condemnation of the disciples in this verse. All the endings attached to Mark in the manuscript tradition were added because scribes considered Mark 16:1-8 inadequate as an ending.
Some say they replace an original ending which was lost. That is not true. They were added because there were no appearances in the earliest tradition. The earliest gospel is unable to testify to the appearances. It ends perfectly well in the middle of Mark 16:8 before anyone knew of appearances, but, without the appearances, the resurrection has no basis, and so theologians have to claim that they are accidentally missing. Mark was written before Paul or some early editor of his epistles had invented them. None of the early Church fathers, Clement, Origen, Eusebius and Jerome, mention anything after Mark 16:8 when they could have strengthened an argument by so doing.
Mark was not a companion of Jesus, possibly not an inhabitant of Palestine and possibly not a Jew. His gospel includes garbled bits of Essene and later material, is confused in its geography and sociology and has a false ending. Nevertheless, if Mark’s is the first gospel to be recorded, if it is considered accurate enough by two more gospel writers to be reproduced by them in large measure and, if Mark really wrote down what Peter said, as church tradition has it, then Mark should contain the essence of the Aramaic oral tradition, the story of the Nazarenes as perceived by Peter, supposedly Jesus’s right hand man.
Dr H Kee sees Mark as written to strengthen the church as it faced its impending problems—interest was waning, because apocalyptic hopes had not been fulfilled. The bishops feared a crisis of apostasy among converts, and suffering for those converts who remained faithful. Mark wanted to prepare the faithful by papering over the cracks and showing that even the disciples had not understood Jesus’s real intentions. They were shown as failing to comprehend even the simplest things Jesus had said, and that they would suffer before the coming of the kingdom. So it was understandable that lesser mortals like ordinary gullible converts were confused and disappointed.
Mark’s should be accepted as the most authoritative rather than the least of the gospels. It is this gospel that should be the central reference for anyone reconstructing the true events at the foundation of Christianity. The other two synoptics are obviously later but have much of the original tradition and can be used to supplement deductions from Mark. John is much too late to be anything but secondary. Nothing that occurs only in John can be trusted unless it can somehow be traced to Mark or to the Essene tradition.
Analysing Mark’s Gospel
In reconstructing the events leading to Jesus’s death, we follow the gospel of Mark. We want to build on the earliest tradition and the one most free of later Christian accretions. The other gospels are of less value the later they are but they can help when they clearly relate to episodes in Mark. Matthew and Luke and less so John can be used to flesh out the shorter but more original account of Mark. In accepting assistance from these other gospels we can feel more assured when there is a clear Essene reference, and less assured when the references are traceable to the gentile church.
Tradition is that Mark took Peter down in no particular order and yet the arrangement of Mark does seem to be ordered. An examination of Mark shows that there is a broad sequence of events which could hardly be altered. That broad sequence can be used and the individual items of the tradition, or pericopes as they are called, can then be themselves examined to find whether there is any better way of fitting them into the outline. Without a general theory that is difficult but given a hypothesis along the right lines the pericopes can be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces are missing and some have been bent but a reasonable picture emerges. Of course it must be true that some sayings Jesus used in his eschatological speeches were used more than once so there is no fixed context. Some of these can be perceived in the gospels dotted here and there. We must try to see more closely the relevance of such scattered sayings to the general argument and place them accordingly.
Many of the miracles are complete misunderstandings of the mystical language or code used by the Nazarenes. Others could have arisen as metaphors of sayings or titles of the messiah. The healing of a blind man was probably code but used as a metaphor of the light of the world. The withering of a fig tree is a metaphor of the destruction by God of the enemies of Israel but was taken to be a metaphor of the destruction by God of Israel implying that Christianity had superseded Judaism.
The four gospels are anti-Jewish. The gospels and Acts arose in an atmosphere of racism that New Testament scholars are aware of but say nothing about. They were written to disassociate Jesus from the Jewish cause at a time when Jews were looked upon unfavourably by most citizens of Rome. Yet, since they were based on a Palestinian tradition, elements of it still emerge from the deliberate obfuscation of the New Testament. They aim to disassociate Christianity from its Jewish origins and remove any hints that it was anti-Roman. Jesus and his followers are depicted as harmless healers and preachers. Since the gospels were completed and widely circulated only after the Jewish War, the purpose of the bowdlerizing was clear—Jewish nationalists were unpopular. The result is the bizarre story of the passion in which a monster like Pilate is an angel and respectable religious sects like the Pharisees are demonic. Furthermore, with the dispersion of the Jerusalem Nazarenes, the heresies of Paul had no one to oppose them and found new favour among the godfearers of the empire. The Hellenists took over and were able to dictate policy. Mark wrote the first and most factual gospel with these two objectives in mind to provide a new authority after the destruction of the Jerusalem Church.
The first details of the new gentile religion that were put together were the details of Jesus’s suffering or passion, to use the technical term. E Trocme believes that Mark was originally in two main sections. Chapters 1-13 told the mission story and it was added to the passion narrative of chapters 14 and 15, which was either from an older written source or from an oral source so often repeated that it had already become stylized. This idea does not contradict the tradition that Peter was the original prime source. Gentiles were mainly interested in the dead and resurrected god, and the passion must have formed the central part of missionary preaching in the first few decades. That is not to say that an apostle like Peter would not tell other parts of the story, but these would have been most often related to close associates in private company. Mark was apparently the first to combine the private recollections of Peter with the public ministry centred on the passion. Vincent Taylor believes that Mark’s passion narratives themselves stem from two sources—a narrative form from a gentile source, and a semitic collection of self contained narratives. The gentile source has to be treated with suspicion. It comprises: Mark 14:1-2; 10-11; 17-21; 26-31; 43-46; 55-64; 15:1; 3-5; 15; 21-24; 29-33; 34-37; 39; 16:9-20. One or two other doubtful passages have been given here the benefit of the doubt.
C H Turner thinks the passages in Mark related in the third person plural were originally related by Peter—1:21 29 5:1, 38 6:53-54 8:22 9:14 30 33 10:32 46 11:1 12 15 20 27 14:18 22 26 32. T W Manson added more material to Turner’s on the grounds that the adjacent material could not be detached from that thought to have been Peter’s giving 1:16-39 2:1-14 3:13-19 4:35-5:43 6:7-13 50-56 8:14-9:48 10:32-52 11:1-33 13:3-4 32-37 14:17-50 53 54 66-72. The rest of the material seems to be well arranged blocks suggesting already collected pre-Markan material.
We adopt the procedure of trawling through Mark’s gospel noting each event and assessing its authenticity and place in the story, checking where appropriate the parallel accounts in other gospels.
Abstract of the Thesis
To follow the arguments and judge whether they are valid, readers need to know my premise and some information missing from the gospels to persuade them that this premise has some foundation.
The premise is that Jesus Christ, the God of the Christians, was an Essene leader. The information missing from the gospels is who the Essenes were, how they related to the other Jewish sects which do appear in the gospels, why Jesus seemed not to be even an orthodox Essene and what it all had to do with the Roman occupying forces.
The synopsis which follows should give preliminary answers to these questions enabling the reader to see the point of the preparatory material and understand the subsequent commentary.
Jesus was an devout Jew—he stoutly defended the law of Moses as the gospels illogically admit. Most Jews yearned for their gentile enemies—especially the Romans who ruled them—to be overcome so that they could be ruled as a theocracy—a kingdom of God. They believed that God had promised them a messiah, a great king who would drive out the gentiles allowing the promised kingdom to begin, as an extension of heaven, on earth.
One sect of the Jews believed this so strongly that they had separated themselves from the ungodly to prepare the way for the messiah and begin to create the kingdom of heaven on earth—they were the Essenes. Their community they considered to be perfectly holy, and their members had to behave as perfectly holy people, to be a foundation of the heavenly kingdom. But they believed that the kingdom of God could not encompass the world until the men of perfect holiness detected the signs of the times which announced the acceptable day of the Lord—the day of vengeance of God—when God would avenge the wrongs done to His people.
When the time was right there would be a cosmic battle in which the forces of darkness and evil would be overcome by God’s miraculous intervention. The duty of the Essenes was to watch for the signs and lead out the saints, those who were perfectly holy, against the forces of darkness—the Romans and their allies, sinful Jewish collaborators.
When the signs indicated that God was ready to create His kingdom on earth, most Jews, being children of Israel, the chosen people of God, would revert from sinfulness to godliness—they were the simple of Ephraim, Jews who had been misled by their pragmatic and collaborating leaders—the Pharisees.
But though Essenes had the secrets of discerning the signs of the times, it was not a perfect art because heaven had not yet arrived, and the Essenes had to send out leaders with the mission of converting the simple of Ephraim. The success of these missionaries would itself be an important sign of the coming kingdom.
The men sent on this essential mission were senior figures in the Essene hierarchy. Jesus was such a man and so was John the Baptist. They had to urge the simple of Ephraim to prepare for the coming kingdom. Jesus was the nasi, the prince of Israel, a leader in the Davidic mould who would convert sinful Jews and assert the authority of God’s righteous.
Only “the righteous” could enter the kingdom so sinful Jews had to repent sincerely, ritually purify themselves through baptism and prepare for the coming battle. In his acts of conversion, the nasi was metaphorically casting out evil spirits, making the blind see and healing the sick. Those who were thus purified could enter the kingdom and were the soldiers in the messianic army. The nasi represented the messiah but could make no claim to be him, the appointment being God’s alone at the end time.
If the nasi were successful than the kingdom was nigh, and if the sum of the signs were such that the acceptable day of the Lord was imminent then the forces of light would engage the forces of darkness, precipitating the cosmic battle for the kingdom. Then one like unto the Son of man, who the prophet Daniel told would come on a cloud from God—probably the archangel Michael with a heavenly host riding out of the Mount of Olives as it cleaved east and west—would arrive to institute the kingdom. Essenes felt that God only helped those who help themselves and the kingdom of God had to be won by the righteous taking on their enemies, then God would intervene with a miracle.
Jesus was appointed nasi by John the Baptist. After initial successes recruiting the simple, the authorities caught on and hounded them, the Nazarenes were seen as a liability, many followers asked Jesus and his generals to leave them alone and they had to flee from Antipas’s soldiers to Phœnicia.
Jesus hid, then ventured back into Antipas’s country. He was still certain the signs were correct but had come to believe that God wanted him to to capture Jerusalem and the temple and that to inaugurate the kingdom of God he was required to play the role of the messiah, Melchizedek. Then God would intervene with a miracle. His disciples crowned him Melchizedek—he was transfigured!
His band proceeded to Jerusalem with Jews travelling for the coming Passover. No one could address him by any title that might draw attention to the spies of the authorities. Outside the city the Nazarenes overcame the inadequate Jerusalem garrison and Jesus purposely revealed himself by fulfilling the prophesy of Zechariah—entering the city on a foal of an ass—and controlled the temple. The defeated Roman garrison in the Antonia barracks withdrew to await reinforcements from Caesarea.
Pilate’s troops counter attacked after a few days, killed the Galilaeans in the temple, battered the Tower of Siloam where some were holding out and recaptured the city. Still there was no miracle. Jesus and his generals in hiding took a last supper together—an Essene messianic meal. Jesus, convinced that he had done all that God required and that a miracle was still in the offing, said he expected to be eating his next meal in the coming kingdom. His men remained armed.
The next day was the Passover, a likely occasion for a miracle. They went to the Mount of Olives where, according to prophecy, the miracle would take place and Jesus urged his men to keep watchful—not for the enemy but for God’s intervention.
It did not occur. A body of the temple guard arrived instead. Jesus had been proven a false prophet and had to suffer the appropriate fate prescribed in Zechariah—he had to die as the worthless shepherd.
Succeeding pages expand this thesis and look into its consequences in the history of Christianity.
