Why Mark, rather than one of the other gospels?

Not required reading for the first session. Here because it answers a fair question, which is why sixteen weeks on this gospel rather than one of the other three.

Mark writes a discipleship document

Start with what kind of book this is, because it is not the kind most of us were trained to expect.

Mark has no creed in it. There is no chapter setting out who Jesus is, no section on ethics, no systematic account of anything. What there is, from the fourth paragraph of chapter 1 onwards, is people being called and then failing to understand what they have been called into. The disciples mishear, argue about rank, ask for the best seats, fall asleep, and run away. That is not incidental colour; it is the spine of the book. Roughly a third of Mark is about how badly the following goes.

Which tells you what the book is for. Mark is not a theological treatise and it is not a set of doctrines to be assented to; it is a document about following Jesus, addressed to people already trying to do it and finding it harder than they were told. If you come to it wanting a systematic Christology by chapter 4 you will be frustrated. If you come to it wanting to learn how to walk, it is the best of the four.

There is a Wesleyan word for exactly this and it is practical divinity: theology that exists to be lived rather than to be filed. Mark got there first.

Written for people like us

Mark keeps stopping to explain. He translates the Aramaic when Jesus uses it, at 5v41 and 7v34 and 15v34. He explains the hand-washing custom at 7v3 to 4, at length and slightly inaccurately, in a way that no Jewish reader would need. He tells you that the Jordan is a river.

Those explanations are how we know his readers were mostly Gentile, and they are also why he is the easiest of the four for a modern British reader to get inside. He is already explaining a foreign world to people outside it. When he explains it to them, he explains it to us.

Matthew is doing something different and doing it superbly. He writes primarily for a Jewish-Christian readership: five great blocks of teaching arranged like the five books of Moses, a genealogy running back to Abraham, a constant this happened to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, and arguments conducted with the synagogue across the street. It is a magnificent book and it asks a great deal of a reader who does not already know second-Temple Judaism from the inside. You have to learn a lot before Matthew’s arguments land. With Mark, the learning and the reading happen together.

Earliest, and what that does and does not mean

Mark was almost certainly written first, and Matthew and Luke both had him in front of them. That is as settled as this kind of question gets.

Be careful what that earns him. Being earliest does not make Mark a transcript, and it does not make him truer than the others; all four are scripture and none of them is a lesser book. What it makes him is the least worked over. He is closest in time to the events and furthest from the church’s later settlements, and he had no earlier gospel to smooth himself against.

The interesting part is what happens when you can watch the smoothing. Because Matthew and Luke are using Mark, we can see what the early church found difficult, by seeing what it tidied.

Mark says that at Nazareth Jesus could do no deed of power there (6v5). Matthew writes he did not do many deeds of power there (13v58). The difficulty was the word could.
Mark has Jesus answer the rich man with why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone (10v18). Matthew reroutes the question entirely: why do you ask me about what is good? (19v17).
Mark says Jesus’ own family came to take charge of him because people were saying he was out of his mind (3v21). Neither Matthew nor Luke keeps that.
Mark ends at 16v8 with three women running away and saying nothing to anybody. Later hands added two different endings to fix it, and make it more satisfactory.

That is what less gilded means, put precisely. Not more authentic; earlier, rougher, and less defended. Reading Mark is reading the version before the church had worked out what was awkward about it, which is a very good place to start if what you want is the following rather than the finished doctrine.

The same principle across the rest of the New Testament

It is worth knowing that this argument is not confined to the gospels. In general, the earlier layers of the New Testament are less settled and more practical, and the later ones are more organised and more doctrinal.

Paul is the clearest case, and this is where the phrase authentic Paul is doing real work rather than being rude. Seven letters are undisputed as his own: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. They are the earliest Christian writing that survives, earlier than any gospel, and they read like what they are: letters into live arguments, arguing his way through problems in real congregations.

A second group is disputed, most scholars judging them later and written in his name by others in his tradition: Ephesians, Colossians and 2 Thessalonians. A third group, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, is later still and different in kind; the arguments have stopped and the arrangements have hardened, and it is in these letters, rather than in the seven, that the church’s instructions about households, about slaves and about women are set out most rigidly. That matters when somebody quotes Paul at you on any of those subjects. It is worth knowing ‘which Paul’.

John, and why not John

John is the outlier, and probably the latest of the four; the usual estimate is the nineties of the first century. By then the movement had structures, offices, a settled liturgy, and a set of arguments it had already had.

You can hear all of that in the book. John’s Jesus speaks in long discourses rather than one-line sayings; he says I am the bread, the light, the door, the vine, the way; the gospel opens not at a river but before creation, with the Word who was with God and was God. It is the most theologically ambitious book in the New Testament, and the church’s doctrine of the incarnation is largely built on it.

But notice what it is doing. John is arguing about who Jesus is, in a situation where that had become the contested question. He is defending a position more than he is training a practice. He is also the most sacramental of the four in register, with the whole bread-of-life discourse in chapter 6, while at the same time having no institution of the supper at all; where the other three have the bread and the cup, John has Jesus washing feet. That combination tells you a great deal about the community he wrote for.

For a course on how to follow, John gives you less to work with. Come to him second or third, when the walking has been learned. He will teach you what to believe; Mark will teach you how to go.

Luke, and the case for reading him next

If a group wants a second gospel after this one, Luke is the better choice.

Luke writes from the margins and for them, deliberately and throughout. Mary’s song at 1v46 to 55 turns the whole social order over before Jesus is born: the powerful pulled off their thrones, the hungry filled, the rich sent away with nothing. The first people at the manger are shepherds, who were nobody. His beatitudes have no cushion in them; where Matthew has blessed are the poor in spirit, Luke has blessed are you who are poor, and adds the matching woes to the rich. Women are named and present all the way through. The Samaritan is the moral example, and the tax collector goes home justified while the Pharisee does not.

Luke writes for the excluded and disregarded; for those on the fringes of their world and their economy. That is not a description of most of us in white Western Europe, and that is exactly the reason to read it. Luke makes you read from a standpoint that is not yours, which is one of the few reliable ways of finding out what you have been assuming.

So the order is not arbitrary

Mark first, because he is the earliest, the roughest and the most practical, because he explains his world to outsiders as he goes, and because his subject is the following rather than the doctrine. Luke next, for the view from the margins. Matthew when there is appetite for the Jewish work his argument requires. John when the walking is established and the questions have turned to who this man is.

That is a judgement about a course, not about the four books. All four are scripture and each holds something the others do not. But sixteen weeks is sixteen weeks, and the gospel written for outsiders about people who kept getting it wrong is the one that best repays that particular investment.

This piece is optional. Nothing in the course depends on having read it; it is here because the question is a fair one and deserves an answer in writing rather than a sentence in the room.