Bible Study

The first three chapters of Mark’s Gospel, as we’ve seen, are fast paced and full of exciting stories. In those three chapters you have miracles and healings and exorcisms; you have the calling of disciples by Jesus and the crush of crowds around Jesus as his fame spreads; you have Jesus’ enemies (the scribes, Pharisees and Herodians) beginning to form a loose coalition to conspire against Jesus; you even have Jesus’ own family starting to get nervous about what Jesus is doing and trying to convince him to stop. So Mark has pushed the story forward quite quickly (some might say too quickly.) Now, we get to Chapter 4, and it’s almost as if even Mark has to catch his breath a little bit. The bulk of Chapter 4 revolves around three parables (although some would identify four, because it depends on exactly how you define a parable, and not everyone agrees on the question of what is and what isn’t a parable) and then, as the Chapter ends, Mark pushes into yet another miracle story – one of ...

  I want to start tonight by talking just a little bit about the chapter divisions of the Bible, because I think they raise a question about the 3 rd Chapter of Mark (and, for that matter, the 2 nd as well.) Chapter divisions in the Bible are not original. Obviously when Paul was writing letters to churches he wasn’t dividing his letters into chapters; neither was Mark when he wrote his account of Jesus’ life. There’s been a long tradition in Judaism dating back at least a thousand years and possibly more of dividing the Tanakh (what we call the Old Testament) into chapters. Those chapters aren’t identical to the chapters of the Old Testament in the Christian Bible, but they certainly had influence. The chapter divisions in the Christian Bible that we know today were basically developed in the early 13 th century by a man named Stephen Langton, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1207 to 1228. The purpose of Chapters (and, by the 1400s, verses within chapters) was basicall...

 So Chapter 2 begins with Jesus performing another healing miracle. I suppose on the one hand you’d want to say that a healing miracle is never boring. It is a miracle, after all. But it does seem to be a rather ho-hum way to start Chapter 2. Chapter 1 was full of healing miracles. A woman was healed of a fever; a man was healed of leprosy, a man had an evil spirit exorcised from him and the Chapter speaks in general terms of Jesus healing various diseases and driving out many demons. So – haven’t we basically heard this story before? It seems a bit anti-climactic in a way to start this week by talking about yet another healing miracle. But that’s just an immediate gut reaction. This actually isn’t like the healing miracles in Chapter 1. The differences are important and give this miracle a different purpose in the story, so I would say that there’s actually a very legitimate reason that this healing miracle shouldn’t be included with the account of the various healing miracles in ...

When we read Mark’s Gospel, we’re reading one of the most important ywritings in the entire Bible. It doesn’t always seem that way. Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, and Matthew has been given the place of primacy, you might say, as the Gospel that leads off the New Testament; the story of Jesus. For a long time it was believed that Mark was an abridged version of Matthew, but in fact, it’s almost universally accepted now that Mark is the oldest of the four Gospels we have in the Bible and that in reality Matthew is more of an expansion of Mark. We don’t know exactly when Mark was written. I’ve seen estimates that suggest as early as 45AD, but I’d say it’s later than that, at around the year 60AD. But there’s no doubt that it’s probably about 20 years older than Matthew and Luke. Mark is a “source” document. It seems clear that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as the source for many of the stories about Jesus they chose to share. (We’re not studying Matthew and Luke, o...