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by Shaun C. Kennedy (Author)
Mark is the shortest of the gospels, even though in parallel stories, Mark often gives the most details of the Synoptic Gospels. For example, Mark and Luke include the detail that the paralytic was lowered from the roof, and Mark and Matthew include the reasons that John was arrested in more detail than Luke. Mark gets a reputation for being the most hurried and spectacular gospel. I think this honor should go to Matthew. In sharp contrast, I think Mark is actually more grounded. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, the cursed fig tree withers immediately, whereas in Mark the same curse takes a few days to play out. Matthew brings the paralytic to Jesus's feet, but Mark includes the details that he was lowered through the roof. Only Mark includes the second rooster crow before Peter's denial. Mark spells out all the stories, stretching out every event and detail. Instead of telling the Gospel as an epic like Matthew, Mark is telling it with realism. He is famous for his more abundant use of the word "immediately" to string his stories together, but the actual accounts themselves are very grounded and have a very real-life feel to them. When reading Mark, one is tempted to dust oneself off from the Palestinian dust you feel you've been walking through.I think that the Gospel of Mark connects with modern readers more because our style of writing in the Twenty-First Century has finally caught up with Mark. Now we read books as though we are watching television. If a detail isn't supplied by the text, we fill it in. When we imagine Jesus cursing the fig tree, we either have an image of him sitting or standing. Somewhere deep inside our mind is a little movie director directing the action narrated by the text we read.This may or may not have been true in previous generations. Certainly, when we read books like Jonah and The Gospel of Matthew, the storytelling tactic is different. Instead of giving us details that help us to paint a more accurate view of the story, they build events so that we can have a clearer understanding of the consequences of the story. Matthew is far less concerned to give us the time-table of the fig tree that was cursed, and more concerned that we understand that the fig tree that was cursed withered. Mark is concerned that we have an accurate count of the rooster crows, all three other gospel writers only care that we recognize Peter's failure, with the arithmetic of that failure being left ambiguous.Even though the first few centuries thought Mark was redundant, our most recent generations have started to connect with Mark in a way we haven't connected with Matthew or Luke. The reason we connect with Mark so well is that Mark is a spiritual blogger. Mark tells us all the things we never knew we want to know about the Gospel. Mark tells the story in a more personal way. Mark is the student of Peter, and he's putting down every day's lesson as quickly as he can. Mark is most famous for the "Messianic Secret," where Jesus is insisting that no one identify him as the Messiah but he is recognized by the demons he's confronting.In Mark, the character of Jesus jumps off the page at you. If you want to get to know Jesus as a friend, Mark is the Gospel for you. In Mark, we get quotes from Jesus in his mother tongue, Aramaic. Even though Mark wrote his Gospel in Greek, he was translating for Peter. One can imagine Peter telling his stories in broken Greek while Mark frantically translated into Latin, and then periodically Peter slipping into Aramaic just as the story is getting interesting. Mark, a Jew of the diaspora, struggles to catch up, shouting out the Aramaic and then translating it. The crowd is enthralled, not sure if this is some sort of magic incantation or the name of some foreign dignitary, only to discover that these are the simple and plain words that Christ used in his homeland among his own people.
