Mark’s Carefully Crafted Story

Abstract

Most Sunday morning churchgoers read the Gospel of Mark only in snippets, which makes it impossible to get a feel for the whole story. As we have suggested, most twenty-first-century Christian readers approach Mark, to one degree or another, as a historical chronicling of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, even though it differs substantially from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, which they read in the same manner. Inasmuch as today’s non-churched readers encounter Mark as a story on its own, they experience it as jumping unpredictably from one story to another with too many unexplained parts of an ancient culture they do not know. When New Testament scholars read it, on the other hand, their approaches are often so technical that it is very difficult for anyone else to understand.