Book of Mark Term Paper

Mark

The Book of Mark

According to Burton Mack's analysis of the synoptic gospels, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins, the Gospel of Mark was likely written in 70 CE in Syria. The Gospel of Mark tells the story of a Jesus who is not born in an overly divine fashion in the sense that it contains no story of Mary's impregnation by the Holy Spirit nor Jesus persecution by Herod. Nor does it contain an extensive Judaic linage of the figure of Jesus, or extensive sermons, like the book of Mark. Instead, it begins with Jesus' baptism as a teacher by the hands of John the Baptist.

According to Mack, the Jesus of Mark's envisioning is an angry, rather terse parable-teller and speaker of wisdom literature, designed to be obscure in meaning than easily understood. He is a man whom stands outside of conventional, Judaic society and is crucified by a world that little understands or wants to know him. (Mack 313) One of the key aspects of the Book of Mark Jesus' last words, which stresses the betrayal and desolation and silence of the Jesus upon the cross, rather than his beatific resignation and acceptance.The Gospel of Mark ends in a kind of narrative silence, as the women seeking to anoint Jesus' body only find an empty tomb and a cryptic message. Mark is without the more miraculous, closing tales such as that of 'doubting Thomas,' as featured in the other gospels. The scholar Vernon Robbins has also noted the previous Passover meal structure places an emphasis on the imminent "absence" rather than the presence of Jesus in heaven. (Robbins, 1983)

Mack suggests over the course of his work on the gospel that Mark as an author created an early ideological alliance between two different Jesus traditions popular at the time that were expanded upon in the later gospels of Matthew, Luke, and the non-synoptic gospel of John. Burton Mack thus traces the Gospel of Mark as an synthesizes what he terms 'the Jesus movement,' namely the aspect of Early….....