Kindle Notes & Highlights
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October 28 - December 13, 2024
The temptation establishes the free, sovereign agency of Jesus, who, like all human agents, must choose to make God’s will his own.
The forty-day trial of God’s Son continues the baptismal theme of Jesus as Israel-reduced-to-one.
I am inclined to see in the reference to the wild beasts a very specific point of contact with Mark’s Roman readers.
If this explanation is correct, then “with the wild beasts” is an important piece of evidence for locating the provenance of Mark in Rome during the reign of Nero.
41. Ignatius (Romans 4-5) repeats the same word (thēriōn; “wild beasts”) six times with reference to his impending martyrdom by wild beasts in Rome.
The Baptizer is the forerunner of Jesus not only in his message but also in his fate,
Jesus proclaimed the gospel, but he also was the gospel.
This is the only reference in Mark’s Gospel to “the good news of God,”
the good news from God
He rarely—and never in Mark—speaks of God as king
he speaks of entering the kingdom as entering a new state of being.
In Jesus of Nazareth the kingdom of God makes a personal appearance.
Belief appears frequently in Mark, in both word and concept, and assumes the act of repentance.
fish, and not meat, was the staple food of the Greco-Roman world.
The fishermen whom Jesus called were scarcely indigent day laborers. In order to survive in their market league, they needed to be—and doubtlessly were—shrewd and successful businessmen.
Unlike the decisive call that comes from Jesus, entry into a rabbinical school depended on the initiative of the aspiring student, not the call of a rabbi.
The summons, rather, is to walk in God’s ways and according to his statutes (e.g., Deut 5:30). But Jesus calls the four to himself. The
The call to the four fishermen is rooted not in the Torah, nor even in the name of God, but in Jesus’ messianic authority alone.
I shall make you become fishers of men.’” The process of becoming disciples of Jesus is a slow and painful one for the Twelve;
making Jesus the initiator and center of a new, life-encompassing community.
the seeds of the Christian church originated in the first act of Jesus’ public ministry in which he called four fishermen into community with himself.
The ruler of the synagogue did not preach or expound the Torah, however, which meant that Sabbath teaching and exposition fell to the laity, and on this occasion to Jesus.
there is but one positive reference to a scribe in Mark (see 12:28-34); the remaining eighteen references portray scribes as antagonists of Jesus and his mission.
The word for “teaching” occurs in various forms thirty-five times in Mark,23 and in all but one Jesus is the subject.
The title “the Holy One of God” not only recalls the divine Sonship of Jesus’ baptism (1:11), but apparently likens Jesus to Samson, the mighty vanquisher of the Philistines, who is the only other person in the Bible to be called “Holy One of God” (Judg 16:17).
There is a strong probability that the site preserves Peter’s house.30 No site, incidentally, has been identified in Scripture or tradition as Jesus’ house, and it may be that Jesus lived with Peter in Capernaum.
It cannot have connoted the idea of subservience or inferiority to Mark, for the word for “wait on” (Gk. diakonein) is the same word used for the angels’ “attending” Jesus during the temptation (1:13). It is, moreover, the same word translated “to serve” in 10:45, where Jesus declares that the Son of Man comes “not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Given the foundational significance of the Shema (Deut 6:4) and monotheism in Judaism, it is scarcely conceivable that Jews who believed Jesus to be the Messiah would have fabricated his divine Sonship.
Evidence within the Gospels themselves is manifold and varied that the dominant genre of Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness was transmitted to the early church and to Mark by Jesus himself. The secrecy motif arose from Jesus’ conscious identification with the Servant of the Lord motif in Isaiah and from the need to guard his messianic identity from premature and false understandings.
Mark records Jesus praying only three times in the Gospel;
All three occur at night and in solitary places. All three also occur in contexts of either implied or expressed opposition to Jesus’ ministry.
Mark regularly omits contextual details so as not to detract from the essential focus of the narrative.
he must live outside the camp” (Lev 13:45-46).
bringing himself into full contact with physical and ritual untouchability.
It removes the social, physical, and spiritual separations prescribed by the Torah and custom alike. The touch of Jesus speaks more loudly than his words; and the words of Jesus touch the leper more deeply than any act of human love.
Unlike an ordinary rabbi, Jesus is not polluted by the leper’s disease; rather, the leper is cleansed and healed by Jesus’ contagious holiness.
Josephus reports that there were some 20,000 priests in Palestine in his day
In off seasons they served as scribes, judges, and magistrates in their respective locales.
This was the protocol prescribed for a cleansed leper. The fact that Jesus commanded the man to follow it reveals that he honored the Mosaic law.
Mark attests to Jesus’ popularity in Galilee by referring to crowds nearly forty times before chap. 10.
Crowds form audiences for his teaching and are the object of his compassion, but Mark never describes crowds turning to Jesus in repentance and belief, as the gospel requires (1:15).
The single most common attribute of crowds in Mark is that they obstruct access to Jesus.
“son”
It is primarily a term of a superior who acts with authority and benevolence.6
The first mention of faith (2:5) in Mark significantly links it with acting rather than with knowing or feeling.
The Gospels preserve several instances of Jesus fulfilling the petition of one party on behalf of another.
it is worth considering whether it fully explains why only here, of all Jesus’ healings, he explicitly correlates sin and infirmity.
It appears possible that Jesus’ address to the paralytic reflects knowledge of his particular sins, and their relationship to his paralysis.
Forgiveness of sins remains everywhere the exclusive right of God.”
Jesus can heal a man of physical paralysis; the larger question is whether he can heal the scribes of spiritual paralysis.
