Author: al
Posted: 2007-02-19 12:37:19
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Disciple – Week 20
Day 1
Overview of Mark.
Mark has never been my favorite gospel. I just do not have the proper appreciation of the intensity and hurriedness that the writer is trying to convey. The repetitious use of certain words an phrases doesn't help me any either.
Day 2
Mark 1 – 4
Call of the twelve.
I've always been partial to the phrase “Fishers of men.” It just seems so clever. It's shared in one form or another in every translation. Moffatt says “fish for men” which is also good, but it doesn't quite have the same ring as the more familiar version above.
Day 3
Mark 5 – 8
6:6
“He marveled at their unbelief” More scriptural evidence that miracles do not provide faith for us. Aside from that, here we have a concept or passage from the bible that has been twisted and perverted by charlatans over the years. Whenever a faith healer fails to cure someone it is because their faith was defective. What a horrible thing to do to someone. There is truth to the statement that Christians are the chief cause of Atheism.
6:8
Apostolic poverty. I think it important to note that the Apostles are not charged to live like this forever. While that might be a righteous aim, such self denial leads to far greater temptations than a person would normally endure. Consider the Franciscans, Assisi himself might have lived by his code, but the order he founded managed to find loopholes and silly ways around the command to live in apostolic poverty. It should be no surprise that an order founded on this creed eventually became one of the wealthiest entities in history.
Day 4
Mark 9 – 12
10:1 – 12
From Davidman:
In practice, of course, male dominance is always tempered by the undoubted fact that the average man is more or less afraid of his wife. But in theory many ancients seem to have held no misuse of a woman wrong, as long as it did not interfere with another man's rights in her. In much of the Orient, even into modern times, you could have innumerable wives and mistreat them in innumerable ways; you could throw out any woman you got tired of; you could visit a harlot and feel no guilt, since no man suffered a property loss thereby. All around little Judea, the Orient rioted and wantoned, nor was Judea itself (for all its intense interest in God) particularly strict in its sexual behaviour. The Testaments tell us a good deal about that. However ready to stone a woman taken in adultery, the men of the time seem to have taken their own freedom for granted.
It was this male self-satisfaction which Christ attacked by defining lust as a certain view of women rather than as a certain act - "Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart."
The naive and the prudish have sometimes thought he meant that all erotic desire was bad in itself. To this let his own words answer-the famous words that call a man and his wife one,, flesh. Our Lord's command about marriage was as sharp and straight as a sword. Your wife is your wife for good, he said; d you can't get rid of her, except for adultery (and only one Gospel permits even that exception) and a divorced woman is committing adultery if she remarries. Now this is a difficult doctrine, as the disciples were the first to point out. Flesh and blood find it an unbearable doctrine. And, obviously, it is an incomplete doctrine, for it says nothing about what constitutes a marriage in the first place, nothing about marriages ended by the act of God, nothing about the woman's rights of action, and nothing about the status of a divorced man. All that is left to those who come after. Nevertheless the command is there and it is perfectly clear as far as it goes. We can only escape it by deciding arbitrarily to throw out that part of the Gospels as a fake : or else by throwing out the divinity of Christ altogether so that wee needn't obey his commands at all.
With that particular command, the old half-slavish status of women vanished, and a new concept of womanhood and wifehood came into the world. Every statement our Lord made: about sexuality works to protect women and to awaken men to their own responsibilities. Condemning adultery, he yet forgave the adultresses who repented and loved God, and denounced the lustful and loveless men who caused them to sin. Perhaps that, in itself, is enough to prove him more than man. For throughout history even the best of men have usually sought to shift the blame for their sexual weaknesses to the women. "The woman tempted me and I did eat ! " cried the father of the tribe, and "The woman tempted me!" has been the cry ever since, whenever someone ate where he should not. True enough, most women try to be as tempting as they can. But what Jesus, and later Paul, pointed out was that, although men are not always free agents in love, they are still on the whole far more free than the women are.
How new-and how appalling-the doctrine of a husband's obligations must have seemed to many early Christians! Jew and Greek divorced at pleasure, and the law of Rome was not unlike the law of Reno. Into this indulgent world tumbled the dreadful statement that a man's wife was neither his property nor his amusement; she was a part of himself, flesh of his flesh, and must be treated accordingly.
Even the disciples were appalled. Even Paul was afraid; the real point of his famous "Better to marry than to burn!" passage is that marriage may be no sin but it's certainly a mess of trouble. Elsewhere he exalted wedlock in terms that established it as holy, yet his fear is more remembered than his love. For a moment, however, the Christian world did accept in its full austerity and its full glory our Lord's doctrine of marriage.
Day 5
Mark 13 – 16
13:31
“My words shall not pass away”
Chesterton (TEM Pt2 Ch VI):
`Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn: and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.
Day 6
Of all of the assignments and questions in the book, the only one that interested me was discovering more about the various endings of the book of Mark. Why did this interest me? Because Moffatt talked about it in one of the more lengthy footnotes I've seen thus far in his Bible.
At the end of 16:8 we find this:
The following appendix represents a couple of second century attempts to complete the gospel. The passage within brackets in the first of these epilogues originally belonged to it, but was excised for some reason at an early date. Jerome quoted part of it, but the full text has only been discovered quite recently in codex W, the Freer uncial of the gospels.
The bracketed portion was a very long stint in 16:14 which none of my other bibles contain (Including the very recent ESV translation). Moffatt even has a footnote saying “The Greek is obscure at this point.” I love his honesty in this Bible. Though I have to admit that thus far the footnotes in the NT are an order of magnitude more helpful than the notes in the OT.
Bracketed text:
But they excused themselves, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief lies under the sway of Satan, who will not allow what lies under the unclean spirits* to understand the truth and power of God; therefore, “ they said to Christ, “reveal your righteousness now.” Christ answered them, “The term of years for Satan's power has now expired, but other terrors are at hand. I was delivered to death on behalf of sinners, ** that they might return to the truth and sin no more, that they might inherit that glory of righteousness which is spiritual and imperishable in heaven.”
* Or, the unclean things that lie under the control of spirits.
** The Greek is obscure at this point.
Appendix b then begins halfway into 16:20. I cannot find the text rendered in that verse in any of my other translations either
(b):
But they gave Peter and his companions a brief account of all these injunctions. And, after that, Jesus himself sent out by means of them from east to west the sacred and imperishable message of eternal salvation.
For a full treatment of this and other possible endings see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_16 |
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