Introducing Mark's Gospel

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There's a line in that hymn that says, by schisms rent asunder and by heresies distressed, referring to the history of the church.
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And I'm moved by that line tonight because on Sunday evening, I'm going to begin teaching through church history.
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And every time I teach through church history, I reread Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language.
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I'm about 80% finished reading through it to prepare for the class.
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And I'm reminded of the heresies that have creeped into the church throughout the centuries and the schisms which have been within the church.
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And it is sad to see Christ's church attacked, but it is also encouraging to know that the gates of hell will never prevail against Christ's church.
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Well, tonight we are going to begin a new series in the gospel of Mark.
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If you wanna take out your Bibles and turn to Mark chapter one.
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Caleb, would you mind reaching over here and just passing one of these to each of them? Actually, I need one.
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I just realized I handed them to you.
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I'll take one for myself.
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Thank you.
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Now, I won't always have handouts, but when I teach through studies like this, I tend to have things to give you.
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So if you are interested in keeping these for the future, you may wanna get yourself some kind of a notebook.
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I know that when I teach in the academy, I encourage the students to have a notebook with all the handouts in it.
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And I still have my notebooks from seminary.
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And I, from time to time, am encouraged to look over the things that I have studied and even go back and reference some of those things.
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So again, tonight, we are going to be beginning a study of the gospel of Mark.
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And I plan to take this book slowly and not try to digest huge sections like we did in Genesis.
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By the time we finished Genesis, we were doing whole chapters at a time.
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And not only is that a lot to cover in one session, it is exhausting to study that much in a week and try to present it all within a 55-minute period of time.
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And that's another thing, too, for Wednesday nights.
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My goal is to not do a whole hour, but more of a 30 to 40-minute teaching session.
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And so we're going to take smaller sections.
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I wanna say it's been a long time since I have taught through an entire gospel.
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In fact, the first book that I ever exegeted in this church as a pastor, I started in 2006, it went to 2008, was the Gospel of Luke.
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That became the basis for my doctoral dissertation was the first few chapters of Luke were the basis for that.
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But this is the first time in 14 years that I'm taking up another gospel.
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Now, I've preached through portions of the gospel.
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I've preached through the Sermon on the Mount and I've preached through a few other passages, but I've never taken up a whole gospel since then.
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So I am excited to do this.
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Certainly, it is something that I've wanted to do.
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My grandest goal is that one day I want to preach a harmony of the gospels.
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But that is a project that I have yet to decide when and how I'm going to do.
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But this will be a portion of what will become that, because my expositions in Luke would obviously be a part of that.
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Now my expositions in Mark will as well.
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And one day hopefully I'll be able to teach through all four consecutively, as is my goal.
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So I want to introduce tonight to you the Gospel of Mark and we're going to do so by reading the first verse.
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Now we're not really gonna exegete the first verse as much as we are just gonna use it as somewhat of a beginning point, because next week I'm gonna look at verses one through eight as we introduce not only the book, but the first person who is mentioned in the book is Jesus and then the next person is John.
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But let us just read tonight Mark chapter one verse one and then I'm going to pray.
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The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I pray now that as I seek to give an understanding of it, that you would keep me from error.
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Lord bless my time and study to now be a time of proclamation and open the hearts and ears of your people to understand your word.
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I pray this Lord in Jesus name and for his sake, amen.
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We are going to do an introduction of Mark's gospel tonight by talking about how it fits into the grander New Testament narrative and also how it fits within the gospels themselves.
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Mark is in fact, it falls into a unique genre of literature.
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Oftentimes the four books that begin our New Testament are called the four gospels and they are called gospels because that is in fact the form of literature that they are.
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They take the form of what would be sometimes considered a Greco Roman biography, but they are really not biographies.
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It's not as if John and Mark and Matthew and Luke sat down to simply give us the facts like Joe Friday taking his information and he wants just the facts man.
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And I don't know how many of you remember Dragnet, but that's a 50 year old reference.
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Yes, it is.
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But that's not what the writers of the gospels did.
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They were not biographers.
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The gospels leave out 90% of Jesus's life.
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In fact, if you look at Matthew, Mark and Luke, they really only cover about a year of time.
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It's John that tells us Jesus's ministry actually spanned about three years because we can count how he was going to the various feasts and things.
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And we see that the fact that his ministry lasted three years.
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But if you consider Jesus's life to be a 33 year span of time, we have so little information in the gospels about 95% of that life.
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In fact, that has caused a lot of consternation in the minds of many people who have often tried to fill in the gaps.
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Because what do we know of Jesus? We have in Matthew and Luke, the information about his pre birth and his birth.
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In the gospels, we are told about at his age of 12 going to the temple.
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And then after that, they all begin essentially in the same spot.
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And that is with his forerunner, John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness, which we're gonna talk about next week.
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And Jesus beginning his ministry after his baptism and going out and preaching.
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And again, we're looking at three years and a 33 year life.
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That leaves a lot of speculation.
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And how many of you have wondered, what did Jesus do as a teenager? You know, he was the son of a carpenter.
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Was he a carpenter himself in his father's shop? Did he work alongside Joseph? Or did Joseph die early in Jesus's life? We know he was alive when Jesus was 12.
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But we don't know if he was alive after that.
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We assume he's dead by the time of the gospels because he's not mentioned in the gospels.
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And therefore, we know nothing of Jesus's teenage years.
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Was he raised by a single mom whose husband had died? Was he raised in relative poverty because he didn't have a father? All of these things are questions that we don't know the answer to.
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Did he take up the mantle as provider for his mother after Joseph had died? And what we find in historical literature is there are other books that cropped up in history, many of them referring to themselves as gospels.
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And some of those gospels tried to fill in the gaps.
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How many of you ever heard of the Gospel of Thomas? The Gospel of Thomas is a recognized Gnostic gospel, which means it was not one that was recognized by the early church, but rather it was one that a competing group used, and I'll get into who the Gnostics were another time, but the Gnostics had their own writings about Jesus.
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These were unearthed by Muhammad Ali, not the boxer, but his name was Muhammad Ali, the person who found the texts in Nag Hammadi, which is where they found the Gnostic texts, and there were the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas, and there were other gospels there.
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And often those gospels were replete with stories about Jesus's early life.
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There's a story about Jesus being a child and accidentally killing a bird and then bringing the bird back to life.
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It's ridiculous, it's not true, it's not found in our Bibles, but this is something that later, or later, not historians, but later Gnostics tried to add to his history because they wanted to fill in that 30-year period where there was only one account, and that's from his 12th year.
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So again, the gospels that we have are not intended to fill in those things.
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The gospels that we have, the four canonical gospels are meant to tell us exactly what we need and nothing more.
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This is why when someone says, well, I'm frustrated that John doesn't tell us more about Jesus, or Mark doesn't tell us more about Jesus, or Matthew doesn't tell us more about Jesus, we have exactly what God intended for us to have.
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And while we may have curiosity that stems from a natural inquisitive mind to want to know what Jesus did when he was eight, nine, 10 years old, or what he was doing when he was 14, 15, 16 years old, the Bible doesn't tell us these things.
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Instead, what it gives us is four gospels which are not intended to give us a biography of Jesus, but rather to give us a reason to believe in Jesus.
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That's what the gospels are.
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The gospels essentially are four tracts.
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I mention tracts because we have been handing out gospel tracts this week.
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Each one of the four gospels is written by its author for one purpose, that you would believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
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That's the goal of the four gospels.
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Now each one of them goes to a different audience in a different way.
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Matthew's gospel is very much aimed at the Jewish nation, and Matthew's gospel gives so many accounts of how Jesus fulfilled Jewish prophecy.
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And what do you think Matthew's purpose is? Is that the Jews would read about this Jesus who fulfills all their prophecies, and that they would believe on him.
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Mark is written to Rome.
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It's written to Gentiles.
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It's very fast-paced.
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Very little of Jesus' words are there.
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It's almost all Jesus' actions, and this is one of the things that's gonna be hard to go slow because Mark goes really fast.
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The word immediately is used over 40 times in this gospel, more than any other book of the New Testament by far, because he goes from one thing to another immediately, immediately, immediately.
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So Mark is writing this where he can sit down in this short 16-chapter book and read it, or have it read to a group of people that they might believe in this person who is called Jesus Christ.
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Luke has the most of Jesus' parables.
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We wouldn't know about the parable of the Good Samaritan.
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We wouldn't know about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man.
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We wouldn't know about many of these other stories if it were not for the gospel of Luke.
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Luke is a historian par excellence.
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He gives us things that are not given to us in any of the other gospels.
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And then, of course, John is the single gospel that stands on its own as being much removed from the others.
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In fact, if you are taking notes, you might make a distinction here.
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Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what we call the synoptic gospels, and John is what is sometimes referred to as the autopic gospel.
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Synoptic means to be viewed from the same perspective, or essentially to be viewed together.
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And autopic means to be viewed by itself.
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Now, you remember, you did the introduction to New Testament class.
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You as well, Miss Jackie.
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We talked about some of this in that.
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We talked about the distinctions between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and John.
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And what's interesting is if you begin to really break it down, what you find out is this.
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90%, I'm gonna do a little Venn diagram up here, and I'm doing this sort of, it's in my notes to do this, but I didn't write down how I was gonna do this.
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I said I'll figure it out when I get there.
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So here's what you need to understand.
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If you take Matthew, so we say this is Matthew.
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90% of what is in Mark is in Matthew.
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So if you took another circle and did sort of like this, you could say this is Mark.
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So Mark is contained almost completely in Matthew.
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Now, on the other hand, 50% of what's in Luke is also in Mark.
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So let's say we draw another circle.
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We say this is Luke.
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And you could do this circle and say this is Mark.
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So what you find is very, very little of Mark is actually unique to Mark.
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What you have in a handout in front of you, I gave you two handouts.
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One is an outline that we're gonna look at the very end, but on the other side of the outline, you will see all of the passages that are unique to Mark.
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They all fit on one page.
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Now, this isn't the passages.
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This is just what they are.
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But notice, these are the passages that only are in Mark.
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All of the rest of Mark is found also in Matthew or in Luke.
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I find that completely interesting, the fact that really Mark is not only the shortest gospel, but it's the least unique.
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Because 50% of what's in it's in Luke, 90% of it is in Matthew.
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Now, again, what is Mark about then? Because if Mark is, in a sense, not unique, what makes it unique? Well, there are some things that make Mark unique, even though it's not necessarily the content.
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What is greatly unique about Mark is that Mark tells the story of Jesus with a minimum of editorial comments.
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He says nothing about who he is.
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In fact, none of the gospel writers actually say who they are.
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John is the closest, because he says, the one who wrote this is the one who Jesus loves.
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We can discern who that is through the book.
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But he never says, I'm John and I wrote this.
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Luke identifies his audience as Theophilus, right? And we know that Luke wrote Acts, and so we can see that both of those are ascribed to Theophilus.
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Matthew, of course, doesn't say Matthew.
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Neither does Mark say that it was written by Mark.
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But this is something that Mark, we can say, is not unique, but at least we know that it is true.
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He does not mention himself or his audience.
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He also focuses very much on the sufferings of Christ.
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It has been said that the gospel of Mark is really just one long passion, or excuse me, a passion narrative with a long introduction.
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Because almost the whole latter half of the book is focused on Jesus' suffering and his passion.
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And so the book of Mark is, again, quickly taking us to the cross, quickly getting us to what Jesus did to save us from sin.
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Mark shows the popular belief in Jesus as Messiah through a rapid series of miracles.
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I wanna read a quote to you.
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This is from, I don't know if you know who these men are, D.A.
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Carson and Doug Moo.
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D.A.
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Carson and Doug Moo are two New Testament scholars and they came together to write an introduction to the New Testament.
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This is one of their quotes.
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They say, Mark's story of Jesus' ministry is action-oriented.
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Rather than recounting Jesus' extended teachings, as we see in the other books, Mark shifts scenes rapidly.
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The book uses the word immediately 42 times, nearly three times as frequently as the rest of the New Testament.
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Testament.
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Constantly on the move, Jesus heals, casts out demons, confronts opponents, and instructs the disciples.
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Again, it's a fast-paced, fast-moving story run to the cross.
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Mark is taking us as quickly as he can to the foot of the cross.
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Now, before I go further, any questions? I do wanna try to make this interactive, so yes.
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That's literally the next thing.
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It literally says who wrote Mark and we're gonna talk about.
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Very good question, though.
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Because we can know, but there's always a question about a book that doesn't have its author named, so we have to step back and say, how can we know? We're gonna answer that in just a second.
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Before we do, anybody else? Any other questions? Okay.
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So who wrote Mark? Most of our modern Bibles say the gospel according to Mark.
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And in fact, the term katamarkon, the Greek katamarkon means according to Mark, is in the earliest manuscripts that we have.
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That writing is at the top, but we don't think Mark wrote that.
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We just know that the earliest copies ascribed it to Mark.
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So who is the Mark that it's referring to? This is the first question we have to ask.
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If we believe that Mark is the author, who is Mark? Well, the Mark that it's talking about is John Mark.
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Now, John Mark is mentioned in the book of Acts.
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He's mentioned for the first time in the book of Acts in Acts chapter 12.
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Acts chapter 12, Peter is in prison.
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He is released from prison by an angel, remember? And the angel says go, and he goes to the house of the mother, her name was Mary, the mother of John Mark.
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So the first time we're introduced to him, we're introduced to him as the son of the woman who was having church in her house.
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She was having prayer meetings in her home.
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Later, that same John Mark would be included in four New Testament epistles.
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But before we get there, we have to remember he was also in the book of Acts, because Paul and Barnabas went on a missionary journey.
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They took Mark with them, and what happened? Mark defected.
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Mark didn't make the whole journey.
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So the next time Paul and Barnabas are gonna go out, Barnabas says, hey, let's take Mark, and Paul says, nay, nay, we're not taking that guy.
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He didn't make the trip last time, and that caused a schism between Barnabas and Paul.
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So Barnabas took Mark, who, by the way, was his cousin.
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Maybe a little nepotism there, but I think of it more this way.
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Barnabas is an encourager.
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He's willing to give him another chance, and he does.
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He takes him, and they go, and they minister together, and Paul takes Silas on the next missionary journey.
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But we see John Mark first as a failure, but then later as a redeemed failure.
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He's redeemed, he's brought up to the point that when Paul writes about him later in his letters, I'm gonna mention this when I preach the Colossians, he says that Mark is actually of great use to me.
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So Paul turns and changes his mind about this one who was once, he was unwilling to work with because of his failure.
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Now he has become one who is worthy of his attention and his time and is of great use to him.
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But also, we have to understand this.
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Mark is not only connected to Barnabas and Paul.
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Mark also has an important connection to another apostle, and that is the apostle Peter.
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In Peter's letters, he mentions Mark, and he talks about Mark being like a son to him in the same way that Paul talks about Timothy being a son to him.
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So Mark is to Peter what Timothy was to Paul.
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So that's an important point for where we're going next, because this term, Mark's gospel or according to Mark, actually goes, like I said, all the way back to our earliest manuscripts, but even outside of the manuscripts, we have early church fathers who wrote that Mark wrote his gospel from the memory of Peter, that Mark's gospel is actually taken from the eyewitness testimony of Peter.
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I'll give you one reference to this.
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Papias, who was the Bishop of Hierapolis until AD 130, said three things about the gospel of Mark.
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One, he said Mark was the author.
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So there's one of the external evidences for Mark being the author.
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This is someone who is close enough to the original events to speak authoritatively on the subject, and he said Mark is the author.
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Number two, he says Mark was not an eyewitness, but obtained his information from Peter, who was an eyewitness.
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So Mark is writing on behalf of Peter.
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And three, this is the third thing, Mark's gospel lacks rhetorical or artistic order reflecting the occasional nature of Peter's preaching.
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So we see a connection between the way Peter gave the gospel, and we see this through Acts, and the way Mark proclaims the gospel throughout the gospel of Mark.
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So we see a connection between the methods of Peter and the methods of Mark.
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So there are these three reasons that we can feel very comfortable believing not only that Mark was the author, or rather the writer, but that he was not writing from his own, but he was writing with Peter.
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And because of this historic connection between Mark and Peter, I like to think of Mark as the gospel of Peter.
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Now, I don't call it that because that would just be confusing, but I like to say that because one of the big questions that people often have is, why is it that we have two gospels written by apostles and two gospels that are not written by apostles? Matthew was an apostle, right? He was the tax collector.
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John was an apostle.
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He was the beloved apostle.
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But Luke was not an apostle.
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Luke was a physician who went on missionary journeys with Paul, but he was not an apostle.
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And Mark was not an apostle.
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But if you consider Luke to be writing under the authority of Paul, because Luke is Paul's companion, and Mark to be writing under the authority of Peter because he is Peter's son in the faith, then now we have the apostolic authority for all four gospels.
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So again, this is why oftentimes I think of Luke almost as the apostle Paul's gospel and Mark as the apostle Peter's gospel.
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So just another way to sort of look at these from a historical perspective.
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But I also wanna show you one other thing.
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If you have your Bible still out, turn to Mark 14.
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There's a very interesting and strange detail that is found in only Mark's gospel.
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When Jesus was arrested, Mark tells us something that none of the other gospels say.
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In the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, there was a young man watching as Jesus was arrested.
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How many of you remember this? Because this is such a weird portion of Mark's gospel, some people don't even remember it.
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I'll bring it up in conversation.
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I'll say, do you remember the naked guy? And people say, what? I'll read the text.
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It says, and a young man followed him with nothing but a linen cloth about his body, and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.
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Now that's all it says.
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It doesn't tell us who it is, it doesn't tell us why it happened, and it doesn't tell us why it's included.
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There's no reason for the inclusion.
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This does nothing to advance the narrative of Jesus.
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This does nothing to advance the story at all.
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But I have a hypothesis.
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Do you wanna hear my hypothesis? I could be wrong, and I'm willing to say I could be wrong.
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But do you wanna hear my hypothesis? Okay.
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I hope you said yes, I was gonna tell you anyway.
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My hypothesis is this is Mark's personal testimony, because I personally believe that the Last Supper was held at the house of Mark's mother.
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I believe that Mark's mother, Mary, was the place, and this has some traditional backing, that Mark's house was the house where the Last Supper was, which means Mark, as a child, was watching on as Jesus gave the final supper.
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And he handed out the bread and said, this is my body, handed out the cup and said, this is my blood.
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And now as Jesus takes his disciples to the garden, it could be that young Mark follows after them in his night clothes.
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As it says, he's in just basically his night outfit.
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And as the arrest begins to happen, as the excitement begins to happen, he runs, they grab him, and he slips away like Joseph having his clothes ripped off of him, but he gets back home naked.
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Now again, I can't prove that.
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But who else would know this story other than him? And I think this is one of the ways that we see him in the story, him including his own bit of testimony.
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Again, can I prove it? No, but I like to believe it, so I'll share it with you.
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Now, one more thought.
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John Mark, as the author of this gospel, and I've already mentioned this, but I just wanna reemphasize it.
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John Mark, as the author of this gospel, reminds us of God's redeeming grace against someone who would earlier show himself to be a defector, but then show himself to be useful in the household of God.
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And this reminds us of just how important it is that we understand that God can use a broken vessel, God can use a defective vessel, God can use a vessel that runs away for a time.
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God is good at taking our failures and using us in spite of them.
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So Mark becomes a wonderful testimony to us of God's grace.
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All right, I'm gonna move on to the dating of Mark.
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Anybody have any questions before we go on? Yes, my dear.
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Okay, I don't know if I understand.
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I don't know, we'll talk later, okay? All right, let's talk now about when Mark was written.
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And the reason why I bring this question up is because if you look at any study Bible, it's gonna say at the beginning, it'll always have an introduction, what Mark's about, or whatever, and it'll always say dating, right? What's the date? And sometimes I think people wonder why that's important.
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Well, why does it matter when it was written? It does matter for a couple of different reasons.
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One, one of the reasons why we reject the majority of the so-called Gnostic Gospels, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, or the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Judas, is because many of those were written far after the time that those people were alive.
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The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, I think, is like the third century.
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The Gospel of Judas is like the fifth century.
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It's so far removed from the time that it couldn't possibly have been written by those people, and therefore, we need to add no weight to the name, because all it is is a pseudepigraphal thing.
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They've taken someone's name and added it to their writing, so there's no reason to give it any weight.
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And for a long time, people made that claim about the four canonical Gospels.
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In fact, during the time of the Enlightenment, and during the time of the rise of skepticism, and things like that that were going on in the Americas and in Europe, one of the greatest arguments against the Bible was these events were written hundreds of years after Jesus.
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They are not contemporaneous with him or the apostles, and there's no reason to believe that they were.
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But now, we have archeological evidence that actually puts all four Gospels firmly in the lifetime of the apostles.
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And it's really not even debated anymore.
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It's the only people who wanna argue that it's later than the time of the apostles are really on the fringe.
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These are not legitimate scholars who are doing this work.
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And Mark is highest among them, because the archeological evidence for the early dating of Mark is substantial.
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One of the stories I like to tell is about the funerary mask that was found in Egypt.
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I think it was found, let me double check that.
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I have this in my notes.
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Yeah, let me see.
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Archeologists years ago discovered a funeral mask made of papyrus glued together.
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Is it Egypt? I think it was Egypt.
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But anyway, here's what it is.
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Back in the first century, when they would bury someone of note, they would make facial coverings for them.
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We've seen these in Egypt.
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We've seen gold coverings and things like that.
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Well, they also used a form of papier-mache, which was papers that were glued together and formed into masks and painted and put over the face of the person who passed away.
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Well, one was unearthed that they began to study the paper that was used, and this was papyrus, and the paper actually become to be found out it was a copy of the Gospel of Mark.
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They could pull the pieces of paper away and read portions of it, and they began to realize this is a copy of Mark's Gospel.
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And the mask has been dated to AD 80 to 90.
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So that means there was a copy of Mark in existence.
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In fact, there were so many copies of Mark in existence that they were willing to do an arts and craft project with it and make a mask for a dead guy out of it.
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And this, again, shoves the idea that Mark was a second or third century work out of the idea of possibility.
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And so, again, when you say why do these dates matter? Because it shows us that these are not, these are not people using pseudonyms.
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These are real writings from the real apostles and their associates within their lifetimes.
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This is all very important when it comes to the subject of apologetics, defending the faith.
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Because what's someone attacking? The history of the faith.
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Well, here we have the history, and the history is firm.
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But there's another question when we talk about the question of dating.
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And that's the question of which came first.
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In our Bibles, we have listed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
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And the assumption by many is that that's the order in which they were written.
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Matthew's written first, Mark is written second, Luke third, John fourth.
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Well, contemporary scholarship has changed a little bit on this.
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And a lot of scholars now are, in fact, Carson and Mu do argue in their New Testament introduction that Mark actually was the first written, and that Matthew and Luke, because there's so much of Mark in them, both were using him as a primary source.
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And so you begin to deal with the subject of source consultation.
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Are they consulting an already written gospel? Right, and that becomes a question of why is it that they're written so similarly? Now, there is another theory called Q.
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How many of you ever heard of Q? Okay, you get the prize in that because you've heard of everything I've said.
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Q, the theory of Q, this is actually the word quell, which means source, is that there was a written gospel that we no longer have, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke all borrowed from that.
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And that Q is the source for Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
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Now, there's nothing necessarily sacrilegious about that.
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If there was a written document that we no longer have, and all three gospel writers are sourcing that, there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't believe it because there's no evidence for it.
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Q is only in the mind of scholars.
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There's never been any source material found for Q.
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But what we do have, and this is why I don't believe Mark was first.
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By the way, I'm gonna say I disagree with Carson and Moot.
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Yeah, I can do that.
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I don't think Mark was first.
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I personally believe the order is the way, the order of their writing.
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And here's a very simple reason.
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I believe Matthew was written to the Jews, and the Bible says the gospel is to the Jew first, and then to the Greek.
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I know that may sound like a simple answer, but I think Matthew's gospel solidifies who Jesus is according to the Old Testament scriptures, and gives us the first genealogy of Christ.
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I actually think it could have went Matthew, Luke, then Mark because Luke is also genealogical.
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And again, proving who Jesus was was hugely important, and genealogies are important.
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And the fact that Mark doesn't see the need to put a genealogy in his, the only genealogy he has is son of God.
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I'm gonna talk about that next week.
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It says the gospel of Jesus Christ, son of God.
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He doesn't say son of Abraham, son of David.
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He didn't go into any of that.
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He just says son of God.
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Mark not including that genealogy, I think, is a big indicator, right, of who likely came first.
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Now again, there are scholarly reasons for Mark being the first, but most of those reasons deal with the concept of source.
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The people who tend to see Mark as first tend to see Mark as source.
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And we're almost out of time.
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I did say I didn't wanna go way past 7.30 tonight, so I won't.
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But when you start talking about source material, we have to take a step back and say, okay, Mark's writing from Peter.
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Luke is getting a lot of his information probably from Paul.
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There are sources, but there's also something else that we often forget.
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There is an oral tradition that has been going on for 20 years by this time, because the first gospels are written in the 50s.
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When did Jesus die? In the 30s.
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Do you think nobody said anything about Jesus in 20 years? No, the gospels have been preached by verbal oral tradition for 20 years.
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And therefore, as the men who saw Jesus die and raise began themselves to die, it became impending and important upon the church to write down these things, because oral tradition would no longer be enough.
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Oral tradition had to be solidified in a written scripture.
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And so I think the reason why we see so much similarity between Matthew, Mark, and Luke is they're all coming from the same stories about Jesus that everyone knew and everyone had heard and everyone had told themselves and others for 20 years.
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So is there a source? Yes, but I don't think it's a written source.
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I think because in that time period, oral tradition was very important.
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It's not like today.
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It's not like when I tell you a story, Ms.
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LaVon, and you maybe go tell it to Ms.
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Pat, and Ms.
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Pat goes tells it to Ms.
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Shirley, and Ms.
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Shirley tells it to my wife.
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It's totally different.
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Not because you intended it to, but because that's just the way life is.
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But oral tradition in the ancient world was one of the ways of passing down important and vital information, and there was a way of doing it that maintained its integrity.
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So it wasn't like the telephone game that we often consider today.
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So I do believe, in fact, I'll give you a good example.
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In the second chapter of Philippians, the apostle Paul says, "'Have this mind among yourselves, "'which is yours in Christ Jesus, "'who though he was in the form of God, "'did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, "'but made himself nothing, took upon himself flesh, "'and became a servant, and went to the cross.'" I'm not quoting it exactly, but you remember that? It's called, that section in Philippians 2 is called the Carmen Christi.
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The reason, that term means the song of Christ.
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And what many scholars believe, along with them, believe that that is Paul actually writing down an early Christian hymn, that the Christian sang, that though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but took upon himself, became nothing, and took upon himself flesh, because it was a way of affirming Christian truth in a, what we might say, a catechism, or a hymn.
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And so it's referred to as the Carmen Christi.
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And we actually see another one of these in Colossians.
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In Colossians 1, which I'll be preaching on in a couple, well, I'm preaching this Sunday, the introduction.
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I'm gonna be doing this for Colossians on Sunday.
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But when we get to 115, we see another song.
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It's the song of the supremacy of Christ.
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And we see that in Colossians chapter one, which again, I believe, is part of the early church tradition that was handed down verbally as the apostles went and proclaimed this truth.
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So these are, why does dating matter? It matters because we believe Mark is written in the time of the apostles, and it matters because we believe that Mark is the second.
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I believe Mark is the second.
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I don't believe he's the source for Matthew.
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I don't necessarily believe he's the source for Luke.
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I believe they're all drawing from a similar, from the apostles' teachings, which had become the verbal tradition of the church.
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That make sense? All right, that was a lot.
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Okay, let's begin to draw to a close.
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Any questions? Well, I must be doing good if I didn't encourage any questions, or maybe I'm just so confusing, it didn't encourage any questions.
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Last thing, when we do a study of the gospels, there is always going to be a need for harmonization.
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Harmonization is when you're reading a story in one gospel, and then you read it in another gospel, and it reads differently.
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Doesn't mean it contradicts, but there's one of the most, one of the best ways to see this is in the resurrection.
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Four gospels give four different accounts of what happened.
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How many angels were there? Was a stone rolled away when the women came, or was it after they came? Or did they see the angel outside? Did they see the angel inside? Was there one angel? Was there two angels? There's all these questions.
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I'm not saying there's contradictions, but you have to harmonize the story.
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One Easter, very early on in my ministry, I was teaching a Sunday school class, and I decided that Sunday, on Easter Sunday, when all the visitors are here for Sunday school, I taught the four gospel narratives.
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And one guy came up to me afterward.
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He said, I didn't know.
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I said, you didn't know what? He said, oh yeah, I didn't know they were so different.
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I said, well, they're not different.
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Well, I said, they're not contradicted, but there's four different accounts of this narrative.
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I said, and historic harmonization is part of how you do a study like this.
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So throughout our study of Mark, there are going to be times where I say, okay, now let's remember Matthew.
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Let's look at what Matthew says.
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Turn over to, and again, 90% of Mark is in Matthew.
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So we're gonna do this more than once.
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50% is in Luke.
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We're gonna do this several times.
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But it's good for the soul to see that God, remember what he said about truth.
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Two or three witnesses, remember? He says that all truth is based upon the testimony of two or three witnesses.
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We are not given one gospel.
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We're given four gospels.
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Four pictures of Christ.
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Not biographies, but tracts, all intended for the purpose of saying, this is the one for whom, or this is the one whom we must believe who came and died for our sins.
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Last thing, on the back of your sheet, I gave you a handout.
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This is the outline of Mark.
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This is from Jensen's New Testament survey.
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You'll notice in the very center, the very center, it goes up into a line.
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It says pivot.
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And it's the question, who do men say that I am? Who did Jesus ask that to? To the apostles.
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The apostles, some of them said, you are Elias the prophet.
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Some say that you are John the Baptist.
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Come back to life.
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And Jesus said, but who do you say that I am? And who was the apostle who said, you are the Christ, the son of the living God? Which apostle said that? Peter.
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That point in this book makes the center point of the book.
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And it's the pivot point of Jesus going from revealing his identity by what he does to making his beeline for the cross.
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And a center point is him asking the question and Peter saying, thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.
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So that's why I like this outline because that shows us really how the book pivots and reminds us who it's really coming from.
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The history of Peter about Christ.
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The apostle who we could say was the biggest mouth and the one that I tend to relate with the most.
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But was certainly one of the closest to Christ.
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All right, do we have any questions? Was this helpful? Good way to get started? All right, well let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for your truth.
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I pray that this time of study would be used to glorify you.
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And ultimately, Lord, that we would become better lovers of Christ by learning more about him and studying your word about him.
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And Lord, I'm so excited just to talk about Jesus, to talk about the things that he did, to talk about the life that he lived, what little snapshot we have of it.
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And Lord, I pray that you would glorify yourself in our study in the weeks, months, and maybe even over a year to come.
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In Jesus' name, amen.