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Notes -
Do you have a favorite Gospel of the New Testament? It has been suggested that the four Gospels correspond to the four Keirsey MBTI temperaments (SP artisans, SJ guardians, NT rationalists, NF idealists) and were written to be persuasive to different audiences:
Conveniently, you can also draw a parallel here with the four Hippocratic temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic).
The Gospel of Mark with its original ending and older manuscript variants. It has a divine tension where the reader is not totally sure whether Jesus is actually the Son of God. As the academic majority believes that Mark is the first gospel with the other synoptics written on top of it (making editorial mistakes in the process), the original reading is the most interesting. It shows the original energy of the religion.
Jesus’ family thinks he is out of his mind
Christ admonishes the disciples for being cowards when He calms the storm
People doubt Christ because he works as a carpenter, as opposed to his being a “son of a carpenter”, with this word having a great meaningspace of artisan and craftsman and builder; this sustains the tension of his legitimacy.
He is emotional, angry and sighing while healing people
There is the messianic secret motif which echoes the story of Euripides’ Baccheus (note all similarities: God entering human form in humility to reestablish correct worship in secret while facing opposition from society, blessing those who recognize him and promising disaster to those who do not)
The character of Bartimaeus who is theorized to allude to Plato’s Timeus
From what I’ve read from people who can read Koine Greek, it is written in a style between Hemingway and ebonics, and erring toward the latter. It is literally not even written well, which I think is awesome.
There is the very important note that Jesus cursed the fig tree when it wasn’t the time for figs, which is essential for understanding what He is actually doing and the purpose of faith and cursing.
Prayer is articulated as an activity in which the person believes they’ve already received what they asked when they pray, which is fascinating, and a very phenomenologically different activity than today’s prayer with very different psychological consequences
It ends with a sense of cosmic horror: “So they went out quickly and fled from the tomb, for they trembled and were amazed. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” This is very fitting for a human race which just crucified the appointed savior of the world. I would also be left in a state of cosmic horror. To me this has the feeling of the original, unfinished ending of Mozart’s Lacrimosa, which leaves you in a state of dread and questioning. Now if Mark is original, this is also important for clarifying the very first sense of the crucifixion. Is it hopeful? Is it horrible? Perhaps both.
I like this original dramatic tension because the reader winds up feeling like the clueless Centurion — “truly this man was the Son of God” — for no other reason than the way He lived. You can almost read OG Mark in an atheistic lens of, “imagine someone lived totally as the son of God in our sinful and evil world”. It’s also important to read this in the context of two Solomonic Wisdom Books: Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon. Ecclesiastes paints a world without any hope after death, and the Wisdom of Solomon was written around 0AD as a correction to this. How does Wisdom correct the nihilism of Ecclesiastes? With the archetypal righteous person, who labels himself the Son of God, who is put to a shameful death by the evil and worldly after claiming God as his Father. This and many other similarities should lead us to believe that Mark was written with the Wisdom of Solomon in mind.
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