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Gospel of Mark

The Gospel of Mark is the second of the four canonical gospels and one of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from his baptism by John the Baptist to his death, the burial of his body, and the discovery of his empty tomb. It portrays Jesus as a teacher, an exorcist, a healer, and a miracle worker, though it does not mention a miraculous birth or divine pre-existence. He refers to himself as the Son of Man. He is called the Son of God but keeps his messianic nature secret; even his disciples fail to understand him. All this is in keeping with the Christian interpretation of prophecy, which is believed to foretell the fate of the messiah as suffering servant.

Most critical scholars reject the early church tradition linking the gospel to John Mark, who was a companion of Saint Peter, and it is generally agreed that it was written anonymously for a gentile audience, probably in Rome, sometime shortly before or after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.

Authorship and date
An early Christian tradition deriving from Papias of Hierapolis (c.60–c.130 AD) attributes authorship of the gospel to Mark, a companion and interpreter of Peter, but most scholars believe that it was written anonymously, and that the name of Mark was attached later to link it to an authoritative figure. It is usually dated through the eschatological discourse in Mark 13, which scholars interpret as pointing to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 AD)—a war that led to the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. This would place the composition of Mark either immediately after the destruction or during the years immediately prior. The author used a variety of pre-existing sources, such as conflict stories, apocalyptic discourse, miracle stories, parables, a passion narrative, and collections of sayings, although not the hypothesized Q source.

Setting
The Gospel of Mark was written in Greek, for a gentile audience, and probably in Rome, although Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), and southern Syria have also been suggested.

The consensus among modern scholars is that the gospels are a subset of the ancient genre of bios, or ancient biography. Ancient biographies were concerned with providing examples for readers to emulate while preserving and promoting the subject's reputation and memory, and also included morals, rhetoric, propaganda and kerygma (preaching) in their works. Like all the synoptic gospels, the purpose of writing was to strengthen the faith of those who already believed, as opposed to serving as a tractate for missionary conversion. Christian churches were small communities of believers, often based on households (an autocratic patriarch plus extended family, slaves, freedmen, and other clients), and the evangelists often wrote on two levels: one the "historical" presentation of the story of Jesus, the other dealing with the concerns of the author's own day. Thus the proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:14 and the following verses, for example, mixes the terms Jesus would have used as a 1st-century Jew ("kingdom of God") and those of the early church ("believe", "gospel").

Christianity began within Judaism, with a Christian "church" (or ἐκκλησία, ekklesia, meaning 'assembly') that arose shortly after Jesus's death when some of his followers claimed to have witnessed him risen from the dead. From the outset, Christians depended heavily on Jewish literature, supporting their convictions through the Jewish scriptures. Those convictions involved a nucleus of key concepts: the messiah, the son of God and the son of man, the suffering servant, the Day of the Lord, and the kingdom of God. Uniting these ideas was the common thread of apocalyptic expectation: Both Jews and Christians believed that the end of history was at hand, that God would very soon come to punish their enemies and establish his own rule, and that they were at the centre of his plans. Christians read the Jewish scripture as a figure or type of Jesus Christ, so that the goal of Christian literature became an experience of the living Christ. The new movement spread around the eastern Mediterranean and to Rome and further west, and assumed a distinct identity, although the groups within it remained extremely diverse.

Synoptic problem
The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke bear a striking resemblance to each other, so much so that their contents can easily be set side by side in parallel columns. The fact that they share so much material verbatim and yet also exhibit important differences has led to several hypotheses explaining their interdependence, a phenomenon termed the synoptic problem.

Up until the 19th century the gospel of Mark was traditionally placed second, and sometimes fourth, in the Christian canon, as an abridgement of Matthew. The Church has consequently derived its view of Jesus primarily from Matthew, secondarily from John, and only distantly from Mark. However, in the 19th century, Mark came to be viewed by many scholars as the earliest of the four gospels, and as a source used by both Matthew and Luke. It is widely accepted that this was the first gospel (Marcan Priority) and was used as a source by both Matthew and Luke, who agree with each other in their sequence of stories and events only when they also agree with Mark. The hypothesis of Marcan priority continues to be held by the majority of scholars today, and there is a new recognition of the author as an artist and theologian using a range of literary devices to convey his conception of Jesus as the authoritative yet suffering Son of God.

Historicity
When in the 19th century it became widely accepted that Mark was the earliest of the gospels it was assumed that it was therefore the most reliable source for the historical Jesus, but the idea that Mark could be used to reconstruct the historical Jesus suffered two severe blows in the early part of the 20th century, first when William Wrede argued strongly that the "Messianic Secret" motif in Mark was a creation of the early church rather than a reflection of the historical Jesus, and in 1919 when Karl Ludwig Schmidt further undermined its historicity with his argument that the links between episodes are the invention of the writer, meaning that it cannot be taken as a reliable guide to the chronology of Jesus' mission: both claims are widely accepted today. Since about 1950 there has been a growing consensus that the primary purpose of the author of Mark was to announce a message rather than to report history, but it is nevertheless still seen as the most reliable of the four in terms of its overall description of Jesus's life and ministry.

Structure and content
 Detailed content of Mark

1. Galilean ministry

John the Baptist (1:1–8)

Baptism of Jesus (1:9–11)

Temptation of Jesus (1:12–13)

Return to Galilee (1:14)

Good News (1:15)

First disciples (1:16–20)

Capernaum's synagogue (1:21–28)

Peter's mother-in-law (1:29–31)

Exorcising at sunset (1:32–34)

A leper (1:35–45)

A paralytic (2:1–2:12)

Calling of Matthew (2:13–17)

Fasting and wineskins (2:18–22)

Lord of the Sabbath (2:23–28)

Man with withered hand (3:1–6)

Withdrawing to the sea (3:7–3:12)

Commissioning the Twelve (3:13–19)

Blind mute (3:20–26)

Strong man (3:27)

Eternal sin (3:28–30)

Jesus' true relatives (3:31–35)

Parable of the Sower (4:1–9,13-20)

Purpose of parables (4:10–12,33-34)

Lamp under a bushel (4:21–23)

Mote and Beam (4:24–25)

Growing seed and Mustard seed (4:26–32)

Calming the storm (4:35–41)

Demon named Legion (5:1–20)

Daughter of Jairus (5:21–43)

Hometown rejection (6:1–6)

Instructions for the Twelve (6:7–13)

Beheading of John (6:14–29)

Feeding the 5000 (6:30–44)

Walking on water (6:45–52)

Fringe of his cloak heals (6:53–56)

Discourse on Defilement (7:1–23)

Canaanite woman's daughter (7:24–30)

Deaf mute (7:31–37)

Feeding the 4000 (8:1–9)

No sign will be given (8:10–21)

Healing with spit (8:22–26)

Peter's confession (8:27–30)

Jesus predicts his death (8:31–33, 9:30–32, 10:32–34)

Instructions for followers (8:34–9:1)

Transfiguration (9:2–13)

Possessed boy (9:14–29)

Teaching in Capernaum (9:33–50)

2. Journey to Jerusalem

Entering Judea and Transjordan

On divorce (10:2–12)

Little children (10:13–16)

Rich young man (10:17–31)

Son of man came to serve (10:35–45)

Blind Bartimaeus (10:46–52)

3. Events in Jerusalem

Entering Jerusalem (11:1–11)

Cursing the fig tree (11:12–14,20-24)

Temple incident (11:15–19)

Prayer for forgiveness (11:25–26)

Authority questioned (11:27–33)

Wicked husbandman (12:1–12)

Render unto Caesar... (12:13–17)

Resurrection of the Dead (12:18–27)

Great Commandment (12:28–34)

Is the Messiah the son of David? (12:35–40)

Widow's mite (12:41–44)

Olivet Discourse (13)

Plot to kill Jesus (14:1–2)

Anointing (14:3–9)

Bargain of Judas (14:10–11)

Last Supper (14:12–26)

Denial of Peter (14:27–31,66-72)

Agony in the Garden (14:32–42)

Kiss of Judas (14:43–45)

Arrest (14:46–52)

Before the High Priest (14:53–65)

Pilate's court (15:1–15)

Soldiers mock Jesus (15:16–20)

Simon of Cyrene (15:21)

Crucifixion (15:22–41)

Entombment (15:42–47)

Empty tomb (16:1–8)

The Longer Ending (16:9–20)

Post-resurrection appearances (16:9–13)

Great Commission (16:14–18)

Ascension (16:19)

Dispersion of the Apostles (16:20)

Structure
There is no agreement on the structure of Mark. There is, however, a widely recognised break at Mark 8:26–31: before 8:26 there are numerous miracle stories, the action is in Galilee, and Jesus preaches to the crowds, while after 8:31 there are hardly any miracles, the action shifts from Galilee to gentile areas or hostile Judea, and Jesus teaches the disciples. Peter's confession at Mark 8:27–30 that Jesus is the messiah thus forms the watershed to the whole gospel. A further generally recognised turning point comes at the end of chapter 10, when Jesus and his followers arrive in Jerusalem and the foreseen confrontation with the Temple authorities begins, leading R.T. France to characterise Mark as a three-act drama. James Edwards in his 2002 commentary points out that the gospel can be seen as a series of questions asking first who Jesus is (the answer being that he is the messiah), then what form his mission takes (a mission of suffering culminating in the crucifixion and resurrection, events only to be understood when the questions are answered), while another scholar, C. Myers, has made what Edwards calls a "compelling case" for recognising the incidents of Jesus' baptism, transfiguration and crucifixion, at the beginning, middle and end of the gospel, as three key moments, each with common elements, and each portrayed in an apocalyptic light. Stephen H. Smith has made the point that the structure of Mark is similar to the structure of a Greek tragedy.

Content

 * Jesus is first announced as the Messiah and then later as the Son of God; he is baptised by John and a heavenly voice announces him as the Son of God; he is tested in the wilderness by Satan; John is arrested, and Jesus begins to preach the good news of the kingdom of God.
 * Jesus gathers his disciples; he begins teaching, driving out demons, healing the sick, cleansing lepers, raising the dead, feeding the hungry, and giving sight to the blind; he delivers a long discourse in parables to the crowd, intended for the disciples, but they fail to understand; he performs mighty works, calming the storm and walking on water, but while God and demons recognise him, neither the crowds nor the disciples grasp his identity. He also has several run-ins with Jewish lawkeepers, especially in chapters 2–3.
 * Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is, and then, "but you, who do you say I am?" Peter answers that he is the Christ, and Jesus commands him to silence; Jesus explains that the Son of Man must go to Jerusalem and be killed, but will rise again; Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus and God tells the disciples, "This is my son," but they remain uncomprehending.
 * Jesus goes to Jerusalem, where he is hailed as one who "comes in the name of the Lord" and will inaugurate the "kingdom of David"; he drives those who buy and sell animals from the Temple and debates with the Jewish authorities; on the Mount of Olives he announces the coming destruction of the Temple, the persecution of his followers, and the coming of the Son of Man in power and glory.
 * A woman perfumes Jesus' head with oil, and Jesus explains that this is a sign of his coming death; Jesus celebrates Passover with the disciples, declares the bread and wine to be his body and blood, and goes with them to Gethsemane to pray; there Judas betrays him to the Jewish authorities. Interrogated by the high priest, Jesus says that he is the Christ, the Son of God, and will return as Son of Man at God's right hand.  The Jewish leaders turn him over to Pilate, who has him crucified as one who claims to be "king of the Jews"; Jesus, abandoned by the disciples, is buried in a rock tomb by a sympathetic member of the Jewish council.
 * The women who have followed Jesus come to the tomb on Sunday morning; they find it empty, and are told by a young man in a white robe to go and tell the others that Jesus has risen and has gone before them to Galilee; "but they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid".

Ending
The earliest extant Greek manuscripts of Mark, codices Vaticanus (which contains a large blank space in the column after 16:8) and Sinaiticus, end at Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing in fear from the empty tomb. The majority of recent scholars believe this to be the original ending, and that this is supported by statements from the early Church Fathers Eusebius and Jerome. The "shorter ending", found in a small number of manuscripts, tells how the women told "those around Peter" all that the angel had commanded and how the message of eternal life (or "proclamation of eternal salvation") was then sent out by Jesus himself; it differs from the rest of Mark both in style and in its understanding of Jesus and is almost universally considered a spurious addition; the overwhelming majority of manuscripts have the "longer ending", with accounts of the resurrected Jesus, the commissioning of the disciples to proclaim the gospel, and Christ's ascension. In deference to its importance within the manuscript tradition, the New Testament critical editors enclose the longer ending in brackets.

Gospel
The author introduces his work as "gospel", meaning "good news", a literal translation of the Greek "evangelion" – he uses the word more often than any other writer in the New Testament except Paul. Paul uses it to mean "the good news (of the saving significance of the death and resurrection) of Christ"; Mark extends it to the career of Christ as well as his death and resurrection. Like the other gospels, Mark was written to confirm the identity of Jesus as eschatological deliverer – the purpose of terms such as "messiah" and "son of God". As in all the gospels, the messianic identity of Jesus is supported by a number of themes, including: (1) the depiction of his disciples as obtuse, fearful and uncomprehending; (2) the refutation of the charge made by Jesus' enemies that he was a magician; (3) secrecy surrounding his true identity (this last is missing from John).

The failure of the disciples
In Mark, the disciples, especially the Twelve, move from lack of perception of Jesus to rejection of the "way of suffering" to flight and denial – even the women who received the first proclamation of his resurrection can be seen as failures for not reporting the good news. There is much discussion of this theme among scholars. Some argue that the author of Mark was using the disciples to correct "erroneous" views in his own community concerning the reality of the suffering messiah, others that it is an attack on the Jerusalem branch of the church for resisting the extension of the gospel to the gentiles, or a mirror of the convert's usual experience of the initial enthusiasm followed by growing awareness of the necessity for suffering. It certainly reflects the strong theme in Mark of Jesus as the "suffering just one" portrayed in so many of the books of the Jewish scriptures, from Jeremiah to Job and the Psalms, but especially in the "Suffering Servant" passages in Isaiah. It also reflects the Jewish scripture theme of God's love being met by infidelity and failure, only to be renewed by God. The failure of the disciples and Jesus' denial by Peter himself would have been powerful symbols of faith, hope and reconciliation for Christians.

The charge of magic
Mark contains twenty accounts of miracles and healings, accounting for almost a third of the gospel and half of the first ten chapters, more, proportionally, than in any other gospel. In the gospels as a whole, Jesus' miracles, prophecies, etc., are presented as evidence of God's rule, but Mark's descriptions of Jesus' healings are a partial exception to this, as his methods, using spittle to heal blindness and magic formulae, were those of a magician. This is the charge the Jewish religious leaders bring against Jesus: they say he is performing exorcisms with the aid of an evil spirit and calling up the spirit of John the Baptist. "There was [...] no period in the history of the [Roman] empire in which the magician was not considered an enemy of society," subject to penalties ranging from exile to death, says Classical scholar Ramsay MacMullen. All the gospels defend Jesus against the charge, which, if true, would contradict their ultimate claims for him. The point of the Beelzebub incident in Mark is to set forth Jesus' claims to be an instrument of God, not Satan.

Messianic Secret
In 1901, William Wrede identified the "Messianic Secret" – Jesus' secrecy about his identity as the messiah – as one of Mark's central themes. Wrede argued that the elements of the secret – Jesus' silencing of the demons, the obtuseness of the disciples regarding his identity, and the concealment of the truth inside parables – were fictions and arose from the tension between the Church's post-resurrection messianic belief and the historical reality of Jesus. There remains continuing debate over how far the "secret" originated with Mark and how far he got it from tradition, and how far, if at all, it represents the self-understanding and practices of the historical Jesus.

Christology
Christology means a doctrine or understanding concerning the person or nature of Christ. In the New Testament writings it is frequently conveyed through the titles applied to Jesus. Most scholars agree that "Son of God" is the most important of these titles in Mark. It appears on the lips of God himself at the baptism and the transfiguration, and is Jesus' own self-designation. These and other instances provide reliable evidence of how the evangelist perceived Jesus, but it is not clear just what the title meant to Mark and his 1st-century audience. Where it appears in the Hebrew scriptures it meant Israel as God's people, or the king at his coronation, or angels, as well as the suffering righteous man. In Hellenistic culture the same phrase meant a "divine man", a supernatural being. There is little evidence that "son of God" was a title for the messiah in 1st century Judaism, and the attributes that Mark describes in Jesus are much more those of the Hellenistic miracle-working "divine man" than of the Jewish Davidic messiah.

Mark does not explicitly state what he means by "Son of God", nor when the sonship was conferred. The New Testament as a whole presents four different understandings:
 * 1) Jesus became God's son at his resurrection, God "begetting" Jesus to a new life by raising him from the dead – this was the earliest understanding, preserved in Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 1:3–4, and in Acts 13:33;
 * 2) Jesus became God's son at his baptism, the coming of the Holy Spirit marking him as messiah, while "Son of God" refers to the relationship then established for him by God – this is the understanding implied in Mark 1:9–11;
 * 3) Matthew and Luke present Jesus as "Son of God" from the moment of conception and birth, with God taking the place of a human father;
 * 4) John, the last of the gospels, presents the idea that the Christ was pre-existent and became flesh as Jesus – an idea also found in Paul.

However, other scholars dispute this interpretation and instead hold that Jesus is already presented as God's son even before his baptism in Mark.

Mark also calls Jesus "christos" (Christ), translating the Hebrew "messiah," (anointed person). In the Old Testament the term messiah ("anointed one") described prophets, priests and kings; by the time of Jesus, with the kingdom long vanished, it had come to mean an eschatological king (a king who would come at the end of time), one who would be entirely human though far greater than all God's previous messengers to Israel, endowed with miraculous powers, free from sin, ruling in justice and glory (as described in, for example, the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish work from this period). The most important occurrences are in the context of Jesus' death and suffering, suggesting that, for Mark, Jesus can only be fully understood in that context.

A third important title, "Son of Man", has its roots in Ezekiel, the Book of Enoch, (a popular Jewish apocalyptic work of the period), and especially in Daniel 7:13–14, where the Son of Man is assigned royal roles of dominion, kingship and glory. Mark 14:62 combines more scriptural allusions: before he comes on clouds the Son of Man will be seated on the right hand of God, pointing to the equivalence of the three titles, Christ, Son of God, Son of Man, the common element being the reference to kingly power.

Christ's death, resurrection and return
Eschatology means the study of the end-times, and the Jews expected the messiah to be an eschatological figure, a deliverer who would appear at the end of the age to usher in an earthly kingdom. The earliest Jewish Christian community saw Jesus as a messiah in this Jewish sense, a human figure appointed by God as his earthly regent; but they also believed in Jesus' resurrection and exaltation to heaven, and for this reason they also viewed him as God's agent (the "son of God") who would return in glory ushering in the Kingdom of God.

The term "Son of God" likewise had a specific Jewish meaning, or range of meanings, including referring to an angel, the nation of Israel, or simply a man. One of the most significant Jewish meanings of this epithet is a reference to an earthly king adopted by God as his son at his enthronement, legitimizing his rule over Israel. In Hellenistic culture, in contrast, the phrase meant a "divine man", covering legendary heroes like Hercules, god-kings like the Egyptian pharaohs, or famous philosophers like Plato. When the gospels call Jesus "Son of God" the intention is to place him in the class of Hellenistic and Greek divine men, the "sons of God" who were endowed with supernatural power to perform healings, exorcisms and other wonderful deeds. Mark's "Son of David" is Hellenistic, his Jesus predicting that his mission involves suffering, death and resurrection, and, by implication, not military glory and conquest. This reflects a move away from the Jewish-Christian apocalyptic tradition and towards the Hellenistic message preached by Paul, for whom Christ's death and resurrection, rather than the establishment of the apocalyptic Jewish kingdom, is the meaning of salvation, the "gospel".

Mark and the New Testament
All four gospels tell a story in which Jesus' death and resurrection are the crucial redemptive events. There are, however, important differences between the four: Unlike John, Mark never calls Jesus "God", or claims that Jesus existed before his earthly life; unlike Matthew and Luke, the author does not mention a virgin birth or indicate whether Jesus had a normal human parentage and birth; unlike Matthew and Luke, he makes no attempt to trace Jesus' ancestry back to King David or Adam with a genealogy.

Christians of Mark's time expected Jesus to return as Messiah in their own lifetime – Mark, like the other gospels, attributes the promise to Jesus himself, and it is reflected in the Pauline Epistles, the Epistle of James, the Epistle to the Hebrews and in the Book of Revelation. When return failed, the early Christians revised their understanding. Some acknowledged that the Second Coming had been delayed, but still expected it; others redefined the focus of the promise, the Gospel of John, for example, speaking of "eternal life" as something available in the present; while still others concluded that Jesus would not return at all (the Second Epistle of Peter argues against those who held this view).

Mark's despairing death of Jesus was changed to a more victorious one in subsequent gospels. Mark's Christ dies with the cry, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"; Matthew, the next gospel to be written, repeats this word for word but manages to make clear that Jesus's death is the beginning of the resurrection of Israel; Luke has a still more positive picture, replacing Mark's (and Matthew's) cry of despair with one of submission to God's will ("Father, into your hands I commend my spirit"); while John, the last gospel, has Jesus dying without apparent suffering in fulfillment of the divine plan.

Content unique to Mark

 * The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Not present in either Matthew 12:1–8 or Luke 6:1–5. This is also a so-called "Western non-interpolation". The passage is not found in the Western text of Mark.
 * People were saying, "[Jesus] has gone out of his mind", see also Rejection of Jesus.
 * Mark is the only gospel with the combination of verses in Mark 4:24–25: the other gospels split them up, Mark 4:24 being found in Luke 6:38 and Matthew 7:2, Mark 4:25 in Matthew 13:12 and Matthew 25:29, Luke 8:18 and Luke 19:26.
 * The Parable of the Growing Seed.
 * Only Mark counts the possessed swine; there are about two thousand.
 * Two consecutive healing stories of women; both make use of the number twelve.
 * Only Mark gives healing commands of Jesus in the (presumably original) Aramaic: Talitha koum, Ephphatha. See Aramaic of Jesus.
 * Only place in the New Testament where Jesus is referred to as "the son of Mary".
 * Mark is the only gospel where Jesus himself is called a carpenter; in Matthew he is called a carpenter's son.
 * Only place that both names his brothers and mentions his sisters; Matthew has a slightly different name for one brother.
 * The taking of a staff and sandals is permitted in Mark 6:8–9 but prohibited in Matthew 10:9–10 and Luke 9:3.
 * Only Mark refers to Herod Antipas as a king; Matthew and Luke refer to him (more properly) as a tetrarch.
 * The longest version of the story of Herodias' daughter's dance and the beheading of John the Baptist.
 * Mark's literary cycles:
 * 6:30–44 – Feeding of the five thousand;
 * 6:45–56 – Crossing of the lake;
 * 7:1–13 – Dispute with the Pharisees;
 * 7:14–23 – Discourse on Defilement
 * Then:
 * 8:1–9 – Feeding of the four thousand;
 * 8:10 – Crossing of the lake;
 * 8:11–13 – Dispute with the Pharisees;
 * 8:14–21 – Incident of no bread and discourse about the leaven of the Pharisees.

 * Customs that at that time were unique to Jews are explained (hand, produce, and utensil washing): Mark 7:3–4.
 * "Thus he declared all foods clean". 7:19 NRSV, not found in the Matthean parallel Matthew 15:15–20.
 * There is no mention of Samaritans.
 * Jesus heals using his fingers and spit at the same time: 7:33; cf. 8:23, Luke 11:20, John 9:6, Matthew 8:16.
 * Jesus lays his hands on a blind man twice in curing him: 8:23–25; cf. 5:23, 16:18, Acts 6:6, Acts 9:17, Acts 28:8, laying on of hands.
 * Jesus cites the Shema Yisrael: "Hear O Israel ..."; in the parallels of Matt 22:37–38 and Luke 10:27 the first part of the Shema is absent.
 * Mark points out that the Mount of Olives is across from the Temple.
 * When Jesus is arrested, a naked young man flees. A young man in a robe also appears in Mark 16:5–7.
 * Mark does not name the High Priest.
 * Witness testimony against Jesus does not agree.
 * The cock crows "twice" as predicted. See also Fayyum Fragment. The other Gospels simply record, "the cock crew". Early codices 01, W, and most Western texts have the simpler version.
 * Pilate's position (Governor) is not specified.
 * Simon of Cyrene's sons are named.
 * A summoned centurion is questioned.
 * The women ask each other who will roll away the stone
 * A young man sits on the "right side".
 * Mark is the only canonical gospel with significant various alternative endings. Most of the contents of the traditional "Longer Ending" are found in other New Testament texts and are not unique to Mark, see, the one significant exception being 16:18b ("and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them"), which is unique to Mark.

title: Gospel of Mark


text:
Gospel of Luke

The Gospel of Luke tells of the origins, birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Together with the Acts of the Apostles, it makes up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke–Acts, accounting for 27.5% of the New Testament. The combined work divides the history of first-century Christianity into three stages, with the gospel making up the first two of these – the life of Jesus the Messiah from his birth to the beginning of his mission in the meeting with John the Baptist, followed by his ministry with events such as the Sermon on the Plain and its Beatitudes, and his Passion, death, and resurrection.

Most modern scholars agree that the main sources used for Luke were a), the Gospel of Mark, b), a hypothetical sayings collection called the Q source, and c), material found in no other gospels, often referred to as the L (for Luke) source. The author is anonymous; the traditional view that Luke the Evangelist was the companion of Paul is still occasionally put forward, but the scholarly consensus emphasises the many contradictions between Acts and the authentic Pauline letters. The most probable date for its composition is around AD 80–110, and there is evidence that it was still being revised well into the 2nd century.

Textual history

Autographs (original copies) of Luke and the other Gospels have not been preserved; the texts that survive are third-generation copies, with no two completely identical. The earliest witnesses (the technical term for written manuscripts) for the Gospel of Luke fall into two "families" with considerable differences between them, the Western and the Alexandrian text-type, and the dominant view is that the Western text represents a process of deliberate revision, as the variations seem to form specific patterns.

The fragment is often cited as the oldest witness. It has been dated from the late 2nd century, although this dating is disputed. Papyrus 75 (= Papyrus Bodmer XIV–XV) is another very early manuscript (late 2nd/early 3rd century), and it includes an attribution of the Gospel to Luke.

The oldest complete texts are the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both from the Alexandrian family; Codex Bezae, a 5th- or 6th-century Western text-type manuscript that contains Luke in Greek and Latin versions on facing pages, appears to have descended from an offshoot of the main manuscript tradition, departing from more familiar readings at many points.

Codex Bezae shows comprehensively the differences between the versions which show no core theological significance.

Luke–Acts: unity, authorship and date

The gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles make up a two-volume work which scholars call Luke–Acts. Together they account for 27.5% of the New Testament, the largest contribution by a single author, providing the framework for both the Church's liturgical calendar and the historical outline into which later generations have fitted their idea of the story of Jesus.

The author is not named in either volume. According to a Church tradition, first attested by Irenaeus (c. 130 AD), he was the Luke named as a companion of Paul in three of the Pauline letters, but "a critical consensus emphasizes the countless contradictions between the account in Acts and the authentic Pauline letters." An example can be seen by comparing Acts' accounts of Paul's conversion (Acts 9:1–31, Acts 22:6–21, and Acts 26:9–23) with Paul's own statement that he remained unknown to Christians in Judea after that event (Galatians 1:17–24). The author of the Gospel of Luke clearly admired Paul, but his theology was significantly different from Paul's on key points and he does not (in Acts) represent Paul's views accurately. He was educated, a man of means, probably urban, and someone who respected manual work, although not a worker himself; this is significant, because more high-brow writers of the time looked down on the artisans and small business-people who made up the early church of Paul and were presumably Luke's audience.

The eclipse of the traditional attribution to Luke the companion of Paul has meant that an early date for the gospel is now rarely put forward. Most scholars date the composition of the combined work to around 80–90 AD, although some others suggest 90–110, and there is textual evidence (the conflicts between Western and Alexandrian manuscript families) that Luke–Acts was still being substantially revised well into the 2nd century.

Genre, models and sources

Luke–Acts is a religio-political history of the founder of the church and his successors, in both deeds and words. The author describes his book as a "narrative", rather than as a gospel, and implicitly criticises his predecessors for not giving their readers the speeches of Jesus and the Apostles, as such speeches were the mark of a "full" report, the vehicle through which ancient historians conveyed the meaning of their narratives. He seems to have taken as his model the works of two respected Classical authors, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote a history of Rome (Roman Antiquities), and the Jewish historian Josephus, author of a history of the Jews (Antiquities of the Jews). All three authors anchor the histories of their respective peoples by dating the births of the founders (Romulus, Moses, and Jesus) and narrate the stories of the founders' births from God, so that they are sons of God. Each founder taught authoritatively, appeared to witnesses after death, and ascended to heaven. Crucial aspects of the teaching of all three concerned the relationship between rich and poor and the question of whether "foreigners" were to be received into the people.

Mark, written around 70 AD, provided the narrative outline for Luke, but Mark contains comparatively little of Jesus' teachings, and for these Luke likely turned to a hypothesized collection of sayings called Q source, which would have consisted mostly, although not exclusively, of "sayings". Mark and Q account for about 64% of Luke; the remaining material, known as the L source, is of unknown origin and date. Most Q and L-source material is grouped in two clusters, Luke 6:17–8:3 and 9:51–18:14, and L-source material forms the first two sections of the gospel (the preface and infancy and childhood narratives).

Audience and authorial intent
Luke was written to be read aloud to a group of Jesus-followers gathered in a house to share the Lord's Supper. The author assumes an educated Greek-speaking audience, but directs his attention to specifically Christian concerns rather than to the Greco-Roman world at large. He begins his gospel with a preface addressed to "Theophilus": the name means "Lover of God", and could refer to any Christian, though most interpreters consider it a reference to a Christian convert and Luke's literary patron. Here he informs Theophilus of his intention, which is to lead his reader to certainty through an orderly account "of the events that have been fulfilled among us." He did not, however, intend to provide Theophilus with a historical justification of the Christian faith – "did it happen?" – but to encourage faith – "what happened, and what does it all mean?"

Structure
Following the author's preface addressed to his patron and the two birth narratives (John the Baptist and Jesus), the gospel opens in Galilee and moves gradually to its climax in Jerusalem:
 * 1) A brief preface addressed to Theophilus stating the author's aims;
 * 2) Birth and infancy narratives for both Jesus and John the Baptist, interpreted as the dawn of the promised era of Israel's salvation;
 * 3) Preparation for Jesus' messianic mission: John's prophetic mission, his baptism of Jesus, and the testing of Jesus' vocation;
 * 4) The beginning of Jesus' mission in Galilee, and the hostile reception there;
 * 5) The central section: the journey to Jerusalem, where Jesus knows he must meet his destiny as God's prophet and Messiah;
 * 6) His mission in Jerusalem, culminating in confrontation with the leaders of the Jewish Temple;
 * 7) His last supper with his most intimate followers, followed by his arrest, interrogation, and crucifixion;
 * 8) God's validation of Jesus as Christ: events from the first Easter to the Ascension, showing Jesus' death to be divinely ordained, in keeping with both scriptural promise and the nature of messiahship, and anticipating the story of Acts.

Parallel structure of Luke–Acts
The structure of Acts parallels the structure of the gospel, demonstrating the universality of the divine plan and the shift of authority from Jerusalem to Rome:

 * The gospel – the acts of Jesus:
 * The presentation of the child Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem
 * Jesus' forty days in the desert
 * Jesus in Samaria/Judea
 * Jesus in the Decapolis
 * Jesus receives the Holy Spirit
 * Jesus preaches with power (the power of the spirit)
 * Jesus heals the sick
 * Death of Jesus
 * The apostles are sent to preach to all nations
 * The acts of the apostles:
 * Jerusalem
 * Forty days before the Ascension
 * Samaria
 * Asia Minor
 * Pentecost: Christ's followers receive the spirit
 * The apostles preach with the power of the spirit
 * The apostles heal the sick
 * Death of Stephen, the first martyr for Christ
 * Paul preaches in Rome

Luke's "salvation history"
Luke's theology is expressed primarily through his overarching plot, the way scenes, themes and characters combine to construct his specific worldview. His "salvation history" stretches from the Creation to the present time of his readers, in three ages: first, the time of "the Law and the Prophets", the period beginning with Genesis and ending with the appearance of John the Baptist; second, the epoch of Jesus, in which the Kingdom of God was preached; and finally the period of the Church, which began when the risen Christ was taken into Heaven, and would end with his second coming.

Christology
Luke's understanding of Jesus – his Christology – is central to his theology. One approach to this is through the titles Luke gives to Jesus: these include, but are not limited to, Christ (Messiah), Lord, Son of God, and Son of Man. Another is by reading Luke in the context of similar Greco-Roman divine saviour figures (Roman emperors are an example), references which would have made clear to Luke's readers that Jesus was the greatest of all saviours. A third is to approach Luke through his use of the Old Testament, those passages from Jewish scripture which he cites to establish that Jesus is the promised Messiah. While much of this is familiar, much also is missing: for example, Luke makes no clear reference to Christ's pre-existence or to the Christian's union with Christ, and makes relatively little reference to the concept of atonement: perhaps he felt no need to mention these ideas, or disagreed with them, or possibly he was simply unaware of them.

Even what Luke does say about Christ is ambiguous or even contradictory. For example, according to Luke 2:11 Jesus was the Christ at his birth, but in Acts 2:36 he becomes Christ at the resurrection, while in Acts 3:20 it seems his messiahship is active only at the parousia, the "second coming"; similarly, in Luke 2:11 he is the Saviour from birth, but in Acts 5:31 he is made Saviour at the resurrection; and he is born the Son of God in Luke 1:32–35, but becomes the Son of God at the resurrection according to Acts 13:33. Many of these differences may be due to scribal error, but others are argued to be deliberate alterations to doctrinally unacceptable passages, or the introduction by scribes of "proofs" for their favourite theological tenets.

The Holy Spirit, the Christian community, and the Kingdom of God
The Holy Spirit plays a more important role in Luke–Acts than in the other gospels. Some scholars have argued that the Spirit's involvement in the career of Jesus is paradigmatic of the universal Christian experience, others that Luke's intention was to stress Jesus' uniqueness as the Prophet of the final age. It is clear, however, that Luke understands the enabling power of the Spirit, expressed through non-discriminatory fellowship ("All who believed were together and had all things in common"), to be the basis of the Christian community. This community can also be understood as the Kingdom of God, although the kingdom's final consummation will not be seen till the Son of Man comes "on a cloud" at the end-time.

Christians vs. Rome and the Jews
Luke needed to define the position of Christians in relation to two political and social entities, the Roman Empire and Judaism. Regarding the Empire, Luke makes clear that, while Christians are not a threat to the established order, the rulers of this world hold their power from Satan, and the essential loyalty of Christ's followers is to God and this world will be the kingdom of God, ruled by Christ the King. Regarding the Jews, Luke emphasises the fact that Jesus and all his earliest followers were Jews, although by his time the majority of Christ-followers were gentiles; nevertheless, the Jews had rejected and killed the Messiah, and the Christian mission now lay with the gentiles.

Synoptics
The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much in common that they are called the Synoptics, as they frequently cover the same events in similar and sometimes identical language. The majority opinion among scholars is that Mark was the earliest of the three (about 70 AD) and that Matthew and Luke both used this work and the "sayings gospel" known as Q as their basic sources. Luke has both expanded Mark and refined his grammar and syntax, as Mark's Greek writing is less elegant. Some passages from Mark he has eliminated, notably most of chapters 6 and 7, which he apparently felt reflected poorly on the disciples and painted Jesus too much like a magician. Despite this, he follows Mark's narrative more faithfully than does Matthew.

The Gospel of John
Despite being grouped with Matthew and Mark, the Gospel of Luke has a number of parallels with the Gospel of John which are not shared by the other synoptics: There are also several other parallels that scholars have identified. Recently, some scholars have proposed that the author of John's gospel may have specifically redacted and responded to the Gospel of Luke.
 * Luke uses the terms "Jews" and "Israelites" in a way unlike Mark, but like John.
 * Both gospels have characters named Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Lazarus, although John's Lazarus is portrayed as a real person, while Luke's is a figure in a parable.
 * There are several points where Luke's passion narrative resembles that of John. At Jesus' arrest, only Luke and John state that the servant's  ear was cut off.

The Gospel of Marcion
Some time in the 2nd century, the Christian thinker Marcion of Sinope began using a gospel that was very similar to, but shorter than, canonical Luke. Marcion was well known for preaching that the god who sent Jesus into the world was a different, higher deity than the creator god of Judaism.

While no manuscript copies of Marcion's gospel survive, reconstructions of his text have been published by Adolf von Harnack and Dieter T. Roth, based on quotations in the anti-Marcionite treatises of orthodox Christian apologists, such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Epiphanius. These early apologists accused Marcion of having "mutilated" canonical Luke by removing material that contradicted his unorthodox theological views. According to Tertullian, Marcion also accused his orthodox opponents of having "falsified" canonical Luke.

Like the Gospel of Mark, Marcion's gospel lacked any nativity story, and Luke's account of the baptism of Jesus was absent. The Gospel of Marcion also omitted Luke's parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Gospel of Luke


text:
Gospel of Matthew

The Gospel of Matthew is the first book of the New Testament of the Bible and one of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells how Israel's Messiah, Jesus, comes to his people (the Jews) but is rejected by them and how, after his resurrection, he sends the disciples to the gentiles instead. Matthew wishes to emphasize that the Jewish tradition should not be lost in a church that was increasingly becoming gentile. The gospel reflects the struggles and conflicts between the evangelist's community and the other Jews, particularly with its sharp criticism of the scribes and Pharisees with the position that through their rejection of Christ, the Kingdom of God has been taken away from them and given instead to the church.

The gospel is traditionally attributed to the Apostle Matthew. According to predominant scholarly views, it was written in the last quarter of the first century by an anonymous Jew familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture.

Author and date
According to early church tradition, originating with Papias of Hierapolis (c. 60–130 AD), the gospel was written by Matthew the companion of Jesus, but this presents numerous problems. Most modern scholars hold that it was written anonymously in the last quarter of the first century by a male Jew who stood on the margin between traditional and nontraditional Jewish values and who was familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time. However, scholars such as N. T. Wright and John Wenham hold there are problems with dating Matthew late in the first century, and argue that it was written in the 40s–50s AD. German scholar Adolf Jülicher argued that the gospel "cannot possibly be the translation of a Hebrew original" and that it most likely dates from "about the year 100."

The majority of scholars believe that Mark was the first gospel to be composed and that Matthew and Luke both drew upon it as a major source for their works. The author did not simply copy Mark but used it as a base, emphasizing Jesus's place in the Jewish tradition and including details not found in Mark. Writing in a polished Semitic "synagogue Greek", he drew on the Gospel of Mark as a source, plus a hypothetical collection of sayings known as the Q source (material shared with Luke but not with Mark) and hypothetical material unique to his own community, called the M source or "Special Matthew." Matthew has 600 verses in common with Mark, which is a book of only 661 verses. There is approximately an additional 220 verses shared by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark, from a second source, a hypothetical collection of sayings to which scholars give the name Quelle ('source' in the German language), or the Q source. This view, known as the two-source hypothesis (Mark and Q), allows for a further body of tradition known as "Special Matthew", or the M source, meaning material unique to Matthew. This may represent a separate source, or it may come from the author's church, or he may have composed these verses himself. The author also had the Greek scriptures at his disposal, both as book-scrolls (Greek translations of Isaiah, the Psalms etc.) and in the form of "testimony collections" (collections of excerpts), and the oral stories of his community.

Setting
Most scholars view the gospel of Matthew as a work of the second generation of Christians, for whom the defining event was the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD in the course of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 AD). From this point on, what had begun with Jesus of Nazareth as a Jewish messianic movement became an increasingly gentile phenomenon evolving in time into a separate religion. They hold that the author wrote for a community of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians located probably in Syria. Antioch, the largest city in Roman Syria and the third largest city in the empire, is often proposed. Other scholars hold that the historical Jesus had already predicted that the Jerusalem Temple would be destroyed.

The community to which Matthew belonged, like many 1st-century Christians, was still part of the larger Jewish community. The relationship of Matthew to this wider world of Judaism remains a subject of study and contention, the principal question being to what extent, if any, Matthew's community had cut itself off from its Jewish roots. It is evident from the gospel that there was conflict between Matthew's group and other Jewish groups, and it is generally agreed that the root of the conflict was the Matthew community's belief in Jesus as the Messiah and authoritative interpreter of the law, as one risen from the dead and uniquely endowed with divine authority.

The divine nature of Jesus was a major issue for the Matthaean community, the crucial element separating the early Christians from their Jewish neighbors; while Mark begins with Jesus's baptism and temptations, Matthew goes back to Jesus's origins, showing him as the Son of God from his birth, the fulfillment of messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. The title Son of David, used exclusively in relation to miracles, identifies Jesus as the healing and miracle-working Messiah of Israel sent to Israel alone. As Son of Man he will return to judge the world, an expectation which his disciples recognize but of which his enemies are unaware. As Son of God, God is revealing himself through his son, and Jesus proving his sonship through his obedience and example.

Unlike Mark, Matthew never bothers to explain Jewish customs, since his intended audience was a Jewish one; unlike Luke, who traces Jesus's ancestry back to Adam, father of the human race, he traces it only to Abraham, father of the Jews. Of his three presumed sources only "M", the material from his own community, refers to a "church" (ecclesia), an organized group with rules for keeping order; and the content of "M" suggests that this community was strict in keeping the Jewish law, holding that they must exceed the scribes and the Pharisees in "righteousness" (adherence to Jewish law). Writing from within a Jewish-Christian community growing increasingly distant from other Jews and becoming increasingly gentile in its membership and outlook, Matthew put down in his gospel his vision "of an assembly or church in which both Jew and Gentile would flourish together".

Structure: narrative and discourses
Matthew, alone among the gospels, alternates five blocks of narrative with five of discourse, marking each off with the phrase "When Jesus had finished" (see Five Discourses of Matthew). Some scholars see in this a deliberate plan to create a parallel to the first five books of the Old Testament; others see a three-part structure based around the idea of Jesus as Messiah, a set of weekly readings spread out over the year, or no plan at all. Davies and Allison, in their widely used commentary, draw attention to the use of "triads" (the gospel groups things in threes), and R. T. France, in another influential commentary, notes the geographic movement from Galilee to Jerusalem and back, with the post-resurrection appearances in Galilee as the culmination of the whole story.

Prologue: genealogy, Nativity and infancy (Matthew 1–2)
The Gospel of Matthew begins with the words "The Book of Genealogy [in Greek, 'Genesis'] of Jesus Christ", deliberately echoing the words of Genesis 2:4 in the Septuagint. The genealogy tells of Jesus's descent from Abraham and King David and the miraculous events surrounding his virgin birth, and the infancy narrative tells of the massacre of the innocents, the flight into Egypt, and eventual journey to Nazareth.

First narrative and Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 3:1–8:1)
Following the genealogy, birth and infancy of Jesus, the first narrative section begins. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, and the Holy Spirit descends upon him. Jesus prays and meditates in the wilderness for forty days, and is tempted by Satan. His early ministry by word and deed in Galilee meets with much success, and leads to the Sermon on the Mount, the first of the discourses. The sermon presents the ethics of the kingdom of God, introduced by the Beatitudes ("Blessed are..."). It concludes with a reminder that the response to the kingdom will have eternal consequences, and the crowd's amazed response leads into the next narrative block.

Second narrative and discourse (Matthew 8:2–11:1)
From the authoritative words of Jesus, the gospel turns to three sets of three miracles interwoven with two sets of two discipleship stories (the second narrative), followed by a discourse on mission and suffering. Jesus commissions the Twelve Disciples and sends them to preach to the Jews, perform miracles, and prophesy the imminent coming of the Kingdom, commanding them to travel lightly, without staff or sandals.

Third narrative and discourse (Matthew 11:2–13:53)
Opposition to Jesus comes to a head with accusations that his deeds are done through the power of Satan. Jesus in turn accuses his opponents of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. The discourse is a set of parables emphasizing the sovereignty of God, and concluding with a challenge to the disciples to understand the teachings as scribes of the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew avoids using the holy word God in the expression "Kingdom of God"; instead he prefers the term "Kingdom of Heaven", reflecting the Jewish tradition of not speaking the name of God).

Fourth narrative and discourse (Matthew 13:54–19:1)
The fourth narrative section reveals that the increasing opposition to Jesus will result in his crucifixion in Jerusalem, and that his disciples must therefore prepare for his absence. The instructions for the post-crucifixion church emphasize responsibility and humility. This section contains the two feedings of the multitude (Matthew 14:13–21 and 15:32–39) along with the narrative in which Simon, newly renamed Peter (Πέτρος), calls Jesus "the Christ, the son of the living God", and Jesus states that on this "bedrock" (πέτρα) he will build his church (Matthew 16:13–19).

Matthew 16:13–19 forms the foundation for the papacy's claim of authority.

Fifth narrative and discourse (Matthew 19:2–26:1)
Jesus travels toward Jerusalem, and the opposition intensifies: he is tested by Pharisees as soon as he begins to move toward the city, and when he arrives he is soon in conflict with the Temple's traders and religious leaders. He teaches in the Temple, debating with the chief priests and religious leaders and speaking in parables about the Kingdom of God and the failings of the chief priests and the Pharisees. The Herodian caucus also become involved in a scheme to entangle Jesus, but Jesus's careful response to their enquiry, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's", leaves them marveling at his words.

The disciples ask about the future, and in his final discourse (the Olivet Discourse) Jesus speaks of the coming end. There will be false Messiahs, earthquakes, and persecutions, the sun, moon, and stars will fail, but "this generation" will not pass away before all the prophecies are fulfilled. The disciples must steel themselves for ministry to all the nations. At the end of the discourse, Matthew notes that Jesus has finished all his words, and attention turns to the crucifixion.

Conclusion: Passion, Resurrection and Great Commission (Matthew 26:2–28:20)
The events of Jesus's last week occupy a third of the content of all four gospels. Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph and drives the money changers from the Temple, holds a Last Supper, prays to be spared the coming agony (but concludes "if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done"), and is betrayed. He is tried by the Jewish leaders (the Sanhedrin) and before Pontius Pilate, and Pilate washes his hands to indicate that he does not assume responsibility. Jesus is crucified as king of the Jews, mocked by all. On his death there is an earthquake, the veil of the Temple is rent, and saints rise from their tombs. Mary Magdalene and another Mary discover the empty tomb, guarded by an angel, and Jesus himself tells them to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.

After the resurrection the remaining disciples return to Galilee, "to the mountain that Jesus had appointed", where he comes to them and tells them that he has been given "all authority in heaven and on Earth." He gives the Great Commission: "Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you". Jesus will be with them "to the very end of the age".

Christology
Christology is the theological doctrine of Christ, "the affirmations and definitions of Christ's humanity and deity". There are a variety of Christologies in the New Testament, albeit with a single centre—Jesus is the figure in whom God has acted for mankind's salvation.

Matthew has taken key Christological texts from Mark, but has sometimes changed the stories found in Mark, giving evidence of his own concerns. The title Son of David identifies Jesus as the healing and miracle-working Messiah of Israel (it is used exclusively in relation to miracles), and the Jewish messiah is sent to Israel alone. As Son of Man he will return to judge the world, a fact his disciples recognize but of which his enemies are unaware. As Son of God he is named Immanuel ('God with us'), God revealing himself through his son, and Jesus proving his sonship through his obedience and example.

Relationship with the Jews
Matthew's prime concern was that the Jewish tradition should not be lost in a church that was increasingly becoming gentile. This concern lies behind the frequent citations of Jewish scripture, the evocation of Jesus as the new Moses along with other events from Jewish history, and the concern to present Jesus as fulfilling, not destroying, the Law. Matthew must have been aware of the tendency to distort Paul's teaching of the law no longer having power over the New Testament Christian into antinomianism, and addressed Christ's fulfilling of what the Israelites expected from the "Law and the Prophets" in an eschatological sense, in that he was all that the Old Testament had predicted in the Messiah.

The gospel has been interpreted as reflecting the struggles and conflicts between the evangelist's community and the other Jews, particularly with its sharp criticism of the scribes and Pharisees. It tells how Israel's Messiah, rejected and executed in Israel, pronounces judgment on Israel and its leaders and becomes the salvation of the gentiles. Prior to the crucifixion of Jesus, the Jews are referred to as Israelites—the honorific title of God's chosen people. After it, they are called (Jews), a sign that—due to their rejection of the Christ—the "Kingdom of Heaven" has been taken away from them and given instead to the church.

Christological development
The divine nature of Jesus was a major issue for the community of Matthew, the crucial element marking them from their Jewish neighbors. Early understandings of this nature grew as the gospels were being written. Before the gospels, that understanding was focused on the revelation of Jesus as God in his resurrection, but the gospels reflect a broadened focus extended backwards in time.

Mark
Matthew is a creative reinterpretation of Mark, stressing Jesus's teachings as much as his acts, and making subtle changes in order to stress his divine nature: for example, Mark's "young man" who appears at Jesus's tomb becomes "a radiant angel" in Matthew. The miracle stories in Mark do not demonstrate the divinity of Jesus, but rather confirm his status as an emissary of God (which was Mark's understanding of the Messiah).

Chronology
There is a broad disagreement over chronology between Matthew, Mark and Luke on one hand and John on the other: all four agree that Jesus's public ministry began with an encounter with John the Baptist, but Matthew, Mark and Luke follow this with an account of teaching and healing in Galilee, then a trip to Jerusalem where there is an incident in the Temple, climaxing with the crucifixion on the day of the Passover holiday. John, by contrast, puts the Temple incident very early in Jesus's ministry, has several trips to Jerusalem, and puts the crucifixion immediately before the Passover holiday, on the day when the lambs for the Passover meal were being sacrificed in Temple.

Canonical positioning
The early patristic scholars regarded Matthew as the earliest of the gospels and placed it first in the canon, and the early Church mostly quoted from Matthew, secondarily from John, and only distantly from Mark.

title: Gospel of Matthew


text:
Gospel of John

The Gospel of John (Εὐαγγέλιον κατὰ Ἰωάννην) is the fourth of the New Testament's four canonical gospels. It contains a highly schematic account of the ministry of Jesus, with seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus (foreshadowing the resurrection of Jesus) and seven "I am" discourses (concerned with issues of the church–synagogue debate at the time of composition) culminating in Thomas's proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God". The gospel's concluding verses set out its purpose, "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."

John reached its final form around AD 90–110, although it contains signs of origins dating back to AD 70 and possibly even earlier. Like the three other gospels, it is anonymous, although it identifies an unnamed "disciple whom Jesus loved" as the source of its traditions. It most likely arose within a "Johannine community", and – as it is closely related in style and content to the three Johannine epistles – most scholars treat the four books, along with the Book of Revelation, as a single corpus of Johannine literature, albeit not by the same author.

Composition
The Gospel of John, like all the gospels, is anonymous. John 21:22 references a disciple whom Jesus loved and John 21:24–25 says: "This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true". Early Christian tradition, first found in Irenaeus (c. 130 AD), identified this disciple with John the Apostle, but most scholars have abandoned this hypothesis or hold it only tenuously; there are multiple reasons for this conclusion, including, for example, the fact that the gospel is written in good Greek and displays sophisticated theology, and is therefore unlikely to have been the work of a simple fisherman. Rather, these verses imply that the core of the gospel relies on the testimony (perhaps written) of the "disciple who is testifying", as collected, preserved, and reshaped by a community of followers (the "we" of the passage), and that a single follower (the "I") rearranged this material and perhaps added the final chapter and other passages to produce the final gospel. Most scholars estimate the final form of the text to be around AD 90–110. Given its complex history there may have been more than one place of composition, and while the author was familiar with Jewish customs and traditions, their frequent clarification of these implies that they wrote for a mixed Jewish/Gentile or Jewish context outside Palestine.

The author may have drawn on a "signs source" (a collection of miracles) for chapters 1–12, a "passion source" for the story of Jesus's arrest and crucifixion, and a "sayings source" for the discourses, but these hypotheses are much debated. The author seems to have known some version of Mark and Luke, as John shares with them some vocabulary and clusters of incidents arranged in the same order, but key terms from those gospels are absent or nearly so, implying that if the author did know them they felt free to write independently. The Hebrew scriptures were an important source, with 14 direct quotations (versus 27 in Mark, 54 in Matthew, 24 in Luke), and their influence is vastly increased when allusions and echoes are included, but the majority of John's direct quotations do not agree exactly with any known version of the Jewish scriptures. Recent arguments by Richard Bauckham and others that John preserves eyewitness testimony have not won general acceptance.

Setting: the Johannine community debate
For much of the 20th century, scholars interpreted the Gospel of John within the paradigm of a hypothetical "Johannine community", meaning that it was held to have sprung from a late-1st-century Christian community excommunicated from the Jewish synagogue (probably meaning the Jewish community) on account of its belief in Jesus as the promised messiah. This interpretation, which saw the community as essentially sectarian and outside the mainstream of early Christianity, has been increasingly challenged in the first decades of the 21st century, and there is currently considerable debate over the gospel's social, religious and historical context. Nevertheless, the Johannine literature as a whole (made up of the gospel, the three Johannine epistles, and Revelation), points to a community holding itself distinct from the Jewish culture from which it arose while cultivating an intense devotion to Jesus as the definitive revelation of a God with whom they were in close contact through the Paraclete.

Structure and content

The majority of scholars see four sections in the Gospel of John: a prologue (1:1–18); an account of the ministry, often called the "Book of Signs" (1:19–12:50); the account of Jesus's final night with his disciples and the passion and resurrection, sometimes called the Book of Glory or Book of Exaltation (13:1–20:31); and a conclusion (20:30–31); to these is added an epilogue that most scholars believe was not part of the original text (Chapter 21). Disagreement does exist; some scholars, including Bauckham, argue that John 21 was part of the original work.

 * The prologue informs readers of the true identity of Jesus, the Word of God through whom the world was created and who took on human form; he came to the Jews and the Jews rejected him, but "to all who received him (the circle of Christian believers), who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God."
 * Book of Signs (ministry of Jesus): Jesus calls his disciples and begins his earthly ministry. He travels from place to place informing his hearers about God the Father in long discourses, offering eternal life to all who will believe, and performing miracles that prove the authenticity of his teachings, which creates tensions with the religious authorities (manifested as early as 5:17–18), who decide he must be eliminated.
 * The Book of Glory tells of Jesus's return to his heavenly father: it tells how he prepares his disciples for their lives without his physical presence and his prayer for himself and for them, followed by his betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion and post-resurrection appearances.
 * The conclusion sets out the purpose of the gospel, which is "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name."
 * Chapter 21, the addendum, tells of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances in Galilee, the miraculous catch of fish, the prophecy of the crucifixion of Peter, and the fate of the Beloved Disciple.

The structure is highly schematic: there are seven "signs" culminating in the raising of Lazarus (foreshadowing the resurrection of Jesus), and seven "I am" sayings and discourses, culminating in Thomas's proclamation of the risen Jesus as "my Lord and my God" (the same title, dominus et deus, claimed by the Emperor Domitian, an indication of the date of composition).

Christology
Scholars agree that while the Gospel of John clearly regards Jesus as divine, it just as clearly subordinates him to the one God. According to James Dunn, this Christology does not describe a subordinationist relation but rather the authority and validity of the Son's "revelation" of the Father, the continuity between the Father and the Son. Dunn sees this as intended to serve the Logos Christology, while others (e.g., Andrew Loke) see it as connected to John's incarnation theme. The idea of the Trinity developed only slowly through the merger of Hebrew monotheism and the idea of the messiah, Greek ideas of the relationship between God, the world, and the mediating Saviour, and the Egyptian concept of the three-part divinity. But while the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, the New Testament possesses a triadic understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas. John's "high Christology" depicts Jesus as divine and preexistent, defends him against Jewish claims that he was "making himself equal to God", and talks openly about his divine role and echoing Yahweh's "I Am that I Am" with seven "I Am" declarations of his own. At the same time there is a stress like that in Luke on the physical continuity of Jesus's resurrected body, as Jesus tells Thomas: "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe."

Logos
In the prologue, the gospel identifies Jesus as the Logos or Word. In Ancient Greek philosophy, the term meant the principle of cosmic reason. In this sense, it was similar to the Hebrew concept of Wisdom, God's companion and intimate helper in creation. The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo merged these two themes when he described the Logos as God's creator of and mediator with the material world. According to Stephen Harris, the gospel adapted Philo's description of the Logos, applying it to Jesus, the incarnation of the Logos.

Another possibility is that the title is based on the concept of the divine Word found in the Targums (Aramaic translation/interpretations recited in the synagogue after the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures). In the Targums (which all postdate the first century but which give evidence of preserving early material), the concept of the divine Word was used in a manner similar to Philo, namely, for God's interaction with the world (starting from creation) and especially with his people. Israel, for example, was saved from Egypt by action of "the Word of the ", and both Philo and the Targums envision the Word as manifested between the cherubim and the Holy of Holies.

Cross
The portrayal of Jesus's death in John is unique among the gospels. It does not appear to rely on the kinds of atonement theology indicative of vicarious sacrifice but rather presents Jesus's death as his glorification and return to the Father. Likewise, the Synoptic Gospels' three "passion predictions" are replaced by three instances of Jesus explaining how he will be exalted or "lifted up". The verb for "lifted up" (ὑψωθῆναι, ) reflects the double entendre at work in John's theology of the cross, for Jesus is both physically elevated from the earth at the crucifixion but also, at the same time, exalted and glorified.

Sacraments
Scholars disagree on whether and how frequently John refers to sacraments, but current scholarly opinion is that there are very few such possible references, and that if they exist they are limited to baptism and the Eucharist. In fact, there is no institution of the Eucharist in John's account of the Last Supper (it is replaced by Jesus washing the feet of his disciples), and no New Testament text that unambiguously links baptism with rebirth.

Individualism
Compared to the synoptic gospels, John is markedly individualistic, in the sense that it places emphasis more on the individual's relation to Jesus than on the corporate nature of the Church. This is largely accomplished through the consistently singular grammatical structure of various aphoristic sayings of Jesus. Emphasis on believers coming into a new group upon their conversion is conspicuously absent from John, and there is a theme of "personal coinherence", that is, the intimate personal relationship between the believer and Jesus in which the believer "abides" in Jesus and Jesus in the believer. John's individualistic tendencies could give rise to a realized eschatology achieved on the level of the individual believer, but this realized eschatology is not to replace "orthodox", futurist eschatological expectations, but to be "only [their] correlative".

John the Baptist
John's account of John the Baptist is different from that of the synoptic gospels. In this gospel, John is not called "the Baptist." John the Baptist's ministry overlaps with that of Jesus; his baptism of Jesus is not explicitly mentioned, but his witness to Jesus is unambiguous. The evangelist almost certainly knew the story of John's baptism of Jesus, and makes a vital theological use of it. He subordinates John to Jesus, perhaps in response to members of John's sect who regarded the Jesus movement as an offshoot of theirs.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus and his disciples go to Judea early in Jesus's ministry before John the Baptist was imprisoned and executed by Herod Antipas. He leads a ministry of baptism larger than John's own. The Jesus Seminar rated this account as black, containing no historically accurate information. According to the biblical historians at the Jesus Seminar, John likely had a larger presence in the public mind than Jesus.

Gnosticism
In the first half of the 20th century, many scholars, especially Rudolph Bultmann, argued that the Gospel of John has elements in common with Gnosticism. Christian Gnosticism did not fully develop until the mid-2nd century, and so 2nd-century Proto-Orthodox Christians concentrated much effort in examining and refuting it. To say the Gospel of John contained elements of Gnosticism is to assume that Gnosticism had developed to a level that required the author to respond to it. Bultmann, for example, argued that the opening theme of the Gospel of John, the preexisting Logos, along with John's duality of light versus darkness, were originally Gnostic themes that John adopted. Other scholars (e.g., Raymond E. Brown) have argued that the preexisting Logos theme arises from the more ancient Jewish writings in the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, and was fully developed as a theme in Hellenistic Judaism by Philo Judaeus. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran verified the Jewish nature of these concepts. April DeConick suggested reading John 8:56 in support of a Gnostic theology, but recent scholarship has cast doubt on her reading.

Gnostics read John but interpreted it differently from non-Gnostics. Gnosticism taught that salvation came from gnosis, secret knowledge, and Gnostics saw Jesus as not a savior but a revealer of knowledge. The gospel teaches that salvation can be achieved only through revealed wisdom, specifically belief in (literally belief ) Jesus. John's picture of a supernatural savior who promised to return to take those who believed in him to a heavenly dwelling could be fitted into Gnostic views. It has been suggested that similarities between the Gospel of John and Gnosticism may spring from common roots in Jewish Apocalyptic literature.

Synoptic gospels and Pauline literature
The Gospel of John is significantly different from the synoptic gospels in the selection of its material, its theological emphasis, its chronology, and literary style, with some of its discrepancies amounting to contradictions. The following are some examples of their differences in just one area, that of the material they include in their narratives:

In the Synoptics, the ministry of Jesus takes a single year, but in John it takes three, as evidenced by references to three Passovers. Events are not all in the same order: the date of the crucifixion is different, as is the time of Jesus' anointing in Bethany and the cleansing of the Temple, which occurs in the beginning of Jesus' ministry rather than near its end.

Many incidents from John, such as the wedding in Cana, the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, and the raising of Lazarus, are not paralleled in the synoptics, and most scholars believe the author drew these from an independent source called the "signs gospel", the speeches of Jesus from a second "discourse" source, and the prologue from an early hymn. The gospel makes extensive use of the Jewish scriptures: John quotes from them directly, references important figures from them, and uses narratives from them as the basis for several of the discourses. The author was also familiar with non-Jewish sources: the Logos of the prologue (the Word that is with God from the beginning of creation), for example, was derived from both the Jewish concept of Lady Wisdom and from the Greek philosophers, John 6 alludes not only to the exodus but also to Greco-Roman mystery cults, and John 4 alludes to Samaritan messianic beliefs.

John lacks scenes from the Synoptics such as Jesus's baptism, the calling of the Twelve, exorcisms, parables, and the Transfiguration. Conversely, it includes scenes not found in the Synoptics, including Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana, the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, and multiple visits to Jerusalem.

In the fourth gospel, Jesus's mother Mary is mentioned in three passages but not named. John does assert that Jesus was known as the "son of Joseph" in 6:42. For John, Jesus's town of origin is irrelevant, for he comes from beyond this world, from God the Father.

While John makes no direct mention of Jesus's baptism, he does quote John the Baptist's description of the descent of the Holy Spirit as a dove, as happens at Jesus's baptism in the Synoptics. Major synoptic speeches of Jesus are absent, including the Sermon on the Mount and the Olivet Discourse, and the exorcisms of demons are not mentioned. John does not list the Twelve Disciples and names at least one disciple, Nathanael, whose name is not found in the Synoptics. Thomas is given a personality beyond a mere name, described as "Doubting Thomas".

Jesus is identified with the Word ("Logos"), and the Word is identified with ("god" in Greek); the Synoptics make no such identification. In Mark, Jesus urges his disciples to keep his divinity secret, but in John he is very open in discussing it, even calling himself "I AM", the title God gives himself in Exodus at his self-revelation to Moses. In the Synoptics, the chief theme is the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven (the latter specifically in Matthew), while John's theme is Jesus as the source of eternal life, and the Kingdom is only mentioned twice. In contrast to the synoptic expectation of the Kingdom (using the term, meaning "coming"), John presents a more individualistic, realized eschatology.

In the Synoptics, quotations of Jesus are usually in the form of short, pithy sayings; in John, longer quotations are often given. The vocabulary is also different, and filled with theological import: in John, Jesus does not work "miracles", but "signs" that unveil his divine identity. Most scholars consider John not to contain any parables. Rather, it contains metaphorical stories or allegories, such as those of the Good Shepherd and the True Vine, in which each element corresponds to a specific person, group, or thing. Other scholars consider stories like the childbearing woman or the dying grain to be parables.

According to the Synoptics, Jesus's arrest was a reaction to the cleansing of the temple; according to John, it was triggered by the raising of Lazarus. The Pharisees, portrayed as more uniformly legalistic and opposed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels, are portrayed as sharply divided; they frequently debate. Some, such as Nicodemus, even go so far as to be at least partially sympathetic to Jesus. This is believed to be a more accurate historical depiction of the Pharisees, who made debate one of the tenets of their belief system.

In place of the communal emphasis of the Pauline literature, John stresses the personal relationship of the individual to God.

Johannine literature
The Gospel of John and the three Johannine epistles exhibit strong resemblances in theology and style; the Book of Revelation has also been traditionally linked with these, but differs from the gospel and letters in style and even theology. The letters were written later than the gospel, and while the gospel reflects the break between the Johannine Christians and the Jewish synagogue, in the letters the Johannine community itself is disintegrating ("They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out..." - 1 John 2:19). This secession was over Christology, the "knowledge of Christ", or more accurately the understanding of Christ's nature, for the ones who "went out" hesitated to identify Jesus with Christ, minimising the significance of the earthly ministry and denying the salvific importance of Jesus's death on the cross. The epistles argue against this view, stressing the eternal existence of the Son of God, the salvific nature of his life and death, and the other elements of the gospel's "high" Christology.

Historical reliability
Jesus's teachings in the Synoptics greatly differ from those in John. Since the 19th century, scholars have almost unanimously accepted that the Johannine discourses are less likely to be historical than the synoptic parables, and were likely written for theological purposes. Nevertheless, they generally agree that John is not without historical value. Some potential points of value include early provenance for some Johannine material, topographical references for Jerusalem and Judea, Jesus's crucifixion occurring prior to the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and his arrest in the garden occurring after the accompanying deliberation of Jewish authorities.

Recent scholarship has argued for a more favourable reappraisal of the historical value of the Gospel of John and its importance for the reconstruction of the historical Jesus, based on recent archaeological and literary studies.

Representations

The gospel has been depicted in live narrations and dramatized in productions, skits, plays, and Passion Plays, as well as in film. The most recent such portrayal is the 2014 film The Gospel of John, directed by David Batty and narrated by David Harewood and Brian Cox, with Selva Rasalingam as Jesus. The 2003 film The Gospel of John was directed by Philip Saville and narrated by Christopher Plummer, with Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus.

Parts of the gospel have been set to music. One such setting is Steve Warner's power anthem "Come and See", written for the 20th anniversary of the Alliance for Catholic Education and including lyrical fragments taken from the Book of Signs. Additionally, some composers have made settings of the Passion as portrayed in the gospel, most notably Johann Sebastian Bach's St John Passion, although some of its verses are from Matthew.

title: Gospel of John