Lesson 1 of a five-part reading of the Gospel of Mark, continued.

Last time: how Mark stole the word “good news” straight off Rome’s monuments. Here, the harder question — not which words he took, but when.

In my last post, I argued that gMark opens by stealing Rome’s imperial language — evangelion, “Son of God,” the whole grammar of announcing a new lord to the world — and hanging it on a crucified Galilean. That’s the what. Now the when: of all the moments in history to stand up and proclaim the good news of God’s victory and the arrival of peace on earth, gMark chooses one of the worst. The text announces God’s triumph at the precise moment that Jerusalem is burning.

To see it, you have to hold onto a year: 70 CE.

Here is how we got there. In 66 CE, about a hundred and thirty years after Pompey of Rome first took the city, Israel rose up in open revolt. It went about as well as a provincial uprising could be expected to go against the most efficient war machine the ancient world ever built. By 70 CE, the legions had retaken Jerusalem and burned the Jewish Temple to the ground. And you have to understand what the Temple was to feel the immensity of that loss. It was not merely the building that housed the Holy of Holies — it was the beating heart of a people. The one place on earth where heaven and earth were said to meet; where the pilgrim feasts gathered the tribes; where sacrifice and prayer and memory and identity all lived together in one house of stone. The House of God.

And Rome burned it down in the year 70.

The Gospel of Mark is written in the gravity well of that catastrophe. Not in a calm theological academy at a safe distance from Roman power. gMark is written in the smoke and ash of Roman violence. Once you see that, the opening line starts sounding far more dangerous.

Look at how gMark writes about the Temple’s fall in Mark 13, in the passage scholars call his “little apocalypse.” From the Mount of Olives, Jesus looks back at the great building and describes its ruin. Not one stone left upon another. A desolating sacrilege standing where it ought not. People fleeing to the hills — pregnant women, nursing mothers, caught in it — the warning not even to go back inside for a coat. This is not vague, cosmic, end-of-the-world poetry. This is reportage. It reads like someone describing a fire they can still smell.

And in the middle of it, gMark does something telling: he breaks the fourth wall. At the most charged line — that “desolating sacrilege standing where it ought not” — he cuts in with an aside. Let the reader understand. Over the heads of the characters in the scene, directly to you. That little parenthesis only makes sense if his readers are watching the very thing he’s pointing at, in real time. You don’t elbow people to “understand” a prediction about the distant future. You elbow them about a headline they are living through. Even the phrase is loaded: “desolating sacrilege” reaches back into the book of Daniel, where it once named an earlier defilement of the Temple centuries before. gMark takes the oldest word Jewish memory had for the holy place violated and reactivates it for the Roman violence happening in his own streets.

So here is where I plant my flag. The simplest and most honest explanation for why Mark 13 describes the fall of Jerusalem in such precise and terrified detail is that gMark is written inside it, or in the raw aftermath, right around 70 CE. The scholarly consensus is that this Gospel is a product of the Roman-Jewish war. gMark is not forecasting a distant future. The text dates itself, with great precision, into a present and ongoing catastrophe.

And now something easy to miss, which changes the tone of the whole chapter…

gMark is not stoking the panic. The text is managing it. Listen again to what Jesus says in the thick of the chaos: you will hear of wars and rumors of wars — but the end is not yet. Do not be alarmed. When someone runs up shouting the Messiah is here, the moment has come — do not follow them. That is a pastor talking a traumatized congregation down off a ledge. The Temple has fallen, false messiahs are multiplying, everyone is certain the world is ending — and gMark reaches for all this apocalyptic imagery for the express purpose of telling the people to keep their heads. It uses the language of the end to contain the fear of the end.

This opens the question that holds this whole Gospel together. If gMark is shaping these words inside the rubble of 70 CE, what was Jesus himself doing, forty years earlier, out in Galilee?

Here is the distinction that holds this whole lesson together: there are two levels to this Gospel, and they are not in competition. On the first level is what Jesus did — and what Jesus did, in the best historical reconstruction we have, was enact a kingdom that was already breaking forth. Present tense. Here and now. Healing bodies, dining with the wrong people, tearing down the walls between who was in and who was out. That is the ground floor. On the second level is what gMark, decades later, built — taking that present-tense proclamation and wrapping it, framing it, setting it inside the trauma of the Jewish community watching their Temple burn. The urgency, the apocalyptic pitch, the sense that the cosmos itself was cracking apart: that is the gospel writer’s editorial hand, writing for people who needed to know that God had not been defeated when Roman violence beat Judean courage.

So when I refer to this as a “Crisis Gospel,” and in the same breath tell you the kingdom Jesus announced was present and immediate — those are two floors of the same house.

If you carry a single sentence out of this lesson, carry this: Jesus enacted a kingdom that was already happening; the Gospel of Mark later wrapped that kingdom in the crisis of the Roman-Jewish war. Hold both floors at once, and this Gospel stops being a prediction and becomes something far more useful to us today — a word of hope, written in the dark, for people who were certain the monsters had won.

We have the stolen words, and now we have the terrible timing. One piece is still missing, and it’s the strangest of all. Next time, who gMark casts to speak it and I promise you’ll have underestimated him.

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The Gospel of Mark · Lesson 1: Mark & the Good News ·
Post 2 of 3. Previous: “The Stolen Word.” Next: “The Roman Witness.”

This is the beginning of the first entry in a five-Sunday reading of the Gospel of Mark (3 lessons per Sunday). I’m drawing throughout on three scholars who would happily argue with one another all afternoon: Amy-Jill Levine, the Jewish New Testament scholar who keeps me honest to a first-century Jewish point of view; John Dominic Crossan, my old undergraduate mentor, who taught me to hear the Kingdom Jesus announced as present and immediate — here, now; and the late Marcus Borg, who taught a generation to take the gospel seriously without necessarily taking it literally. A Jew, a former Dominican monk, and a Protestant theologian. Every one of them has helped me read gMark more closely.

I’m a professor, so I’m professionally obligated to open with the following observation: the Gospel of Mark begins with an act of plagiarism.

Almost every important word in Mark’s first line — “good news,” “Son of God,” even the simple impulse to announce a new ruler to the world — had been written before. Mark stole them. And I’m fairly sure he wanted you to know he stole it. Because the source he stole from was the Roman Empire itself.

That’s the puzzle I want to hand you. Why would a writer announcing what he believes is the most important news in human history reach deep into the mouth of his enemy, and lift the words from the empire to say it?

Let’s start with the world gMark is written in. First-century Israel is a Jewish state under European occupation, and had been for generations. Pompey marched into Jerusalem sixty-three years before the common era, and after him came the client kings, the Roman governors, the soldiers, etc. Occupation was not a neutral arrangement. Taxes flowed outward to Rome and to a Temple aristocracy that often managed the relationship on Rome’s behalf. It meant a governor who could nail you to a post by the roadside the moment you became politically inconvenient. And underneath all of it ran a hope: a deep and widespread Jewish conviction that God would not leave his people under the Roman boot forever. That God would act. That God would send an anointed one and set the world right.

Now the word itself. On its native soil, evangelion — the Greek that opens gMark, the word your Bible may render “good news,” or “gospel” — was not a religious word at all. It’s a battlefield word, and the Romans loved to hear themselves say it! When two armies met, and one broke the other, you sent a runner home: a herald, an evangelos. What he shouted as he came through the gate was the evangelion — the good news that the enemy was beaten, the war was won, and the victory was ours! That is the home address of the word. It announces imperial conquest as a gift to the conquered.

We’ve beaten you. You’re Roman now. You’re welcome.

There is a stone that brings this to crystal clarity. Scholars call it the Priene Calendar Inscription, after the city in present-day Türkiye where it was found, and it was carved about 9 years before Jesus was born. It records a decision by a council of Greek cities so overcome with gratitude to the Roman emperor that they reorganized their entire calendar to make the year begin on his birthday! And they explained the change in writing. The birthday of the god Augustus, the stone says, “signaled the beginning of good news for the world.” The beginning of good news. In Greek, the beginning of evangelion — the same word that opens gMark.

That announcement had teeth. “Son of God” was no metaphor in the pre-Christian Roman world; it was a royal title with a paper trail. Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar, had been formally voted a god by the Roman Senate after his death, which made Augustus, officially, divi filius, Son of the Divine. Carried east and rendered into Greek, that became Theos Huios: Son of God. Across the empire, and especially in the cities of Asia Minor, where the Priene stone was carved, there were temples to the divine Augustus. Altars, sacrifices, festivals on the imperial birthday — an entire civic religion of the emperor, stitched into the calendar and the marketplace and the public square. You did not have to privately believe Caesar was divine to be swept up in it. In the Mediterranean world, there was simply no getting out of its way.

And the claim was not empty. Augustus really had ended a century of civil war; the Pax Romana was a visible daily fact, stamped on the coin in your hand. To the unwashed millions, it was the greatest story they had ever been told: a “good news” that stretched from Persia to Spain and stood on the twin pillars of civic religion and imperial power.

That is the good news Mark sets out to contradict.

So when Mark lays those exact words — the victory word, the emperor’s title — at the feet of a crucified Jewish laborer from Galilee, the audacity is almost hard to feel from this distance. As of the opening line of this Gospel, there are now two lords. One on a throne. The other on a cross.

But watch what gMark does next. Having stolen Rome’s vocabulary, the gospel writer turns immediately to the Jewish prophet Isaiah — a voice crying in the wilderness, prepare the way. The words are lifted from Rome, but the authority is claimed from Israel’s scripture. From the very first sentence, the text is fighting the empire in the empire’s own language, but on Israel’s home ground.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way,
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight…’ ”
MARK 1:1-3

Here is what I want you to carry out of this first lesson. The author of gMark did not invent a religious word. They repurposed a deeply political one. And that single choice — made before they’ve told you one thing that Jesus said or did — is already a treasonous argument.

We have the stolen words now. Next time, the stranger question: not which words Mark took, but when he chose to walk out the door with them. Because of all the moments in history to announce the good news of God’s victory and the coming of peace on earth, Mark picks just about the worst one imaginable.

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The Gospel of Mark · Lesson 1: Mark & the Good News ·
Post 1 of 3. Next: “The Year the Temple Burned.”

In 1877, the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli looked through a telescope in Milan and drew a map of Mars laced with channels: canali. English readers mistranslated the word as “canals,” and suddenly a planet became a civilization. Engineers, theologians, and novelists spent the next half-century arguing about who built them. The canals were never there. The longing was.

That’s the kind of story I can’t leave alone.

I’m a philosopher and historian of ideas, and this website is about the unexpected kinships between them: the moments when traditions that were never introduced turn out to be family. Rumi and the Jewish mystics, whirling toward the same silence. Finding Heidegger on Mars. A Holocaust survivor’s perspective on the philosophy of time. We tend to sort these things into departments and centuries and shelve them apart. But here, on Scribespark, we will see how these things make curious and exciting connections with one another.

Scribespark is a series of introductions. Essays on faith, philosophy, and film for the curious reader. Less jargon, no gatekeeping, and no assumption that you’ve read what I’ve read. Just the conviction that ideas catch fire when traditions touch, and that watching the spark become a light is one of life’s genuine pleasures.

About Me

For the last 15 years, I have taught philosophy and religion in East Texas. I chair a Humanities department at a small liberal arts college and adjunct at the neighboring university. I give public lectures that aim to feed and grow the public sphere. The best part of my day is the moment an idea lands for someone unexpectedly. I know that moment well. I was the first in my family to finish college. I came to the life of the mind by way of military service, the long way around, and the long way has its advantages: you arrive grateful, and you never forget that someone held the door for you. So I try to hold it open, too. Great ideas are common property, and half the pleasure of this work lies in sharing them with my neighbors.

Welcome to Scribespark.