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.”