Isn’t the Gospel of Saint Mark Wonderful?

The Good Book. Photo by Xerones.

As a fire and brimstone atheist I suppose I should berate the Gospels as pillars of an outmoded superstition. Yet while I don’t find the religious message in them compelling, there is some good writing and some good tales. I don’t see any more convincing evidence for the existence of gods in the Gospel of Saint Mark than I do in Herodotus but, like Herodotus, Mark can tell a tale well. Rather like the other books of the Bible there’s an underlying religious theme to the Gospel of Saint Mark. If you look beyond this there is an interesting story in the background. It starts towards the end of Jesus’s life, with his baptism by John. Much of the early part of the book is set on establishing Jesus as a super-human personality and is crammed with miracles. Unlike the party trick with water mentioned by Saint John, the miracles Saint Mark records are usually answers to maladies and sickness. Disease was a constant threat in the ancient world and to be associated with unnatural cures for such illnesses would have marked someone out as divine. You can argue over whether the miracles were real or not, but the ailments themselves must have been plausible to the people being preached to. They would have recognised these concerns as being common to them too.

There’s also a strong undercurrent of a clash between the established order in Judaism and an opposition that sees the rulers as corrupted. This starts in 2:16 “when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners? When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” It continues through the book and ultimately leads to his defeat. The backstory highlights this moral decay in the land. In Chapter six, John a prominent critic of the rulers is engaged in a power struggle with Herod’s wife and loses both the fight and his head. The death is portrayed as vicious and meaningless, devoid of any moral authority.

Against this Jesus starts a rebellion, but rather than conquest by swords he attempts something like a velvet revolution, winning by persuasion rather than force. He seems to acknowledge that the Romans will not be destroyed by force, but the occupation can be subverted by reforming the territory of Judea. This commitment to peace is tested and he maintains it even though it eventually leads to his death.

Mark paints a picture of a principled man, a brave man. The death scene is moving. “…at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And some of them that stood by, when they heard it, said, Behold, he calleth Elias. And one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink, saying, Let alone; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down. And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.” That, to me, seems to be the tragic call of an honest man who has done what he believes to be right who discovers in the end that the good that he had done had come from within him rather than some external force. Rather than endure the agony of crucifixion he drinks the poison offered and exits life.

If you read the Bible like any other ancient text then there’s no reason to assume the existence of Jehovah as being any more real than Zeus. But just as we can use Homer to examine the life of the archaic Greeks, so the New Testament reveals some of what life was like for the non-elite in the Roman Empire. For such people this was a desperate time.

Other books of the period show there was a craving for a Messiah, and even if you didn’t like Jesus another would be along in a few years. I don’t know if the Gospels are the story of a man who thought he was the Messiah, or a resistance leader who was posthumously deified. Either approach may seem ridiculous to modern eyes, but this is a harsh reading of the text. The only universal explanation for the cosmos was the divine. It was a time of gods, and it is no surprise that great people were seen to be touched by the divine. None of the lives in the book are diminished by seeing them as human rather than divine. Anyone can sacrifice themselves if they know they’re coming back three days later. It takes a brave person to sacrifice themselves when they’re uncertain of what will happen.

Is it a religious message? I think not, but it could be a message for the religious. A common justification for terrorism is that people are pushed into a position where there is no other option. Jesus seems to be one of the few people, like Ghandi or Martin Luther King with the vision to create another option. —–