The Gospels, part 2: The Gospel of Mark (1)

Setting the stage

There is a timeworn theme that has gained some traction in recent times in popular discussions about early Christianity and the New Testament. It’s the idea that Jesus and Paul (to the disadvantage of the latter) should be viewed as fundamentally at odds in their teachings. Certainly, we can make a series of conspicuous distinctions between Jesus and Paul, ignoring of course the most obvious, that of the respective status of each within the early ekklesia (there’s a vast difference, after all, between the one proclaimed as the Messiah and an apostle – or “emissary” – who once likened his apostolic status to that of “a miscarried baby”). These distinctions would include the following: Jesus had been a man of the countryside, dirt poor, a worker, a Galilean, and his first – and quite possibly, only – language had been Aramaic (a smattering of Greek can’t be entirely ruled out); Paul, on the other hand, was a man from the important, Stoicism-soaked city of Tarsus in Cilicia (in Asia Minor), highly learned, whose first language was Greek, although he also knew Hebrew, Aramaic, and possibly at least a modicum of Latin. These are all certainly important dissimilarities between the two. From the writings we have, we can likewise see that Jesus’ teachings, especially as we find them in the Synoptic Gospels, and Paul’s have strikingly different – but not clashing, it should be added – emphases and styles. In fact, the one epistle in the entire NT canon that comes closest to propounding the unadorned teachings that we find in the Synoptics, especially those found in Matthew, is the Letter of James (see my 2018 book, The Letter of James: A Pastoral Commentary). Nevertheless, there is a tendentious trend currently to jam a wedge between Jesus and Paul where, in simple historical fact, a wedge “ought not to be.”