The gospel of Mark

Tujuan Penulisan skripsi ini ialah: Pertama, untuk mengetahui pemahaman yang benar mengenai hal yang dilakukan oleh perempuan yang sakit pendarahan tersebut sehingga bisa sembuh. Kedua, untuk menerapkan kembali akan iman yang sungguh untuk percaya kepada kuasa Tuhan. Adapun hasil penelitian adalah sebagai berikut: Pertama, Sakit penyakit yang dialami seberapa lamapun waktunya dan sekeras apapun penyakit yang dirasakan pasti ada waktu penyakit itu akan sembuh dan hilang dari tubuh manusia, sesuai dengan kehendak Tuhan. Kedua, Pengorbanan Kristus di atas kayu salib telah menebus segala dosa umat manusia. Sakit penyakit merupakan akibat dari ulah dosa manusia yang tidak menghargai akan pemberian tubuh yang sehat yang Tuhan berikan dengan cara memberikan tubuh dengan hal-hal yang tidak penting dan memakai hal-hal yang tidak berguna untuk tubuh ini. Ketiga, Kesembuhan dapat terjadi ketika seseorang mempunyai iman untuk kesembuhan tersebut, di dalamnya termasuk dengan adanya tindakan untuk meraih kesembuhan yang adanya dari Tuhan Yesus sendiri. Keempat, Mukjizat kesembuhan bisa terjadi ketika orang masih percaya bahwa mujizat kesembuhan yang dilakukan Tuhan Yesus pada masa pelayanan-Nya ketika Dia ada di dunia ini masih bisa terjadi di dalam kehidupan orang percaya masa kini. Kelima, Tuhan Yesus tidak pernah mengukur akan besar kecilnya iman seseorang ketika meminta sesuatu dari-Nya, sekecil dan sebesar apapun iman seseorang itu sudah cukup untuk menjawab setiap seruan doa yang dinaikkan kepada Tuhan. Iman yang lahir dari hati itulah iman yang sesunggunya. Keenam, Jangan pernah menyerah ketika sakit penyakit menghampiri hidup ini, tetap berserah kepada Tuhan Yesus, minta Dia turut campur tangan di setiap aspek kehidupan ini, maka Tuhan tidak sedikitpun meninggalkan orang yang sungguh berharap kepada-Nya. Ketujuh, yang terpenting ialah seorang murid Yesus dalam hal ini orang percaya yaitu mau mendengar, mau datang dan mau menerima Yesus sepenuhnya diatas segala-galanya.

Convocation Address at Bethel University, August 29, 2016 about recent troubles in Minnesota, particularly the shooting of Philando Castille, and our responsibility as followers of the Gospel. There is an audio link also available. After you click the link, it's the first one in the queue; fast-forward to 15:00:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/2016-2017-chapel-college-arts/id1148681753?mt=10

Terminology concerning family life is very thick in the Gospel of Mark. The
Gospel confronts a traditional concept of family in which honor was the pivotal value with the concept of Jesus’ spiritual family. Belonging through faith to Jesus’ family implies life according to new criteria of honorable behavior. Blood and name are not essential bonds of kinship anymore but Jesus himself who reveals the will of the Father. Being part of the spiritual family of Jesus is more important then bonds constituting natural family. Mutual relationships in the new family should be modeled on Jesus’ relation with his Father. Christian community should perceive its identity as children of God the Father. According to Jesus’ teaching the most important value in human life is not family honor and man’s own honor resulting from the honor of family but God alone.

[Man or Angel?
Identity of the Young Man in the Markan Narrative on Jesus’ Empty Tomb (16:5-7)]

The question of the identity of the νεανίσκος in Mark 16:5-7 is not so clear and straightforward as one might think at first glance. If the reader is not influenced by the other three canonical gospels, the Markan description of this figure is at least ambiguous. It might be an angel, but equally well a human being. Further, when read in the context of the larger Markan narrative, this figure should be linked with another, parallel νεανίσκος appearing in Mark 14:51-52. Both of these occurrences ought to be read not only on a realistic-historical level but in a symbolic register as well. On a historical level the young man sitting in the tomb of Jesus is an angel, even though the women visiting Jesus’ tomb regarded him purely as a human being. As a symbolic figure, however, the νεανίσκος sitting in the empty tomb of Jesus might represent, at one and the same time: Jesus, his disciple, a catechumen, a martyr, a Markan Church, or an implied reader. The two Markan νεανίσκοι, taken together, create an inclusio which brackets that Gospel’s entire passion and paschal narrative. This invites the discerning reader, Jesus’ disciple, to pose a question regarding his or her own status as a witness to Jesus’ resurrection.

The scope of the present study is the symbolic analysis of the two interwoven Markan narratives about the healing of the woman with the flow of blood (5:25-34) and the raising of Jairus' daughter (5:21-24.35-43). The principal thesis of this work consists in interpreting both women as symbols of Israel. The study begins with the presentation of the methodological premises of symbolic analysis. The main methodological premise of this work is the conviction that the literary sense of this pericope is in fact imbued with symbolism. Then there is a presentation of three criteria which help in detecting symbols in the biblical text: textual probability, conventions probability and contextual probability. Subsequently, in order to lend credence to the principal thesis of the article, seventeen literary elements found in Mark 5:21-43 are discussed; each of them meets the first two criteria and lends itself to symbolic interpretation of the two women as representations of Israel. The cumulative weight of these seventeen elements creates a rather strong cumulative argument in favor of the main thesis. Finally, the conformity between the symbolic interpretation of these women and both the immediate and global contexts of this peri-cope is discussed. The presence of this conformity meets the third criterion of contextual probability. The article thus offers a convincing case for the symbolic interpretation of the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus' daughter in Mark 5:21-43 as representations of Israel.

In this article I propose an interpretation of the Marcan fig tree episode (Mark 11:12-14.20-25) in its final form that draws on a vegetable metaphor widely known in Antiquity, and highlights the connexion between the episode and the temple scene (Mark 11:15.19) that divides it. This interpretation addresses the problem posed by the narrator’s commentary in v.13d and makes of it a key element to understand the Marcan Jesus’ attitude towards the temple. With the aid of James C. Scott’s work on resistance discourse of subordinated groups, I show that this text, together with the other Marcan references to the temple’s destruction, belong to one type of Scott’s resistance discourse, and deduce some implications for the social setting of the Gospel of Mark.

The Four Gospels present four distinct accounts of the life of Jesus based on the writer’s experience and his audience.  Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels based on their similarities though as we see their are distinctives of each book.  The Gospel of John stands alone as a unique gospel account as a later account that according to Eusebius,  “John set out to write a spiritual Gospel focusing on Jesus' transcendence as Lord and the very Word of God made manifest in the world” (Schaff & Wace (Eds.), 1890, Eusebius XIV:7).  The Four Gospels show us four distinct ways of presenting the gospel message based on different audiences with differing cultures, Biblical knowledge and relation to the Jewish People that can be instructive to us as we present the Gospel today to like the Gospel writers to present a message that is culturally relevant to our hearers.

The main proposal of this research is to perform the translation of a Greek version of the Gospel of Mark that appears in the manuscript denominated Sinaitic Codex. It was found in the nineteenth century CE, by the german linguist Constantin von Tischendorf, in the monastery of St. Catherine (Mount Sinai, Egypt) and is one of the oldest and most complete bibles handwritten in ancient Greek (4th century CE). The objective is to present a bilingual edition (Greek Koiné - Portuguese) of close connection with the Greek text, without abandoning fluency and understanding in the Portuguese language. From a comparison, there were notable divergences between the translation of the Gospel of Mark contained in the Sinaitic Codex and those contained in the Bibles called “Almeida Revista e Atualizada” and “Nova Almeida Atualizada”. The main disagreements between the translations were analyzed in the light of the bibliographical revision and evidenced the possibility of a rereading of the canonical gospel of Mark. In this rereading, Jesus of Nazareth is a construction worker who has left the profession to become a "favorite son of God" and the itinerant preacher of a "Kingdom of God" accessible without intermediaries and where there are no social categories; Jesus appears as a master who sits "in a circle" with his apprentices, that is, on the same level, without hierarchy; he uses a kind of "path pedagogy," for the learning of his followers is happening as he walks along with them through the cities; Jesus expresses impulsive feelings of anger as any human being; does not resuscitate and does not appear to his followers after his death. In this translation were put explanatory notes of philological and exegetical character, besides an introductory study in which the proposal of rereading of the canonical gospel of Mark from the Sinaitic Codex is discussed.



Key words: Translation, Gospel of Mark, Sinaitic Codex, Bible, Jesus of Nazareth.


RESUMO



A principal proposta desta pesquisa é realizar a tradução de uma versão grega do evangelho de Marcos que figura no manuscrito denominado Códice Sinaítico. Ele foi encontrado no século XIX E.C., pelo linguista alemão Constantin von Tischendorf, no mosteiro de Santa Catarina (Monte Sinai, Egito) e é uma das mais antigas e completas bíblias manuscritas em grego antigo (Século IV E.C.). O objetivo é apresentar uma edição bilíngue (Grego Coiné – Português) de estreita ligação com o texto grego, sem abandonar a fluência e a compreensão na língua portuguesa. A partir de um cotejamento, verificaram-se notáveis divergências entre a tradução do evangelho de Marcos que figura no Códice Sinaítico e aquelas que constam nas bíblias denominadas “Almeida Revista e Atualizada” e “Nova Almeida Atualizada”. As principais discordâncias entre as traduções foram analisadas à luz da revisão bibliográfica e evidenciaram a possibilidade de uma releitura do evangelho canônico de Marcos. Nessa releitura, Jesus de Nazaré é um operário da construção civil que deixou a profissão para se tornar um “filho predileto de Deus” e o pregador itinerante de um “Reino de Deus” acessível sem intermediários e onde não existem categorias sociais; Jesus aparece como um mestre que senta “em círculo” com seus aprendizes, isto é, no mesmo nível, sem hierarquia; ele utiliza uma espécie de “pedagogia do caminho”, pois a aprendizagem dos seus seguidores vai acontecendo a medida que ele vai caminhando junto com eles através das cidades; Jesus expressa sentimentos impulsivos de ira como qualquer ser humano; não ressuscita e tampouco aparece aos seus seguidores depois de morto. Nesta tradução foram apostas notas explicativas de caráter filológico e exegético, além de um estudo introdutório em que se discute a proposta de releitura do evangelho canônico de Marcos a partir do Códice Sinaítico.



Palavras-chave: Tradução, Evangelho de Marcos, Códice Sinaítico, Bíblia, Jesus de Nazaré.

For decades biblical scholarship has been convinced of the inauthenticity of the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel. Given the overwhelming consensus on the matter, it might seem like folly to even raise the issue afresh. Yet it is our contention that the foundation upon which this position has been built is somewhat faulty. One of the major reasons why interpreters have rejected the longer ending has to do with stylistic variance. But in many cases, stylistic assessments have been based on surface-level examinations of the text without any methodological constraint. The purpose of this essay is to propose a basic methodological procedure by which to evaluate the syntactical style of Mark 16:9-20 in relation to the rest of Mark’s Gospel, and then to test the longer ending on this basis.

2011年有幸在多倫多建道中心教授「釋經學應用」，我二話不說便選了〈馬可福音〉為題材。那時我加倍努力備課，以為已盡究〈馬可福音〉的義理。誰知在今年初(2013) ，於基約華人宣道會教授〈馬可福音〉時，神竟讓我看見〈馬可福音〉一幅更完美、更有意義的對稱結構。其興奮心情就如科學家發現新定理一樣。

本筆記就是按照最近一次教授〈馬可福音〉的主日學講義來編成的。我從講義裏刪去那些可從一般釋經書找到的資料，並加上個人亮光。這並非傳統釋經著作，當中也沒有仔細的章句分析，而且所用參考書不多。然而，在釋經方面，我也按照一般的經文觀察和分析方法，並參考新約希臘文聖經和不同譯本：《和合本》、《和合本修訂版》(簡稱《和修本》)、《新漢語譯本》、《聖經新譯本》、NIV和NRSV。希望這部有欠學術嚴僅之筆記本也能幫助信徒領會〈馬可福音〉的特色，並領會其中最重要的信息，就是「耶穌是誰？」

Though New Testament scholars have written extensively on the Roman Empire, the topic of the military has been conspicuously neglected, leading many academics to defer to popular wisdom. Against this trend, The Roman Army and the New Testament provides a clear discussion of issues that are often taken for granted: Who served in the military of early Roman Palestine? Why did men join the Roman army, seemingly at odds with their own interests as subject peoples? What roles did soldiers serve beyond combat? How did civilians interact with and perceive soldiers? These questions are answered through careful analysis of ancient literature, inscriptions, papyri, and archaeological findings to paint a detailed portrait of soldier-civilian interactions in early Roman Palestine. Contrary to common assumption, Judaea and Galilee were not crawling with Roman legionaries with a penchant for cruelty. Rather, a diverse mix of men from Palestine and nearby regions served as soldiers in a variety of social roles: infrastructure construction, dispute mediation, bodyguarding officials like tax-collectors, etc. Readers will discover a variety of complex attitudes civilians held toward men of Roman violence throughout the Roman East.

The importance of these historical issues for biblical scholarship is demonstrated through a verse-by-verse commentary on relevant passages that stretches across the entire New Testament, from the Slaughter of the Innocents in Matthew's nativity to the climactic battle with the Great Beast in Revelation. Biblical scholars, seminarians, and military enthusiasts will find much to learn about the Roman army in both the New Testament and early Roman Palestine.

This paper seeks to explore the historical character of the Gospel of Mark. It attempts to review and discuss such important aspects of the Gospel that fall within the framework of critical-historical study of an ancient document. Major areas explored and critiqued in the paper are, for instance, the genre, historical accuracy, mythical elements, compatibility with contemporary literary trends, possibility of concurrent sources, dominant religious discourse, and the intended primary audience

This paper is an exegetical analysis of the passage Mark 8:27-38. By using the principles of
hermeneutics and tools for exegesis, this passage has been analyzed and studied. Theological
implications and reflections are also deduced from this study. This paper is an attempt to
exegete Mark’s narration on the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah is of pivotal importance,
while it also aims to answer the reason for Jesus’s question to teach on discipleship.

Usually, the interpreters of Mark’s gospel understand the allusions and citations to psalm22 in his passion narrative as proof of prophetic fulfillment. This reveals a theo- logical conclusion rather than a literary one. Instead, this article poses, using a literary approach, that Mark uses psalm 22 for three purposes: firstly, he wants to scripturize the historical details of Jesus’ crucifixion account. Secondly, he uses psalm 22 to enhance the literary motifs of abandonment, despair, contempt, and defeat present in his narrative. He invites his readers to understand the details of Jesus crucifixion in light of the suffer- ings of the psalmist wherein the motifs aforementioned are represented vividly. Thirdly, as a completion of his picture of Jesus as divine, psalm 22 enables Mark to present Jesus as human. Jesus’ despair, divine and human abandonment, and defeat are proper of human experience. By describing Jesus this way, a divine-human Christology emerges.

The New Testament is a great treasure, it is the gospel of
life, given by God’s inspiration in the first century and ever
spreading since then. It is a joy to study and to teach it.
Jesus Christ the central hero of the New Testament is out-
standing. He is unique. According to the testimony of the prob-
ably eight apostles and prophets or chosen ones who wrote the
New Testament Jesus is the Christ, the Son of Man, the Savior
of Israel and the world, the high priest in heaven, the King of
kings, the Lord of lords, not only a prophet, but the Word of God
in person whose Spirit was in the prophets of the Old Testament,
the eternal Son of God who was the beloved of the Father even
before the foundation of the world, that is the second person of
the Holy Trinity.
The purpose of this book is to encourage people to study the books of the
New Testament, appreciate its contents and worship its hero.

CLICK AUDIO LINK BELOW (under "Files") TO HEAR THIS DISCUSSION. THERE IS NO PAPER COPY. "Christ through Four Gospel Portraits" is an exploration of the the distinct historical, literary, and theological contributions of each Evangelist to the question of the identity and mission of Jesus for its earliest Christian readership.

Did Jesus speak Greek? An affirmative answer to the question will not doubt challenge traditional presuppositions. The question relates directly to the historical preservation of Jesus' words and theology.Traditionally, the authenticity of Jesus' teaching has been linked to the recovery of the original Aramaic that presumably underlies the Gospels. The Aramaic Hypothesis infers that the Gospels represent theological expansions, religious propaganda, or blant distortions of Jesus' teachings. Consequently, uncovering the original Aramaic of Jesus teachings will separate the historical Jesus from the mythical personality. I contend that the Aramaic Hypothesis is inadequate as an exclusive criterion of historical Jesus studies and does not aptly take into consideration the multilingual culture of first-century Palestine. Evidence from archaeological, literary, and biblical data demonstrates Greek linguistic dominance in Roman Palestine during the first century CE. Such preponderance of evidence leads not only to the conclusion that Jesus and his disciples spoke Greek but also to the recognition that the Greek New Testament generally and the Gospel of Matthew in particular were original compositions and not translations of underlying Aramaic sources.

The excerpt is provided by permission of Wipf and Stock publishing.

The short story that we now know as the Gospel according to Mark was written in Greek twenty centuries ago in the context of an agrarian society that had been developing its own characteristics in the circum-Mediterranean region. Mark's account presupposes the values, institutions, and relationships of the culture in which Jesus and his first followers lived. Modern readers of the Gospels, however, especially those born and raised in the North Atlantic postindustrial societies, have other values and institutions, and relate to each other according to other cultural codes. This temporal and cultural distance between the ancient texts and their present-day readers makes necessary an exegetical effort whose purpose is to recover, as far as possible, the reading scenarios presupposed by these texts. In order to reconstruct these scenarios, exegesis has turned in recent years to the social sciences, whose models permit us to imagine and describe the situations presupposed by these ancient texts. This book aims to show how the use of these scenarios elaborated with the help of the social sciences can contribute to a more considered and respectful reading of Mark's story.

The relation between Mark and John, the Bi-Optic Gospels, is one of the most difficult and most important subjects in biblical studies. Upon correct inferences of this set of intratraditional and intertraditional relationships many other judgments falter or stand. Seeking to make an advance over monodimensional source- and redaction-critical theories, an overall theory of Markan-Johannine interfluentiality identifies at least six stages in the developments within and between these two traditions, seeking to make the best sense of their textual similarities and differences. Along the way, several advances are argued over prevalent critical approaches, leading to an assessment of John’s relation to Mark as being interfluential in the oral stages of their traditions, augmentive and corrective to Mark in John’s first edition as “the second gospel”, and harmonizing - in that the final edition of John tends to reconcile itself with the other Markan Gospels. As the final Markan interpolation includes Johannine content, interfluentiality indeed continues. In service to an overall theory of interfluentiality stands Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyvalent dialogism, applicable to historical narratives as well as fictive ones, wherein answerability within the cognitive experience of authors seeks to reconcile disparities between life and art. In that sense, an ongoing history of dialectical engagement between these bi-optic renderings of Jesus’ ministry inform also a broader understanding of John’s distinctive relations to the Lukan, Q, and Matthean traditions, and most importantly to their common subject: Jesus.

See my other papers, articles, essays and books and related material. Current book: 'Piso Christ' (available on Amazon). See the work of all other researchers & scholars who have concluded a Roman origin for the creation of Christianity.

Refer to all references given in the works of Abelard Reuchlin and myself. Also see that of Bruno Bauer, James Ballantyne Hannay, Sir Ronald Syme, Rod Blackhirst, Carrington, and Joseph Atwill. And above all, please share this with others. Thank you. -RP

Presented at the Salzburg Symposium, "For and Against the Priority of John," organized by Peter Hofrichter and published in his edited volume, Für und Wider die Priorität des Johannesevangeliums (Olms, 2002, 19-58), this essay lays out my overall theory of what I cal "A Bi-Optic Hypothesis."

The metaphor of the camel passing through the eye of the needle is found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25) and the Qur'an (7:40). The Gospels seem to suggest that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The Qur'an, on the other hand, puts the metaphor in the context of disbelievers who are arrogant (istakbarū) toward God's signs. At the outset, it would seem that the passage's contexts in the Gospels and the Qur'an are different; however, through a closer analysis of the keywords, there are textual parallels that can be extracted from both texts and go beyond simply the use of this analogy in common, as previous scholars have thought. For instance, the rich man in the Gospels is asking about inheriting eternal life, while the Qur'an also discusses eternal life and inheritance in the same context. These and several other textual parallels suggest that the Qur'an is alluding to the same context for the metaphor as the Gospels do.

The following is a pre-distributed paper discussed in the Gospel of Mark Section at the 2018 National Meeting of the SBL in Denver, CO.

The publication of Werner Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel was a watershed moment not only for media-critical approaches to Mark, but for the study of the gospel generally. Kelber’s seminal monograph, however, has often been charged with propagating the so-called Great Divide approach to orality and textuality. Recent interpreters have distanced themselves from any perspective that claims that these modalities of communication are mutually exclusive or competing. Instead, these interpreters emphasize that orality and textuality interfaced in a complex manner in both the production and reception of texts. Yet there is little clarity about how this plays out at the ground level. The question of how a text like the Gospel of Mark simultaneously exhibits evidence of both oral and textual influence often goes unanswered. This paper aims to answer that question at the levels of both production and reception. It suggests that Mark existed (and still exists) at the borderland of orality and textuality. It is a “textualized oral narrative” composed via dictation. As such, there will have been multiple receptions of it, oral, aural, and literary, in antiquity. By proposing this thesis, I attempt to move further beyond the dichotomous terms that theories about the production and reception of Mark are often constructed in. The paper suggests that Mark will have been read performatively to groups and will also have been literarily received by individuals, rather than suggesting one mode of reception over and against the other. This thesis is argued on four counts. First, the linguistic style of Mark resembles spoken narratives, and this can be substantiated by modern sociolinguistic research. Second, the opening words of Mark, and specifically the term “gospel,” indicate that it is orally proclaimed news. Only after Mark was committed to the textual medium did this term come to refer to a literary genre. Mark’s existence at the borderland between orality and textuality helps to explain this development of the word. Third, early historical testimony from the likes of Papias, Clement, and Eusebius alleges that Mark was both produced and received as a tertium quid between writing and speaking. And fourth, several Markan exegetical “problems,” such as the location of the swine miracle in Mark 5 and the mix-up of Ahimelech and Abiathar’s names in Mark 2, and the solutions provided by the later Synoptic authors are less problematic when one understands Mark as a textualized oral narrative.

In this book Steve Johnstone brings together the Reformed doctrines of Covenant Theology and the subject of evangelism. How should the covenants of Scripture, and their insights into God's single plan of redemption throughout history, inform the actual content of an evangelist's Gospel today? And how can our preaching as evangelists be enriched by the covenants of Scripture?

This short paper is simply designed to raise questions as to Markan priority in the solution of the synoptic puzzle. It gives a short and by no means comprehensive outline of the synoptic problem, and asserts that while there is no present day academic consensus regarding an alternative hypothesis to Markan priority, it does not mean Markan priority is a satisfactory theory explaining the data in the three gospels. It is not and many of its inadequacies are explained in this paper. The first half of the paper outlines some of the hypotheses put forward which attempt to explain the data, this culminates with Markan priority. The second half is a critique of the hypothesis based on the work of Farmer on the Griesbach hypothesis. The final conclusion is by no means certain.

This article contains chapter 4 of the book 'Reading Torah, The Key to the Gospels'. It's an introduction to the Jewish character of the synoptic gospels and shows what it means to read the gospels as a form of Jewish midrash literature from the first century CE. The evangelists didn't intend to write a historical report about the life and death of Jesus, but tried - each in their own way - to elaborate Jesus' Torah teachings into a messianic strategy for their own Jewish communities after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 70 CE.

An e-book and a paperback edition of 'Reading Torah, The Key to the Gospels' are for sale at Amazon.com.

“The influence of 1 Enoch on the New Testament,” writes the celebrated pseudepigrapha scholar R. H. Charles, “has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books taken together.” If the number of publications comparing Enochic and biblical literature is an adequate litmus test, then Charles’s claim has been substantiated with respect to the New Testament at large and the Synoptic Gospels in particular. The flurry of studies reading the New Testament in tandem with 1 Enoch continues unabated. As a result, more attention has recently been given to how 1 Enoch 1–36, known as the Book of the Watchers, influences readings of demonological pericopes in the Synoptic Gospels. It is becoming increasingly evident that the demonological framework presented in the Book of the Watchers influences the perspective that the synoptic authors work from. Without knowledge of the former we cannot fully comprehend the latter.

In this paper I take this claim as axiomatic for Mark 1:21–27. I argue that the tradition about the watchers and their offspring stands behind the account of the man with an unclean spirit in the Capernaum synagogue. I further contend that Mark has constructed this account as an intercalation that becomes intelligible once the framework from the watchers tradition is registered. The central portion of the “sandwich,” Mark 1:23–26, presents the content of Jesus’s teaching mentioned in the outer frames, Mark 1:21–22 and Mark 1:27. Contrary to several recent interpretations, I argue that Jesus’s teaching in the synagogue and his exorcistic activity are one and the same. Jesus’s pedagogy is “not like the scribes,” insofar as he does not act as a “text broker” in the synagogue, mediating written traditions to the illiterate masses. Nor is his authority over unclean spirits dependent on the technology of writing, as is the case with the apocalyptic intermediary Enoch, whose prestige is rooted in his scribal attainments. Rather, according to Mark 1:21–27 Jesus is qualified to teach and exorcise demons in synagogues because he mediates directly between the deity and the spirit world.