Loading...In case you haven’t heard, I will be doing a live, eight-lecture online course on the Gospel of Mark on Feb. 18-19. The course is not connected with the blog — it is part of my separate venture for a series I’m publishing called How Scholars Read the Bible. But I mention here because some of you may be interested. Even if you can’t make the live sessions and Q&A, you can purchase the course to watch at your leisure. You can learn about it here: bartehrman.com/mark
The course will consist of four lectures and Q&A each day. The lectures will be 45 minutes each, so a bit longer with more substance than the other courses I’ve done.
I’m completely pumped about this course. Mark is my favorite Gospel and, in fact, probably my favorite book of the Bible. It is a book that is widely misunderstood, in part because casual readers often think of it as a Readers Digest version of Matthew and Luke, a kind of no-frills, nuts-and-bolts account of Jesus’ life without much substance. Oh boy is THAT ever wrong. I’ll be going into depth to explain why in the course.
Here are some of the issues I’ll be dealing with:
- Why don’t most readers today recognize the highly unusual way Mark portrays Jesus and the meaning of his life?
- For Mark, how can Jesus be the expected destroyer of God’s enemies and the king of the Jewish people, if he was himself rejected by them, captured, and publicly tortured to death? Isn’t that the opposite of the “Messiah”?
- Why in Mark (unlike the other Gospels) does none of Jesus’ close relations realize who he really is? Not the Jewish leaders? Not those hearing his message? His neighbors? His companions? His closest disciples? His mother?
- Does the Gospel of Mark portray Jesus as God?
- Is Mark’s account an accurate portrayal of what the historical Jesus himself said and did? Or is it a portrayal that shapes Jesus’ life and ministry according to Mark’s own theological understanding of Jesus? Could it be both?
- Did Mark have first-hand knowledge of Jesus’ life, or is most of his information second-, third-, or fourth-hand? Is he just makin’ stuff up?
- How did later copyists of Mark’s Gospel change what he said to create a different story? Have any of these changes misled readers away from Mark’s original message?
Again, if you’re interested in learning more, go here: bartehrman.com/mark
As I indicated, you can purchase a ticket for the course and come live to hear me deliver the lectures and to participate in the Q&A. OR, if you don’t want the live version, you can simply purchase the course to watch at your convenience. If you do come to the live lectures, you will also get the video of the course, along with all the extra materials that come with it (Questions for Reflection on each lecture, suggested readings, etc.)
I hope to see some of you there!
Sounds fantastic. I’m afraid I ordered the course twice. None of my hands knows what the other one does. It’s supposed to be a good thing . A bit chaotic, though 😊
I need to be out of town in another time zone. Look forward to learn the time/s for the course to see if I can attend live.
Hi! Do you have the times set for the live recordings?
Hmm. Good question! Guess we should, huh? I need to ask. On my part, I just show up when I’m told. 🙂 I’ll have Chris send everyone the times.
This sounds so awesome.
Mark is also fascinating because of its seemingly abrupt beginning and ending (with the beginning weirdly focused on wildman John the Baptist after quoting an old scripture, and possibly the real ending, 16:8, perhaps stopped in mid-sentence, gar). In your lectures, will you delve into this from your perspective, and whether the mystery associated with the abrupt beginning/end is intentional and part of Mark’s secrecy/mystery theology, or if there was possibly a lost beginning/ending (maybe as part of a codex), such that the “longer ending” (verses 9-20 have what i understand to be different word choices and sentence structure than the rest of Mark) is perhaps an attempt to remake what was lost ? In any case, Mark 14:28 and 16:7 indicate there will be a future meeting that never occurs (not even in the longer ending really), so from that sense Mark does seem prematurely truncated.
Oh yes!! I’m devoting an entire lecture to just this issue.
Oh yes!! I’m devoting an entire lecture to just this issue.
Here’s a Mark question for you: given that in Mark the disciples just do not get who Christ is and what he’s all about, might that and the fact that Mark’s gospel ends with none of the disciples ever seeing him risen, or even hearing about it, be because none of the original disciples ever did become involved with the post-crucifiction church, that they all just went back to Galilee and lived out their lives in obscurity, leaving it to others, such as Paul, to pick up the story from there based entirely on their own mystical experiences of the risen Jesus?
I think at least it’s possible that Mark wanted his readers to think that the disciples never did get it. I’d say that, historically, they — or some of them — MUST have gotten it since Paul says that Peter and John did (he knew them both) and indicates that all the twelve did (though he never says that he knw the others)
Hey Bart, so so sorry to be off-topic but did you ever talk about the doctrine of predestination (as Calvinism thinks it)? I’m very curious about your thoughts (on a personal and biblical level) but I could not find anything related from you
I certainly thought/taught a lot about it when I was still a conservative Christian. I never talk about it these days since I don’t believe in God at all, let alone his predestining people or things; and I don’t thnk the early Christians thought about it in those Calvinist terms either.
So, if I understood correctly, you think that Paul for example did not have that concept while writing Romans… ?(chapter 9 comes to mind)
I want to understand if the doctrine of predestination has some sense to “exist” in a biblical sense, or it is just a specific, weird way of interpreting some passages and it does not have solid ground.
If that is the case, I guess all the dispute between Luther and Erasmus about free will is completely pointless and Erasmus had an easy win (?)
Passages in Paul could certainly be *used* by later theologians to argue for the predestination of individuals to heaven or hell, but in Romans Paul is talking about what God had in mind for the Jewish people/nation of Israel.
Hi Bart, I see that James Tabor is also doing a course on Mark. I suspect you both agree on most things. Have you considered doing a podcast to discuss the things you might disagree on? I think it would be a lot of fun!
That would be fun! But yes, we talked about both of us doing one at about the same time (we didn’t know about it until it was a done deal) and agreed the more the merrier. Preach the word!
I plan to purchase the course but cannot attend the live lectures. Just to clarify are you saying that the “extra materials” will not be available if we cannot attend? A Bart Ehrman bibliography for the gospel of Mark would be very valuable. Maybe you could put the stuff online (if you haven’t already) and provide links?
Thanks
Ah, the contrary! Extra materials go to everyone who purchases the course.
The interesting part is why “Mark” presented the disciples, the family confused as he does. He even tells without filter, that his supposed companion Peter (the Rock!!!) as “Satan” (whatever Satan was considered to be in a Jewish tradition where the Hebrew Bible tells little about “him”/it except in (the symbolic) book of Job as the adversory), but instead presents the Italian soldier/guard as the first to truly understand who he really was . What did this scene show,,,(of course without any witness to what is said and meant by this Italian). Why did the soldier understand in this dying scene,,,what does he wish us to understand about Christ or Messiah.
Well, the gospel questions for a non-scholar like me are more along the lines of who or what was the essence of the Messiah, or Christ. If so, who can blame them,,,,? they have been fighting over this issue for centuries after Jesus,,,and I would say until today. Many Jewish scholars (at least one (some) rabbinic school of thought) consider the Messiah or messianic world to be a new state of mind, a new consciousness, like among many other, Rabbi Simon Jacobsen who consider Christ or Messiah, or the messianic era as a process rather than an event.
Honestly,,,I’m not very convinced that we even today have really have understood Christ and perhaps we too are in the same position as how Mark present the confusion.
Hey Dr. Ehrman, I’ve always thought that the community the author of Mark’s gospel came from probably descended at some point from Paul’s missionary activities, but that these Christians need not have known Paul directly or necessarily believed in all of the same ideas he preached. Mark was written after Paul’s time and reflects the ideas of its author, not Paul.
Recently, somebody told me that my thinking is off base and that Mark is entirely Pauline talking points. My question is: am I off base or is my online acquaintance reading too much into Mark based on his own understanding of the dynamic between Paul and early Christians?
There’s no definitive answer that everyone will agree with. The problem si that Mark has a number of important similarities with Paul’s writings, but their ultimate interests and many of their other concerns are so different that any kind of direct dependence is hard to establish. My sense is that Mark accepts some of the theological views that Paul had, but it’s not clear at all to me that he knew any of the Pauline letters that we have today, or that he even knew about Paul himself. It’s possible to share views with someone you’ve never heard or known. Lots of people probably have views held by an author 40 years ago without even knowing the author held these views or that such an author exsited…
The author of Mark portrays Jesus as interacting with demons. To a modern skeptical mind, obviously no such thing could’ve happened. So where is Mark coming up with all of these demon episodes? Would these have sounded strange to 1st century Jews and non-Jews? Do we have other writings from the era where demons are conversing and interacting with people? Paul never mentions it nor is it in Q, so it doesn’t appear like casting out demons was well known thing amongst the earlier Christians. So is this something Mark might’ve just come up with? And if so, why demons?
It would have been widely assumed among many Jews that demons existed (just as among many Americans today!) They became a part of the Jewish tradition with the rise of apocalypticism and teh idea of an ongoing conflict of the forces of good and evil.
Having attended Bart’s online course about Mark’s gospel and just as it happens when I read any of his books I ended up with more doubts than before, and that’s great !!!
One of this doubts is related with the above post by JacobSapp01
I agree that “ the author of Mark’s gospel probably descended at some point from Paul’s missionary activities”, in fact I think the gospel of “Mark” is named after the same Mark mentioned in Colossians and Philemon that became an important church leader after Paul’s death , he was the one who ordered the forgery of 1 Peter when expanding the gospel to Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia and Bithynia.
On the other hand Matthew does not sound so much “pauline”…
So, my question is ,why Matthew allegedly from a non-pauline “school” uses Mark as his primary source?
Why did he try to rewrite Mark and not (as John’s author did) to write one of his own?