The Gospel of Mark: A Beginner’s Guide  to the Good News is an informal introduction to the first of the synoptic Gospels.   It’s markedly different from the other Gospels in its spareness and pace. Mark moves,  and everything is done ‘immediately’, from the disciples going out on missions to Herod Antipas having John the Baptist beheaded, chop-chop.  I checked this out to support my mission in January of reading books about the Bible in tandem with reading the Bible in a year, and was eager to get into it because I’ve read several books by Amy-Jill Levine over the years and enjoy her style. She’s more informal in this than in her commentaries in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, but that’s to be expected.  Although the book has serious scholarly content, Levine is also appreciating it on a spiritual level –  looking at the parables, for instance, and asking the reader provocative questions that rise from them.  She settles into etymology when appropriate, pointing out that Mark often uses ‘kairos’ rather than ‘chronos’. The distinction is important, because whereas chronos simply refers to time as we experience – second by second, day by day – kairos is sometimes called “God’s time”.   Mark’s very language conveys that now the hour is at hand, now is the hour of salvation. 

While I found the book very interesting at times, I soured on it the more I read it. Levine’s joking asides are fun at first, but quickly wear off their welcome, and her personal views are sometimes in the driver’s seat, leading to nonsensical takes. She does not like the Parables which attack the Temple and its leadership, for instance, and this results in her somehow skewing the parable of the murderous tenants as a labor dispute against a corrupt landlord. Said tenants literally murder anyone the landlord sends to pick up his portion of the revenue — revenue that owes to him buying the land, establishing the fields, fences, and presses — and nothing in the text supports him being corrupt. The worst one can say is that he’s absent. That was the point (60% through the book or so) when I lost trust in the author. She also completely dismisses the idea that Peter wanting to create tents during the Transfiguration has anything to do with the Feast of Booths, saying it “does nothing for me”. Considering that the Feast of Booths is sometimes associated with the coming of the Messiah (all nations celebrating it once the Messiah comes), Elijah heralds the Messiah’s arrival, and Elijah is present at the Transfiguration, it’s a vein rich enough to demand addressing. Her outright dismissal of it is far too cavalier.

This was a mixed bag on the whole; I enjoyed some of the deep dives and side-trails (like her fascination with the ‘naked man’ in the arrest of Jesus), but it felt too chatty for me and some commentary was entirely off the rails. If this had been my first Levine, I doubt I’d read her again: as it is, I still enjoy her work — just not this one.

Quotations

The mountain, and the prayer, lead to an eruption of the uncanny, or the
miraculous. Go up the mountain, and you may be a different person when you return. While the bear who went over the mountain only saw the other side of the mountain (does anyone remember this song?), we are not bears and we should be awake rather than hibernating. We can understand a change in perspective.