My assumptions about the Gospel of Mark:

• Before it stood alongside the other gospels in the New Testament, it stood alone. It deserves to be taken seriously and on its own terms, without reference to any other gospel.
• We need to treat it critically, i.e. using all our critical faculties.
• We encounter it first and foremost as a story; stories are good.
• We may have access to layers of history behind that story, but we may not. This is not necessarily a loss.
• The Gospel of Mark is anonymous. For convenience we refer to the author as ‘Mark’.
• The stories that make up the Story of this gospel developed over several decades.
• For a long time, people heard Mark rather than read it.
• The world inhabited by Mark is quite different from the one(s) we live in: we are separated from it by 2000 years, two languages and a social world that is strange to us. All of this can be disguised when we read the Gospel as a part of a book written in 21st century English.
• The Gospel of Mark is not objective: it is unashamedly biased towards its point of view of Jesus. It is written from faith to faith; Mark works hard to persuade readers to become disciples of Jesus.