My assumptions about you:

• You want to think about how to interact with the Gospel of Mark during this “Year of Mark”.
• You are an intelligent grown up who wants to take responsibility for your own learning.
• You want to be able to ask questions and make comments.
• You understand yourself as having some sort of relationship with the Christian tradition.
• At some point, early on, you will read the Gospel right through in one sitting. Ideally you will use the New Revised Standard Version. You will worry away at the text often after that.
• You will consult some of the resources mentioned here.

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.

What you need to know about me:

• I am an Anglican priest, currently living in Wellington New Zealand
• I am a scholar who counts John Donahue as a teacher and a friend. I treasure his classes on Mark, and on the Parables of Jesus, of which I was a part while a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University
• I am a teacher. This blog is an adjunct to weekly teaching and preaching to the congregation of St Peters on Willis in Wellington. It also makes good on a promise made to a group of priests in the Bay of Plenty last year.
• I have been “worrying away” at the New Testament for some thirty mumble mumble years. That is not going to stop; there will be other gospel blogs.