Prologue to Mark’s Gospel
The first eight verses of the Gospel of Mark act as a form of introduction, a sort of prologue. It is as if the person introducing Mark to the gathered speaks these eight verses, explaining who John the Baptist was, his relationship to Jesus, and showing us his importance by describing his relevance to the fulfilment of scripture, in directly referencing him to the writings of the Prophet Isaiah.
And then at verse nine it is as if Mark himself begins to talk, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan”.
At least sometimes I think this is the way that Mark’s Gospel begins. Other times I think the ‘introduction’ goes on to include verse 13. So then it is with verse 14 that Mark’s voice is first heard, “Now after john was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the Gospel.”” I usually prefer verse nine as Mark’s start proper because I prefer to regard verses thirteen and fourteen as a kind of link from the previous ‘John’ section to the following ‘Simon and Andrew’ section that develops and then completes the chapter.
Why do I think in this way? It is because I am very confident that Mark’s Gospel was declaimed to an audience. I say declaimed rather than ‘spoken’ quite deliberately. The long oral tradition which goes back probably into the Bronze Age at least, has at the core of the tradition the telling of stories by one to many. Story telling is not mumbled softly to one-self, nor is it told only to two or three. It is declaimed to an assembly prepared and in the mood to settle down for a long telling in which their own experiences and emotions will be brought by the teller into the very web of the story itself.
Mark’s Gospel is like this. It is patterned elaborately and consists at the lowest level of groups of four to six lines where the first line introduces to the audience a new idea, the following lines develop and expand that idea and then finally the last line provides sufficient closure so that the teller can now move on to the next set of lines to be told. He thus builds up his argument unit by unit, patiently, thoroughly, convincingly and in a deeply involved and intimate way.
An example: Chapter 1 verses (16 – 20).
[16] And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen.