Jesus According to Mark

Jesus According to Mark

This is part of a series of posts on the Biblical view of Jesus. Click here to see them all.

I officially started my Master’s program at Fuller Seminary this week. One of the things I’d like to do over the next few years I’m going through this is to blog some of the relevant studies from my classes. Obviously, much of what I’m doing won’t be interesting to the typical person. With that in mind, I ask for a bit of grace as I attempt to find which of my interesting insights are also interesting to my readers. My first class is a New Testament introduction and one of the assignments is to read each book of the Bible and list verses which tell us the author, audience, situation, purpose, and view of Jesus which we find in that book. The first week’s assignment was the Gospel of Mark, and a fascinating part has been going through and documenting the view of Jesus we see in Mark’s account. If lists like these are interesting to my readers I could turn these into a series of posts throughout the next ten weeks. If not, I’ll just show you how Mark talks about Jesus and we’ll pretend we never had this conversation. Below are the verses I listed and the observations about Jesus we see in them. A few caveats to consider: 1) these are all taken from the NRSV English translation and not from the original Greek, 2) this is my list after reading through it and there may be inaccuracies or other verses I missed, 3) some are actual titles while others are aspects or behaviors of Jesus. Without further ado, here is my list in order of references to each:
  • teacher (1:21-22,27; 2:13; 4:1-2,38; 6:2,6; 9:17,31,38; 10:1,17,20,51; 11:17-18; 12:14,19,32,35,38; 13:1; 14:14,49)
  • healer (1:30-31,40-42; 2:10-12; 3:5,10; 5:29,41-42; 6:56; 7:34-35; 8:22-25; 10:52)
  • Son of Man (2:28; 8:38,31; 9:9,12; 10:33,45; 13:26; 14:21,41,62)
  • exorcist (1:23-27,34,39; 3:11-12,15; 5:1-20; 7:29; 9:25-28)
  • King of the Jews (15:2,9,12,18,26,32)
  • Messiah (8:29; 12:35; 13:21-22; 14:61-62; 15:32)
  • Son of David (10:4,7-8; 11:10; 12:35-37)
  • Son of God (1:1,11; 5:7; 9:7; 15:39)
  • storyteller (4:2,11,33-34; 12:1)
  • Rabbi (9:5; 11:21; 14:45)
  • controls weather (4:39-41; 6:48-51)
  • prophet (6:4; 13:22)
  • forgives sins (2:5-10)
  • shepherd (14:27)
Seeing Jesus this way allows one to learn new insights. For example, I’ve never seen this before, but I realized that Jesus isn’t called the “King of the Jews” until chapter fifteen (when He meets Pilate), and then that title is used six different times in that chapter alone. I was also surprised by how dominant His role and title of teacher appears, especially in relationship to the others. Does any part of this list surprise you? What observations do you see in looking at this?

This is part of a series of posts on the Biblical view of Jesus. Click here to see them all.

 

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Jeremy Jernigan

Speaker | Author | Founder of Communion Wine Co. https://linktr.ee/JeremyJernigan