Matthew and Mark

Matthew is the most obviously architectural of the four. Five times, at 7:28, 11:1, 13:53, 19:1 and 26:1, the narrative pauses on a formula: when Jesus had finished saying these things (so the BSB at 7:28 and 19:1, with small variations at the other three). Each formula closes a block of teaching and hands back to narrative. The five blocks are the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 to 7, the mission discourse in 10, the parables of the kingdom in 13, the discourse on life together in 18, and the long discourse on judgement and the end in 24 and 25. Between them run five stretches of narrative, and the whole is framed by the infancy account at the front and the passion and resurrection at the back.

Benjamin Bacon proposed in 1930 that the five blocks are deliberate, a new Pentateuch, five books of the new Moses. The supporting details are suggestive. Matthew alone has an infant threatened by a king who kills the boys, a return from Egypt, and a teacher who goes up on a mountain to deliver law. Matthew alone reports Jesus saying he came not to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them, followed by six paragraphs each setting what you have heard was said against what he now says.

The proposal is not universally accepted and the objections are fair. Jack Dean Kingsbury argued that Matthew's real structural markers are the two occurrences of from that time on Jesus began, at 4:17 and 16:21, which divide the gospel into three parts about the person of Jesus, his proclamation, and his suffering. Others note that Bacon's scheme leaves the infancy and passion narratives outside the structure entirely, which is awkward for a theory about the book's design. A reasonable position, and a common one, is that the five discourses are certainly deliberate and that whether Matthew intended a Pentateuch on top of that is a further claim requiring further evidence.

What is not in doubt is the pastoral effect of the arrangement, and it explains why Matthew stood first in the canon and first in the church's teaching for most of Christian history. If you are catechising converts or training preachers, a gospel that gathers the teaching into five memorable blocks is more useful than one that scatters it. Chapter 18 is a manual for a congregation in conflict, running from how to treat a child to how to confront a member who has sinned to how many times to forgive. Matthew is the only gospel to use the word ekklesia, church, at all, at 16:18 and twice in 18:17. Whatever else it is, this is a book written for a community that has to organise itself.

Ten to fourteen times, depending on what you count, Matthew stops the narrative to say that something happened to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. These are usually called the formula quotations, and no other gospel does anything comparable at this density. The virgin conception fulfils Isaiah 7:14, the flight to Egypt fulfils Hosea 11:1, the slaughter at Bethlehem fulfils Jeremiah 31:15, the move to Capernaum fulfils Isaiah 9, the healings fulfil Isaiah 53:4, the entry into Jerusalem fulfils Zechariah 9:9.

A student should look at these closely rather than accept them as a list, because two of them are genuinely difficult and Matthew does not hide the difficulty. Hosea 11:1, out of Egypt I called my son, is in its own context plainly about Israel coming out of the exodus; it is not a prediction of anything. Matthew 2:23 says it was spoken through the prophets that He will be called a Nazarene, and there is no such text; proposals include a play on the Hebrew netzer, branch, in Isaiah 11:1, or on the Nazirite vow, or a general reference to prophecies of a despised origin, and none of them is demonstrable. Matthew 27:9 attributes to Jeremiah a quotation whose wording comes mostly from Zechariah 11:12-13, though there are Jeremiah passages about a potter and a field in the background.

The honest way to read this is to recognise that Matthew is not doing what a modern reader means by prediction and fulfilment. He is doing what Jewish interpreters of his period did, reading the scriptures typologically and by verbal association, on the conviction that the pattern of Israel's story is recapitulated in the messiah. Israel was called out of Egypt; so is he. Israel was tested in the wilderness forty years and failed; he is tested forty days and does not. Matthew's word pleroo, to fill full, is better translated as bringing to its intended fullness than as ticking off a prediction. Whether you find that persuasive is a separate question from whether you have understood it, and a teacher owes students the second before pressing the first.

All of this tells you something about the readership. Matthew does not explain Jewish custom; he assumes it. He uses the phrase kingdom of heaven around thirty-two times where the other gospels say kingdom of God, which is generally understood as the reverent Jewish avoidance of the divine name, though a few scholars argue the two phrases carry slightly different emphases. He reports Jesus restricting the mission to the lost sheep of Israel in 10:5-6 and 15:24. And he is fiercer than anyone in the New Testament about the scribes and Pharisees in chapter 23. That combination points to a largely Jewish Christian readership in a painful argument with the wider synagogue, most often located in Antioch, though the location is a guess built on inference rather than evidence.

The same gospel ends with the eleven sent to make disciples of all nations. Matthew holds a firmly Jewish framing and a universal mission together without apparently feeling the tension, and any reading that drops either half has stopped reading Matthew.

Mark is the shortest gospel and reads as though the writer is out of breath. The word euthys, immediately, appears around forty times, most of them in the first half; in chapter one it comes about ten or eleven times in forty-five verses, though the BSB, like most translations, varies the English (at once, immediately, right away, promptly) so a reader of English does not hear the drumbeat. Mark strings clauses together with and rather than subordinating them, uses the historic present constantly, so that the Greek keeps saying he says where English smooths it to he said, and piles up redundant expressions: literally, when evening came, when the sun set (1:32). Classical stylists found the Greek crude. It is better understood as the Greek of a storyteller.

The speed is not merely a style. It produces a Jesus who is under pressure from the first page. There is no infancy narrative, no genealogy, no prologue in heaven. Mark opens with a title, a quotation and a man in the desert, and by verse 13 Jesus has been baptised and driven into the wilderness, and by verse 14 John has already been arrested. The word Mark uses for the Spirit sending Jesus into the wilderness, ekballo, is the same word used for driving out demons. The gospel that gives the least background gives the most urgency.

The audience markers point away from Jerusalem. Mark translates the Aramaic phrases he quotes in his main scenes: talitha koum, ephphatha, abba, eloi eloi lema sabachthani. He stops to explain Jewish handwashing customs in 7:3-4 in terms that only make sense to someone outside them. He uses Latin loanwords in Greek dress, including words for the executioner, the legion, the denarius and the praetorium, and in 12:42 he explains the value of two small Greek coins by giving the Roman one, the kodrantes. In 15:21 he identifies Simon of Cyrene as the father of Alexander and Rufus, naming two men his readers apparently knew. Together these have long been taken to indicate a Gentile readership, traditionally at Rome, and the traditional location is plausible without being proved.

Papias, writing in the first half of the second century and quoted by Eusebius, says that Mark became Peter's interpreter and wrote down accurately, though not in order, what he remembered of what Peter had said. Papias adds that Mark made no mistake in writing down single points as he remembered them, and that his one aim was to omit nothing and state nothing falsely. This is the earliest statement about the origin of any gospel and it deserves weight. It also deserves caution: Eusebius himself thought Papias a man of very small intelligence, we have the words only at second hand, and scholars differ over what not in order was meant to concede. Some read Papias as defending Mark against a charge that his sequence was wrong.

One more feature of Mark belongs here because everything else about the gospel prepares for it. The oldest manuscripts, including Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, end the gospel at 16:8, with the women running from the tomb and saying nothing to anyone because they were afraid. The last word in the Greek is gar, for (literally, they were afraid for), which is an extraordinary way to end a book; the BSB's in their fear they did not say a word to anyone smooths it out of sight. Whether Mark intended to stop there, whether the original ending was lost, and what to make of the longer ending in 16:9-20, are all disputed. Most modern scholars take 16:8 as the intended ending, but the question is genuinely open, and your Bible almost certainly carries a note about it.

Here is the problem, stated as data before anyone explains it. Mark's Jesus repeatedly forbids people to say who he is. He silences demons in 1:25, 1:34 and 3:11-12, specifically because they know him. He tells a cleansed leper not to tell anyone in 1:44, tells the family of Jairus' daughter in 5:43 that no one should know, tells the deaf man's friends in 7:36 to tell no one, tells the blind man of Bethsaida in 8:26 not to go into the village. He warns the disciples to tell no one after Peter's confession in 8:30 and again after the transfiguration in 9:9. Alongside this, Mark's disciples are dense, his parables are said in 4:11-12 to be given so that outsiders do not understand, and his Jesus withdraws from crowds.

William Wrede named the phenomenon in 1901 and gave the explanation that has been argued about ever since. In Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien he proposed that the historical Jesus made no messianic claim at all, and that the early church, which came to confess him as messiah after Easter, faced the awkward fact that the tradition contained no such claim during the ministry. The secrecy motif was the solution: he was the messiah all along, and the reason nobody said so is that he forbade it. On this reading the secret is a theological construction, whether by Mark or by the tradition he inherited, and its value for a historian is as evidence about the early church rather than about Jesus.

The second explanation accepts that the commands are historical and locates the reason in first-century politics. Messiah was a loaded word in occupied Judaea. Popular expectation attached it to a Davidic figure who would break Roman power, and men who accepted the role tended to die with their followers. On this reading Jesus avoided the title because he was going to redefine it, and could only do so at the point where the redefinition was visible, which is the cross. Supporters point out that the pattern fits Mark's structure exactly: the commands to silence dominate the first eight chapters, and after Peter's confession the secrecy is replaced by three passion predictions in which Jesus explains what kind of messiah he is, and the disciples cannot take it in. Variants of this reading are held by scholars as different from one another as Oscar Cullmann, James Dunn and N. T. Wright.

The third explanation is literary rather than historical. On this reading the secret is a narrative device that positions the reader. From 1:1 the reader knows the answer, and then watches character after character fail to reach it: the crowds think prophet, the family thinks madness, the authorities think blasphemy, the disciples get the title right in 8:29 and the meaning wrong in the next breath. Only the demons know, and they are silenced. The secret finally breaks in 15:39, when a Roman soldier at the foot of a cross says truly this man was the Son of God, and it is not an accident that the confession comes from an outsider at the moment of death. On this reading Mark is teaching the reader that the identity of Jesus cannot be understood apart from the crucifixion, and the secrecy is how he teaches it.

Weigh them by the strongest objection to each. Against Wrede: Mark's supposed cover-up is spectacularly ineffective, since the gospel announces the messiahship in its first line, and the theory requires a tradition about a non-messianic Jesus that nobody preserved and which is itself a reconstruction. Against the historical reading: the commands are not consistent, and the inconsistency is the hardest datum in the discussion. In 5:19 the Gerasene man, in Gentile territory, is told to go and tell, and does. In 1:45 and 7:36 the command is broken and Mark reports the disobedience without any sign of disapproval; in 7:36 he says the more He ordered them, the more widely they proclaimed it. A historical policy of concealment that is sometimes reversed and regularly ignored is a strange policy. Against the literary reading: it explains Mark's artistry without settling whether any of it goes back to Jesus, which is what a historian wants to know. So what is settled is modest: the commands are in the text, they cluster in the first half, and they contribute to a gospel that withholds recognition until the cross. What is not settled is whether they originate with Jesus, with pre-Marcan tradition, or with Mark, and whether the phenomenon is one thing at all or several unrelated habits that Wrede's label has bundled together. That last possibility is worth taking seriously: the silencing of demons, the commands to healed individuals, and the charge to the disciples after Peter's confession may have three different explanations, and the tidy phrase messianic secret may be doing more harm than good by making them look like one problem.