Mark & John

19 Pages 4799 Words

One of the last recorded actions of Jesus is the commissioning of the apostles to preach his message. His closest disciples were instructed to bring his life and teachings to “...Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”1 Indeed, the implications of this statement were great, for it did not provide the apostles with the opportunity to merely establish the new church in Jerusalem, rather they were charged also with evangelizing to all nations. However, the area in which Jesus conducted his ministry was small and the surrounding countries were cultural melting pots. This presented these new missionaries with the problem of how to effectively portray Jesus as the savior of the human race and disseminate the Good News to people who possessed widely different social, political, and religious convictions. Relating the message to these groups and capturing the whole essence of Jesus required describing him from different viewpoints. In order to maximize the success of these representations “...all that was irrelevant and failed to illustrate and exemplify its theme was excluded.”2 Thus, four gospels were written with obvious differences so as to provide four general portraits of Jesus to the different audiences to whom the evangelists wrote. The Gospel of Mark portrays Jesus as a servant for the people of God while the Gospel of John emphasizes his divinity and position as the Son of God, two opposite portraits that are influenced by the writers’ backgrounds, audiences, and historical contexts.
The identity of the author of Mark’s gospel is not clearly known, but it is a critical point for understanding the gospel’s portrait. The traditionally held view is that the writer was “...an associate and interpreter of Peter...who accompanied Paul and Barnabas on part of their first missionary journey.”3 Textual evidence for this consists primarily of a verse that explicitly states that John Mark was w...