As most of you know, I’ve been teaching scripture for a long time, nearly thirty years on the English Department faculty at UCLA and since 1995 in the community at large when I started Logos Bible Study. My goal...
Jacob Jordaens. The Four Evangelists (oil on canvas), c. 1625-1630.
Louvre Museum, Paris.
(Listen to an audio version of the blog post below!)
As most of you know, I’ve been teaching scripture for a long time, nearly thirty years on the English Department faculty at UCLA and since 1995 in the community at large when I started Logos Bible Study. My goal has always been to teach verse-by-verse through the entire Bible, Genesis through Revelation, including the Deuterocanonical books (or “Apocrypha”). I’ve done that over a one-year cycle (the “One Year Bible,” which is now a popular Podcast on Spotify); a five-year cycle (which is featured on Audible.com with thousands of 5-star reviews); and a seven-year cycle (which is featured in our “Course Catalogue” on logosbiblestudy.com, twenty-two university-level courses consisting of 450 video lessons, over 20,000 pages of written material, classic art work, satellite imagery maps and hundreds of professional photographs taken onsite in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas—the world of the Bible.
Mission accomplished . . . well, sort of!
Now, I’m going back over the seven-year cycle courses (the advanced, university level courses) revising and fine-tuning them. I would typically teach my seven-year program by moving back and forth through the Bible: Genesis/Matthew; Exodus/Mark; Leviticus/Luke, and so on, weaving the fabric of scripture as I made my way through the texts. After seven years of doing that, however, when I go back to the beginning (to year one) I find that I’ve learned a lot in the process, and the earlier courses need to be revised accordingly. Consequently, I just finished entirely re-writing the Matthew course and teaching the re-write as a “Featured Course” online, on logosbiblestudy.com. Now, I’m completely re-writing the Mark course . . . and I’m seeing things that I’ve never seen before, things that I’ve overlooked, or simply didn’t know about on the first go-around.
It’s fairly certain that Mark was the first to put the gospel story into written form, and his audience was the Christian community in Rome: Mark was a Jew writing for a predominantly Gentile audience in the capital of the Roman Empire sometime in the A.D. 60s. And Mark’s gospel is unique: it is urgent, exploding out of the starting blocks with a dramatic proclamation: “Beginning the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God, as it has been written in Isaiah the prophet . . ..” The word “beginning” in Greek [????] is the same word that begins Genesis in the LXX, “in the beginning.” In Mark no definite article precedes “beginning,” although most translators (wrongly, in my opinion) supply it. Grammatically, this lack of a definite article is called an anarthrous construction; it is relatively common in Greek, and here it serves to create an abrupt start, a sudden proclamation—a thunder clap on a sunny afternoon—rather than a measured introduction.
As a herald, Mark proclaims God’s entrance into history, and he calls it the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God. “Gospel” [??????????] is the key word in Mark’s prologue: it is his theme, the very substance and essence of his narrative. The Greek term ?????????? means far more than “good news” or “good report,” as it originally meant in classical literature and as Paul uses it in 1 Thessalonians 3: 6; in Mark it embodies the entire Christian message—the person, words and works of Jesus. So important is the “gospel” in Mark that it frames his prologue and provides the launching pad for the story proper: Verse 1 reads, “Beginning the gospel [the ??????????] of Jesus Christ, Son of God . . .,” and verse 15 closes with Jesus proclaiming the gospel of God, saying: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is fast approaching; repent and believe in the gospel [the ??????????]” (vv. 1, 15). In Mark’s prologue “gospel” forms an inclusio, bookends that both highlight and illuminate the text in between.
It is this “gospel” [this ??????????] which is rooted back in the Old Testament and that bursts forth in the New that so frightens the characters who people Mark’s story. When Jesus stills the storm, his disciples are terrified [?????], saying: “Who is this, that even the wind and the lake obey him?” (4: 41); when he drives out “Legion” from the demonized man, and the Gerasenes see the man “sitting down, clothed and in his right mind . . . they were terrified,” (5: 15) and when the women at the empty tomb are told to tell Peter and the disciples of Jesus’ resurrection, “trembling and amazement gripped them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were terrified” (16: 8). This intrusion of the gospel into daily life shocks and disorients those it touches: they draw back, frozen with fear, bewildered . . . terrified. Like a vector shot from eternity into the present, the gospel intersects reality at precisely Mark’s moment in time, accompanied by the dramatic proclamation: “Beginning the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God . . ..”
This abrupt and rather shocking message targets the Gentile believers in Rome during the 60s, and if we’re to understand Mark’s gospel and place it in its proper context, we must understand Mark’s audience, the people to whom Mark addresses his message. The believers in Rome in the 60s lived at a time of enormous upheaval, a very dangerous time for the incipient church. To capture a sense of the danger they faced, we need to place the tiny Roman church in its correct historical and cultural context, and we begin to do so by understanding the size and structure of the believing community.
It is notoriously difficult to estimate populations in the ancient world, but it is generally accepted that at the time of Constantine issuing his Edict of Milan in A.D. 312 the Roman Empire had a population of roughly 60,000,000 people, about 10% of whom were Christians, or 6,000,000. If we work backward, assuming a population growth rate of 40% per decade (which according to those who study demographics is about right), that would give us 1,867 Christians in the Roman Empire in A.D. 60. Rome was the largest city in the Empire by half, followed by Alexandria, Syrian Antioch, Carthage and Ephesus, so we might reasonably say that fewer than 1,000 Christians lived in the city of Rome at that time, less than 0.1% of the entire urban population. That’s a surprisingly small number . . . but it’s right on target. If our demographics are in the right ballpark, an overall 40% growth rate each decade would produce the agreed upon 6,000,000 Christians in the Roman Empire by A.D. 312, a fairly solid number.*
Recall as well that 1st-century Christian communities met in house-churches, small numbers of people gathering in a single room, praying together, sharing a meal and recounting stories about Jesus, about who he is and what he said and did, perhaps socializing afterward. House churches continued well into the 3rd century, small rather independent gatherings of local believers, sometimes hosting traveling preachers and teachers. It wasn’t until the early to mid-3rd century (the 200s) that the growing church built separate structures for their meetings. We have an example of this with the Dura Europos church in eastern Syria.
This is the Dura Europos church on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, a “house church” converted sometime between 233 and 256 into a building used exclusively for liturgical worship. Sadly, since this photo was taken, the structure has been looted and extensively damaged by ISIS during the 2011-2015 Syrian Civil War. Fortunately, the frescoes—which include the earliest existing images of Jesus—were removed, and they now reside in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.
So, travel back in time with me to the 2nd half of the 1st century, to the winter of A.D. 54 when St. Paul writes from Ephesus to the church in Corinth, saying in closing that “Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly, and so does the church that meets at their house” (1 Corinthians 16: 19), and when St. Paul writes to the church in Rome in A.D. 57, Aquila and Priscilla have returned to Rome and Paul urges those in Rome to “greet Priscilla and Aquila [and] the church that meets at their house” (Romans 16: 3-5). If we were believers in Rome in those days, perhaps we would join them in Priscilla and Aquila’s living room, a group of say 10-15 people sharing a meal, celebrating the Eucharist, singing hymns and talking about the events of the day.
And just what were those events?
Let’s start our investigation with Julia Agrippina (A.D. 15-59), great granddaughter of Caesar Augustus; adoptive granddaughter of the Emperor Tiberius; sister of the Emperor Caligula; wife of the Emperor Claudius; and mother of the Emperor Nero. Through incestuous marriages, imperial intrigue and duplicitous assassinations, Agrippina engineered her son’s rise to power. After poisoning Claudius (her uncle and 3rd husband), her seventeen year-old son Nero became Emperor in A.D. 54, with Agrippina controlling the reins of power. Quickly, however, Nero’s relations with his mother deteriorated, ending by Nero having her murdered in A.D. 59.
On 18 July A.D. 64 the Great Fire of Rome erupted, the conflagration destroying a large portion of the city. According to the historian Tacitus, the fire raged for five days, destroying three of fourteen districts and severely damaging seven others. Both Suetonius and Cassius Dio point to Nero as the arsonist, who wanted to clear a large part of Rome to build a new palace complex.
Hubert Robert. The Fire of Rome, 18 July 64 A.D. (oil on canvas), c. 1760.
Musée Malraux, Le Havre, France.
To deflect blame, Tacitus writes that Nero blamed the fire on Rome’s Christians:
Therefore, to put an end to the rumor Nero created a diversion and subjected to the most extraordinary tortures those called Christians, hated for their abominations by the common people. The originator of this name [was] Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. Repressed for the time being, the deadly superstition broke out again not only in Judea, the original source of the evil, but also in the city [Rome], where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and become popular. So an arrest was made of all who confessed; then on the basis of their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of arson as for hatred of the human race.
Both St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred in Rome during this time.
The persecution ended with Nero’s death. The Roman Senate had declared him a public enemy of the Roman people and announced their intention to have him executed. With that, Nero turned to suicide, but too cowardly to carry it out, he enlisted his private secretary, Epaphroditos, to do the deed. Nero died on 9 June A.D. 68, the 6th anniversary of his murdering his stepsister and first wife, Octavia.
Following Nero’s death, civil war erupted and four emperors reigned in quick succession: Galba (8 months); Otho (2 months); Vitellius (8 months); and Vespasian (10 years). The first three were dispatched through murder or suicide within a year. At this time of enormous political chaos—in A.D. 66—the great Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine. Nero chose the brilliant general (and future Emperor) Vespasian to suppress it. Fielding more than 50,000 combat troops, Vespasian began operations in Galilee; by A.D. 68 he had crushed opposition in the north, moved his headquarters to Caesarea Maritima, the deep-water port on the Mediterranean, and methodically began clearing the coast. Meanwhile, the defeated Jewish leaders in Galilee escaped to Jerusalem, where a bitter civil war among the Jews erupted, pitting the fanatical Zealots and Sicarii against the more moderate Sadducees and Pharisees. By A.D. 68 the entire Jerusalem leadership and their followers were dead, having been killed by their fellow Jews, and the Zealots held the temple complex, using it as a staging area for their war against Rome. With Nero’s death in Rome, Vespasian’s troops proclaimed him Emperor. Support spread quickly, and in A.D. 69 Vespasian left Jerusalem for Rome to claim the throne, leaving his son Titus to conclude the war in Jerusalem.
By the summer of A.D. 70, Titus had breached the city walls and captured the Temple. During the fierce fighting the temple complex caught fire, and on Tisha B’Av (29/30 July A.D. 70) the Temple fell: 1,000 years of Jewish temple worship ended in a single day. The fire spread quickly to the city itself, destroying most of it. Tacitus writes that no fewer than 600,000 Jews fought the Romans in Jerusalem; those captured were crucified, up to 500 per day; and historians estimate that 1.2 million Jews died during the span of the Jewish revolt, A.D. 66-73. It was the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history until the Nazi holocaust of 1939-1944.
Do you see where I’m headed with this? As 0.1% of the population in Rome; as the target of Roman persecution and scapegoating; and as Christians being viewed as a very minor sect of Judaism who proclaims Jesus as a king who will usher in a new kingdom, the Christians in Rome during the 60s were vulnerable and justifiably terrified.
That is the audience to whom Mark addresses his gospel, a gospel that urges—indeed, demands—that the gospel message be preached to the entire (Roman) world by the very people who are cowering in their homes, keeping a low profile. Mark must develop a narrative strategy that creates a sense of urgency, a strategy that encourages a fearful people to stand up and proclaim the gospel, even in the very face of death.
And that’s precisely what he does.
And what I must do is re-write our Mark course to reflect that reality.
* For those who would like more on the population and demographics of the Roman Empire and the Church, see: Wayne A. Meeks. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983); Ramsay MacMullen. Christianizing the Roman Empire: A.D. 100-400 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984); Howard Clark Kee. Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical Method (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983); and Rodney Stark. The Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).