• Mark portrays a very humble, very human Jesus, who is:
  • not sinless,
  • denies being divine, and
  • makes prophecies about the end of the world that fail to come true
• Mark has no Christmas stories:
  • begins with Jesus' baptism about the age of 30,
  • lacks the beautiful, but highly mythological, tales of:
    • angelic annunciations,
    • magi from the East, and
    • choirs of angels and shepherds singing hymns in the fields
• Mark's Easter story was so lacking in substance that
      later Christian scribes felt that they had to augment it
      with dramatic details from the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke,
      who themselves had originally copied Mark to begin with
• Mark's Jesus doesn't say much; there is nothing akin to
  • the sermon on the Mount of Matthew,
  • the philosophical discourses in Luke, or
  • the very long, self-promoting monologues in John.
  • the essence of Mark is the "Messianic Secret"
    • Jesus strives to conceal his identity, and
    • is misunderstood by almost everyone.
  • The most that Jesus says in Mark, ironically,
    is in chapter 13, the Synoptic Apocalypse,
    where Jesus erroneously predicts the end of the world
    and the coming of the Son of Man
    within one generation of Jesus' own time.

• What to Expect, p. 75

Being the first of its kind, Mark must be read as a unique document within its own historical context. In order to be truly unbiased in studying Mark, we must clear our minds of any thoughts about Jesus that originated in later writings such as Matthew, Luke, and John. That is a difficult task indeed since most of the stories with which we are most familiar about Jesus were later additions to the gospel tradition by the authors of these later Gospels. And among those later additions we must include all the Annunciation and Christmas stories, the vast majority of the Easter stories, and many of Jesus' most famous and words.

The Jewish God does NOT have real sons, period.
This is verified by the charge of blasphemy
    for which Jesus was convicted at his trial before the Sanhedrin
    with the High Priest of the Temple as his judge.
For the Son of God idea in the Hebrew world
see the article in the Jewish Encyclopedia:
    "the term by no means carries the idea of physical descent from,
    and essential unity with, God the Father."

Greco-Roman Gods, however, do have children,
often through sexual liaisons with humans (see Chapter 2).
A prime example is Hercules,
    son of the Greek Father God, Zeus by a human female.
Is this an example of a Jewish theological concept
    being misunderstood, or reinvented,
    as it passes from the Semitic environment of Judea
    into the Greco-Roman theological environment?
Did Jesus have to become a "real" Son of God
    to compete with other real sons/daughters of Gods
    in the Greco-Roman religious environment?

• Jesus the Authoritative Son of God (p. 78);

      but if he was so manifestly authoritative, why was he also:

• the Opposed Son of God (pp. 79-80, Boxes 6.2, 6.3)
• the Misunderstood Son of God (pp. 80-83);
  
  Did Jesus himself think that he was the "Son of Man"? (see Box 6.6)
  In Mark 14:53-65 Jesus is convicted of blasphemy because he refers
  to the Son of Man immediately after identifying himself as the Messiah.
  (It was not blasphemous to claim to be the Messiah, but it was blasphemous
  to claim to be the "Son of Man," a divine apocalyptic figure - Cf. 1 Enoch)

But did Jesus really identify himself as the "Son of Man"?
Note that he acknowledged himself as the Messiah only in Mark
but not in the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke (Synoptic View).
This is one rare occasion when Matthew and Luke agree with each other
against a parallel passage in Mark (called the "Minor Agreements").

Helmut Koester sees the "Minor Agreements"
as evidence that the Modern text of Mark in today's NT is NOT original,
but an edited version of an earlier Proto-Mark.
This theory is based on the discovery of Secret Mark by Morton Smith in 1958.

• Jesus the Acknowledged Son of God (p. 83, Box 6.5);

Consider Ehrman's theory of the central role in Mark 8:22-26 of the story of the healing of the blind man in two stages. Is this symbolic of the blindness of the Jews, including Jesus' own disciples, to Jesus' message, and that seeing is a gradual process? The only ones in Mark who understood who Jesus was were God at Jesus' baptism, the demons who were exorcised from a herd of pigs, and the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross when Jesus died in Mark 15:39. Or is this just another example of Mark's inferior Jesus, who is not able to heal the man in his first attempt and has to complete the process in a second stage?

One of the Old Testament prophecies that the early Christians found to justify their faith in a crucified Messiah is the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53, which in its original context referred to the Jewish people as a whole during the Babylonian Captivity 600 years earlier.

• Jesus the Crucified Son of God (pp. 86-88, Box 6.7);

Another scriptural passage that would have prevented Jews from believing in Jesus is Deuteronomy 21:22-23, according to which, criminals deserving of death who are hanged on a tree are cursed by God:

“If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God."

Compare:

• Acts 5:30 "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree."

• Acts 10:39 "And we are witnesses of all things which He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem, whom they killed by hanging on a tree."

• Acts 13:29 "Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb."

• Jesus the Vindicated Son of God (pp. 88-89);