4. The Gospel of Mark

Hello everyone. Good to see you. It’s great to be with you are studying the Gospel of Mark on this particular video. And you’ll use this video as a sort of a process.

As you read through the Gospel of Mark, your assignment will be to read Mark in advance, and then, you will have the opportunity to watch the lecture on some of what you’ve just read. Then we’ll take another section of Mark. You’ll read about it, take your notes in your student manual or on your computer. However, you’re doing that. And then we’ll talk about it again and we’ll work our way through, the gospel of Mark in that fashion. Overall, you’re going to need to pace yourself in your reading. My estimation is, should take you about an hour for every six chapters in Mark, for example.

So, if we read four chapters and then we decide to stop and do some lecture on that, you should have completed that inside an hour. And, you’ll read it. You’ll ask the Holy Spirit of course, to open your eyes to the scripture before you start, and you’ll prepare your heart.

You’ll be in a posture of…

“Oh Lord… Just release the Kingdom to me, give me a revelatory understanding of this gospel. I ask you open my eyes.”

Now let the Holy Spirit write on the words and I’ve got my Bible with me as you then read it. You’ll let the Holy Spirit highlight some words. I like to highlight directly in my Bible.

You can, of course do what some instructors tell you to do, which is download the passage to say a Word doc or note pad, and then sort that out and, you know, get that to look like, you know, draw your lines and comments on something else. You’re certainly welcome to do that.

It takes a little bit longer. My Bible, I find I can quickly highlight and quickly flip back and forth between pages and make some notes. If there’s a chiasm there, I can put ABC, or if there’s just key points, I can number them. One, two, three, four, et cetera.

We are going to do a survey of the four gospels to give you an overview of them. We stopped on the last video, not completing that. So I’m going to give you a quick high level overview of that.

And so we have four gospels. All of them are coming from a different vantage point. So Matthew Mark, Luke, those first three are what we call the synoptic gospels, meaning they share a common point of view. It means to be alongside one another. And in that context, we’re talking about that they’re seen in parallel to one another. So it’s this idea of the three gospels alongside one another. They look very similar.

John has a completely different perspective. We need to understand their collection of stories, which is highlighted there rather than, what we call a didactic or a specific form of teaching, which is, you know, to be, you know, like giving points one points, two points three, and having you see it, you’re supposed to glean it from the story itself. And that’s under what we talked about with narratives. there are four.

Why are they different? Again, we’ve talked about the different vantage points of scripture, sometimes layers of meaning. And so we’re getting four different slices. I’m going to go to the very end of the high-level overview and just kind of give you the perspective of the difference of the audiences.

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