Excerpt from The Gospel According to St. Mark: The Greek d104 With Introduction Notes and Indices The earliest of extant commentators on St Mark urges as his apology for undertaking so serious a task the neglect which that Evangelist appeared to have suffered at the hands of the great teachers of the Church. While each of the other Gospels had received separate treatment, the Gospel according to St Mark, so far as he could discover, had been passed by, as if it needed no elucidation or none which could not be gathered from expositions of St Matthew and St Luke. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

St Mark's Gospel is among the earliest records about Jesus of Nazareth. This commentary focuses primarily on the problem of understanding what Mark himself intended to convey to his readers when he set out to write the good news of Jesus Christ'. There is an examination of information in the gospel about the historical Jesus, about the early Christian community and about Mark's theological concerns. There is, also, consideration of the sources for the Gospel, of the tradition behind it and of interventions by editors. Professor Hooker's new commentary takes account of the many lasted twentieth-century Markan studies and comes with her own translation of the Gospel. References to Greek sources are included but do not require a knowledge of Greek.

Saint Mark's Gospel is generally agreed to be the primary source for the life of Jesus - both Matthew and Luke drew on his account when they were writing their own. None of them, stresses the author of this book, was attempting to create a modern-style biography. But although Mark lays his own individual emphasis on the perennial struggle between the forces of good and evil, the suffering and secret Messiahship of Christ, he seems largely to be handing on, unmodified, the traditions of the early Christian Church.

The last fifty years have seen a shift of emphasis in New Testament scholarship. When the task was to establish the text and to discuss the authenticity of the documents, linguistic and historical considerations came first. Now that these things are approaching a settled state it has become possible, and necessary, to give more attention to the theological and religious content of the New Testament. Hence the New Testament is re-examined by scholars in this new series. Each volume takes a book of the New Testament and, after an introduction on general matters, goes through the text in great detail, commenting especially on theological matters, relating the contents to the life and worship of the early Christian communities. It is assumed that students have their own Greek text beside the open commentary. The text on which the commentary is based is the Kilpatrick-Nestle edition.