The beginning of the Gospel -2

The beginning of the Gospel

The Gospel according to St Mark can seem like something of a Cinderella among the Gospels. For many hundreds of years it was used in public worship far less than any other of the Gospels. It never attracted the great – indeed the encyclopaedic – commentaries of scholars and saints across the centuries. Unlike St John’s Gospel, where everybody who was anybody in the history of the Christian Church seemed to want to write a commentary on it, St Mark attracted relatively little attention from the great expositors of Scripture in the early and mediaeval Church. Its brevity made it seem less useful than the fuller accounts of the other Gospel writers, and its style and language are apparently very straightforward (apparently; as we shall see, there’s rather more to it than that). In the most solemn week of the Christian year, the week leading up to Easter, it was the narratives of Matthew and John that were used in public worship and that eventually attracted the great musical settings like those of Johann Sebastian Bach (he did write a setting of Mark’s Passion narrative but nothing survives, probably because it would not have had a prominent place in the regular liturgy of Holy Week like the others)…