Gospel Of Mark
Essays

The Gospel of Mark is an "anonymous" text named only "in order to distinguish it from the other gospels," ("The Gospel of Mark" n.d.). However, Mark's identity is believed to be linked to Peter.

Often regarded as the earliest of the four Gospels, the Book of Mark was written within perhaps thirty years of the time of Christ's death and alleged resurrection. Although it is an anonymous book, meaning that the…

¶ … Gospel of Mark centers on the controversies of the Little Apocalypse and the narrative of Jerusalem Barabbas. At heart, it is the soulful Christian struggle between the good symbolized at the heart of Old Testament…

Dennis McDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000) is a book that was always guaranteed to upset orthodox Christian theologians and biblical literalists and fundamentalists everywhere, since its main thesis held that the author of the first gospel used the Iliad and the Odyssey as literary models. He compares Mark to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a Gnostic book, and describes it as a "hypotext" that "relies somehow on a written antecedent" (McDonald, p. 2). Specifically, Mark used Books 22 and 24 of the Iliad as models for the death and burial of Jesus, in which Achilles brutally kills Hector and then releases the body to his father, King Priam of Troy. Hector's soul went to Hades and never returned, but of course Jesus was resurrected on the third day, even if his rather dim disciples in Mark failed to recognize him initially.