SIMON PHIPPS

The ending to Mark’s Gospel is one of the most curious parts of the New Testament.  It is like missing the last chapter of a good novel you are reading, or not being able to complete that puzzle you’ve been working on for the last month.  It leaves something to be desired. The women arrive at the tomb only to find it empty. An angel tells them Jesus has risen, and tasks them with going and telling what has happened, instead they run away and the story ends. It looks like early readers of the gospel felt the same way about it’s ending. If you look in your bibles you will see two additional endings attached after the original ending of Mark’s Gospel: the shorter ending, and the longer ending. Unhappy with the ending the early churches added in these two additional endings. The official ending of Mark’s Gospel ends on verse 8 of chapter 16 . New Testament Scholars have come up with various solutions as to why the gospel ends this way, with one o...

A little while ago I listened to a podcast about Friedrich Nietzsche’s book " The Birth of Tragedy " . The speaker was discussing Nietzsche’s love of   Greek Tragedy . A form of play from over 2000 years ago that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, pulled back the veil of reality to give the viewer a glimpse of the chaos that lay behind. Greek Tragedy revealed the ultimate reality that life is meaningless , and that we are but froth tossed about on a cosmic ocean . Nietzche argued that art (in this case in the form of a play) created a safe way for people to explore this complete lack of meaning and total chaos in reality. Nietzsche hated the movement towards Platonism that took place just over 2000 years ago that believed that some kind of order lay behind life. Often times so much of life seems like random chaos . So much of life seems meaningless, and we are left to stare into the abyss, stare into the chasm that is left by so many tragic events. We ...

Last week I published a blog post looking at MarkanSandwiches and how they have helped me to make sense of Mark’s Gospel and what Mark was trying to achieve – and by extension this helped me to deepen my faith and understand scripture better. This post I wanted to talk about another curiosity within Mark’s gospel that has had a similar effect – The Messianic Secret . The Messianic Secret was first expounded by the theologian  William Wrede . He noticed that throughout the gospel of Mark, Jesus was constantly asking people not to say anything about who he was. This generally took the form of: a)  Jesus casting demons from people and then commanding them not to say anything about who he was, and b)  Jesus healing people and then asking them not to tell anyone about what he had done. Wrede argued that Mark used this device as a cover up for the fact that Jesus never spoke enough about the fact that he was the Messiah; however I think that theolo...