page_title: Gospel of Mark
section_title: Setting
hierarchical_section_title: Gospel of Mark / Composition, genre, and setting / Setting
caption_attribution_description: English: List of kephalaia (chapters) to the Gospel of Mark. List is placed after kolophon of the Gospel of Matthew and before Gospel of Mark
context_page_description: The Gospel According to Mark is the second of the four canonical gospels and of the three synoptic gospels. It tells of the ministry of Jesus from his baptism by John the Baptist to his death and burial and the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb. There is no miraculous birth or doctrine of divine pre-existence, nor, in the original ending, any post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. It portrays Jesus as a heroic man of action, an exorcist, a healer, and a miracle worker. He is also the Son of God, but keeps his messianic nature secret, with even his disciples failing to understand him. All this is in keeping with prophecy, which foretold the fate of the messiah as suffering servant. The gospel ends, in its original version, with the discovery of the empty tomb, a promise to meet again in Galilee, and an unheeded instruction to spread the good news of the resurrection.
  Most scholars date Mark to closely after AD 70.
context_section_description: Christianity began within Judaism, with a Christian "church" (or ἐκκλησία, ekklesia, meaning "assembly") that arose shortly after Jesus's death, when some of his followers claimed to have witnessed him risen from the dead. From the outset, Christians depended heavily on Jewish literature, supporting their convictions through the Jewish scriptures. Those convictions involved a nucleus of key concepts: the messiah, the son of God and the son of man, the suffering servant, the Day of the Lord, and the kingdom of God. Uniting these ideas was the common thread of apocalyptic expectation: Both Jews and Christians believed that the end of history was at hand, that God would very soon come to punish their enemies and establish his own rule, and that they were at the centre of his plans. Christians read the Jewish scripture as a figure or type of Jesus Christ, so that the goal of Christian literature became an experience of the living Christ. The new movement spread around the eastern Mediterranean and to Rome and further west, and assumed a distinct identity, although the groups within it remained extremely diverse.
  The gospels were written to strengthen the faith of those who already believed, not to convert unbelievers. Christian "churches" were small communities of believers, often based on households (an autocratic patriarch plus extended family, slaves, freedmen, and other clients), and the evangelists often wrote on two levels, one the "historical" presentation of the story of Jesus, the other dealing with the concerns of the author's own day. Thus the proclamation of Jesus in Mark 1:14 and the following verses, for example, mixes the terms Jesus would have used as a 1st-century Jew ("kingdom of God") and those of the early church ("believe", "gospel"). More fundamentally, Mark's reason for writing was to counter believers who saw Jesus in a Greek way, as wonder-worker (the Greek term is "divine man"); Mark saw the suffering of the messiah as essential, so that the "Son of God" title (the Hellenistic "divine man") had to be corrected and amplified with the "Son of Man" title, which conveyed Christ's suffering. Some scholars think Mark might have been writing as a Galilean Christian against those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who saw the Jewish revolt against Rome (66–73 CE) as the beginning of the "end times": for Mark, the Second Coming would be in Galilee, not Jerusalem, and not until the generation following the revolt.
  The theological debates at the time of Mark's writing are evident in the way Mark belittles the disciples of Jesus. This derision of the disciples is in contrast to other religions where the companions of the founder are venerated.The denigration of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Jesus movement is a motif that reverberates throughout the canonical texts and throughout the tradition.
caption: List of kephalaia (chapters) to the Gospel of Mark, placed after the colophon of the Gospel of Matthew and before the Gospel of Mark, in Codex Alexandrinus (AD 400-440).
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