Customer Reviews

MARK and JOHN The First and Last Gospels

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I commenced work on these Gospels way back in the early 1960s. I abandoned the project when it became apparent that a large number of new Biblical translations would shortly be placed on the market. Certainly Bibles like The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition and The New American Bible (With the Revised Book of Psalms and the Revised New Testament) were highly admirable in almost all respects except innovation. As they were produced for church use, it was probably too much expect that these Bibles would tackle any of the many textual problems that all Biblical scholars were well aware of. Church congregations are extremely conservative and don't like to be told that John's Gospel was most definitely not written by an illiterate Galilean fisherman. Nor do they wish to be informed of the canonical status of the two appendices to Mark's Gospel. Nor have they any interest whatever as to which sections of John's Gospel were written by John, the Beloved Disciple (who is quite a different person from John Zebedee, the ex-fisherman) and which were inserted by John, the Elder, his editor. To his everlasting credit, Father Alexander Jones, who edited "The Jerusalem Bible", delves extensively into many of these problems, but his luminous (and often startling) remarks are hidden away in footnotes -- and as everyone knows, most people do not read footnotes. In fact one of my pastors actively discouraged the reading of footnotes. "God did not write the footnotes!" was his constant cry. So here, for the first time in 1,900 years, is the Gospel of Mark as it was originally set down by the evangelist in 65 A.D., and the Gospel of John as it left his editor's desk around 105 A.D.