Word: marked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Editor's note: In a riveting exercise in biblical scholarship and storytelling, Reynolds Price translated the Greek texts of Mark and John, then wrote his own narrative in Three Gospels (1996). We asked Price, a prolific novelist (Kate Vaiden, the trilogy A Great Circle, Roxanna Slade and the forthcoming children's novel A Perfect Friend), to take another look at episodes in Jesus' life and craft a new Gospel based on the historical evidence and his reading of the Bible. He adds a chapter in which his erudition and imagination take a leap into an unexplored moment after Christ...
...only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East...
Other Apocryphal fragments like the Gospel of Peter, and even the widely publicized and still suspect fragment from the Secret Gospel of Mark, may also contain scraps of genuine memory, but lacking complete originals, we have only the shakiest grounds for assessing their reliability. The disappointing fact seems to be that most of the surviving New Testament Apocrypha arose in legitimate attempts to comprehend realities about which the canonical Gospels are mute, and any dogged attempt to read them is apt to leave the reader with one prime reaction--those 2nd and 3rd century Christian editors who decided...
...capacity for storytelling, might well consume all four Gospels in a night and conclude that their individual accounts bear enough relation to one another to suggest that they spring from a common event. Their internal differences are occasionally extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark's affirmation that he was the "beloved Son of God" to John's flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures--ourselves above all. Nonetheless, the four together make...
...face of all contradictions and confusions then, our reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed--some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet--Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies...