It is a common notion that the writer of the second Gospel deliberately undertook to make an abridgement of the first. The reader observes that the same events are recorded in both, apparently in the same way, that one is shorter than the other, that various parables and discourses which add considerably to the beauty and fulness of St. Matthew are passed over by St. Mark, that his story is rapid, that he dwells on incidents more than words. What more natural than the supposition that he was selecting what seemed to him the capital points in the life of Jesus, discarding accessories?
The difficulties in this supposition increase at every step for a reader who bestows upon the Gospel the same kind of attention that he would think necessary in studying any ordinary document. All careful observers are struck with the vividness of St. Mark’s style; the incidents which he relates are never merely chronicled; they are surrounded with all the circumstances which rendered them impressive to bystanders. His desire of brevity does not prevent him from giving stories of the same kind, as in the case of the two miracles of the loaves. He often introduces into his narratives particulars which an abridger, aiming merely at condensation, would have been certain to reject, if he had found them in his original. These remarks are so obvious that I cannot wonder that some of those who in former days were busy in the search for a Gospel out of which the rest might have been composed, should often have felt inclined to adopt the opposite notion to that which I am considering, and to fix upon St. Mark’s history as answering nearly, though not exactly, to their conception of the primitive one.
The modern school very properly withdraws our thoughts from all speculations of this kind, and directs us to the actual books which we possess, urging us to look manfully at the contents of them, and observe their great and startling differences.
Attention to that precept compels me to notice, not merely an accidental departure here and there, in St. Mark from St. Matthew’s Gospel, but an omission of that which we have found to be most characteristic of him. It is not that he omits a parable, or passes over a memorable discourse; it is that the feeling which possessed the mind of St. Matthew and colored all his language, is not apparently present at all in the same manner to St. Mark. If phrases, allusions, quotations, repeated, and as it were unintentional, indicate any thing, it must have been a predominant purpose in St. Matthew to speak of the Gospel as the fulfilment of that which had preceded it; if an absence of such phrases, allusions, and quotations, in the very places where the other had introduced them, is indicative of any thing, this was not the predominant purpose of St. Mark. If we suppose he had St. Matthew’s narrative before him, the fact is all the more remarkable; no dream of shortening the previous history can have suggested such omissions.
Let it not be forgotten that the whole Sermon on the Mount is wanting in St. Mark. What a monstrous omission for an epitomizer who was choosing out the important parts of the divine history! What a natural and necessary omission for one who did not design to bring out the Fatherly kingdom as that which Christ had come to reveal; who had another object which his readers could not have perceived, if he had dwelt upon that topic which St. Matthew had so fully illustrated. I have already said what I believe his object was. I took the first verse of his Gospel as the text of this whole lecture, because I felt that it announced more distinctly than any one I could find in St. Matthew or St. Luke, that which was common to all the Evangelists. But it may be common and special both. It may be absolutely necessary that there should be an Evangelist who sets forth Christ Himself distinctly, simply in His own personality, as the King of the nation, as the Lord of man; and who, that he may do that work properly, does not set forth that mystery of his relation to the Father which was implied in these acts, with the same prominence and distinctness. We may find, when we come to consider the history of the Apostolical Church, that there was a class of persons occupying a middle position between the Jewish and Gentile world, a set of persons with whom St. Mark is connected by a respectable tradition, for whom such a treatment of the subject was peculiarly necessary, whose most earnest wants would not have been satisfied, who would not have felt that the meaning of Judaism was fulfilled or that its connection with the outward world could be established, who would not have been delivered from some of their most dangerous tendencies, unless the Gospel of the Son of God had been presented to them in this simple and direct shape. We may find, as we go on to later Church-history, that as a matter of fact this view of the Gospel has, to the exclusion of almost any other, affected the condition of a whole age, has been the cause of all its strength; its exclusiveness and corruption, the source of all its weakness. This is not the time to enter upon either of these subjects; I merely allude to them in order to get a hearing for what I say, and to induce you to study the Gospel of St. Mark with this thought upon your mind. You will not expect me to go minutely over ground which I have previously travelled. I shall only add a few more hints to those I have given you already, which may enable you to feel that St. Mark carries out as much by his omissions as his statements, by his differences from St. Matthew as by his resemblances to him, the intention which he announces so simply and distinctly in the opening of his Gospel.
In the first chapter we are told nothing of a son of David or a son of Abraham. There is no genealogy, no account of a divine conception. We hear nothing of a journey into Egypt, nothing of kings coming from the East to worship Christ, or of children murdered for His sake. The beginning of the Gospel is John preaching in the wilderness; announcing that one is coming after him who is mightier than himself, because He will baptize with the Holy Ghost; baptizing that mightier one, who, as he ascends out of the water, is declared to be the beloved Son. The Temptation is very shortly treated. It could not be passed over; but since the details of it given by St. Matthew illustrate principally the relation of the Son to the Father, His trust and dependance, they were wonderfully adapted to the object of that Evangelist; they would have disturbed the coherency of St. Mark’s, and made his aim less intelligible. I desire to avoid refinements, but I cannot think the introduction of the words, “and He was with the wild beasts,” by St. Mark, is insignificant. I believe that he wishes especially to exhibit the Son of God as the ruler of nature, as the Person in whom the original grant of dominion to man was fulfilled. And since the Temptation is the introduction to the ministry, it was fitting that this view of His character and office, as well as that of His perfect obedience, should be fully set forth.
This hint once given, will enable you I think, not indeed to discover in St. Mark what you had not seen in him before, but to account for your own impressions respecting him. You will find him recording every exercise of our Lord’s power distinctly and minutely; making us more conscious than the other evangelists of the wonder which the on-lookers felt at a doctrine which was connected with dominion over unclean spirits; insisting upon the Son of Man’s lordship over the sabbath-day; touching upon the call of the disciples and the ordaining of the Apostles as instances of His authority; recording parables, such as “the sower,” “the man casting seed into the ground,” “the mustard-seed,” “the vine-dressers,” which describe His personal influence and mysterious government; omitting nothing which can illustrate the nature of His kingdom and His relation to human beings, the doubts which were felt respecting the possibility that such power should belong to Him who was called the carpenter’s son, the demonstration that it did belong to Him, and that He could confer it upon men, and that they would be able hereafter to exercise dominion in His name under Him; passing by every thing which does not serve to bring this truth into light, or to make his readers more sensible of it. While therefore there is the most strong external resemblance between him and St. Matthew, there is, I conceive, a lively and continual contrast in the design and in the effect of their narratives. The chapters which respectively conclude the two Gospels, display the difference perhaps more completely than any others. “All power is given to Christ in heaven and earth,” the disciples are to go and baptize the nations; Thus St. Matthew winds up his narrative. St. Mark adds, “And these signs shall follow them that believe. In my name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” The first words speak of the reconstitution of humanity, of man brought back into submission and communion with God. The second speak of new powers, endowments, energies, with which the witnesses for this redeemed constitution should be invested, that they testify of Christ, the healer of the sick, the caster out of devils, as the real Lord of the race. St. Mark therefore cannot stop where St. Matthew stops, at the fact of a Resurrection, the fulfilment of all past hopes and aspirations: he alludes to the Ascension—though he but alludes to it. Another evangelist was needed to set forth the mystery of that fact and its relation to the after condition of the universe.