His name was Jesus. By the time he appeared in the book in which we came to know him—I am talking about the Gospel of Mark—he was already the Messiah, the one destined to come at the end of the seven millennia or aeons or days. Our first glimpse of Mark’s Jesus has him being baptized in the wilderness while the Spirit of God descends and declares him to be his son. Very shortly after that, Jesus does away with the Sabbath. You may wonder why I say the Gospel of Mark, since the Gospel of Matthew precedes that of Mark in the New Testament. But Mark’s Jesus is older than Matthew’s. Mark’s gospel, written sometime between 68 and 73 C.E., cast the mold for the other Gospels. The Gospels according to Matthew and Luke incorporated much of Mark; the Gospel according to John came along a generation later. Mark, in fact, probably invented the genre called “gospel,” the quasi-biographical novella offered up as an act of evangelical witnessing. The real importance of Mark, though, is that he wrote a literary masterpiece.
