The Beginning of the Gospel

Now I invite you to turn with me to the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1. It’s page 707 in the church Bibles, if you would like to make use of them. Mark 1:1:

“The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the son of God.”

“It[’s] written in Isaiah the prophet: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’—‘a voice of one calling in the desert, “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”’ And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt [round] his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: ‘After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’”

Amen.

Father, help us now, as we turn to the Bible, that you will be our teacher, that the Holy Spirit will enable us to think properly, to respond humbly, and that we might find that, as it were, Christ stands in the midst of us not only as the one who orchestrates our praise but also as the one who preaches the Word home to our hearts. Only you, O God, can accomplish this, and it is to you we look. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

In 1975, in a book that John Stott had penned in conjunction with a missionary conference, he wrote as follows: “Nothing hinders evangelism … more than the widespread loss of confidence in the truth, relevance, and power of the Gospel.”[1] Let me give that to you again: “Nothing,” he wrote, “hinders evangelism … more than the widespread loss of confidence in the truth, relevance, and power of the gospel.”

If the polls that came out around the holiday period are to be believed, then we are confronting a situation in contemporary America that is unlike much that has gone before. It has been understandable that those who have rejected the New Testament, who have turned their back on the Bible, have very little to say to their friends and neighbors about who Jesus is and what he’s done. And such a loss of confidence in the gospel in that arena is no surprise. But if the polls are accurate, then they are suggesting to us that within the present framework of contemporary Christianity, there has been and continues to be an erosion of conviction on the parts of those professing faith as it relates to the exclusive claims of Jesus and as it relates, in essence, to the truth and the relevance and the power of the gospel.

Now, this should be a matter of concern for us, that we would examine our own hearts, that we would consider ourselves, that we would think, first of all, about where we stand in relationship to these things—particularly if we have committed ourselves to this particular church, if we have identified fully with our stated purpose: that we were hoping, under God, to see unbelieving people becoming the committed followers of the Lord Jesus Christ. If we are committed to that, it is clearly of the utmost importance that we both know the good news, that we know the gospel, and that we stand able and prepared to share it with others.

And, of course, one of the best ways to do that is to walk in the footsteps of Christ himself—is to turn to the Gospel records as they’ve been given to us and to make sure that immersing ourselves in all that we’re given concerning the life and the death and the resurrection and the ascension and the return of Jesus becomes part and parcel of our thinking so we will then be enabled to tell others this wonderful good news.

To help us to that end, we’re beginning this morning a series of studies in the Gospel of Mark. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest, it’s the first, and arguably it is, if you like, the most missionary-oriented of the Gospels. I say that because Mark chooses to leave out a significant amount of material which Matthew and John and Luke include. It’s not that Mark is securing for us only the most important parts—that couldn’t be—but rather, he seems to be zeroing in, as he writes his Gospel, on the information concerning Jesus that is of vital importance if a man or a woman is going to believe in Jesus, so that it is a useful exercise for some who are wondering about the claims of Christ to read this Gospel through, and for those of us who profess faith in Christ to become increasingly aware of it and to be able to identify with the evangelist’s purpose.

Now, you should also know that Mark is breaking new ground when he writes his Gospel. Before Mark, there was no such thing as a gospel. People would’ve said to him, “And what is this thing that you’ve written for us?” “Oh,” he said, “it is the gospel. It’s the good news. It’s the euangelion,” in Greek, which gives us our word evangelical. “It is a gospel,” he said. “I’ve written down all of the amazing things concerning Jesus, his life, and his ministry.”

And he is doing so not in an endeavor to provide a biography—indeed, none of the Gospel writers are writing biographies—but in order to be persuasive, so that those who read the record he provides may come to believe in Jesus. And it is for that reason that, along with the other Gospel writers, he gives a disproportionate amount of time and space to the events that relate to the passion and the resurrection of Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, virtually a third of his Gospel is given to the closing weeks of the life of Christ.

Now, with all that in mind, I want to give you the structure of what I think will be our study for not only this morning but either for tonight or for next Sunday. What I want to do is to start, if you like, out on the circumference of this issue and then move into the center: first of all, by giving consideration to the nature of the Gospels themselves, some general comments regarding the Gospels; then to look specifically at the author of this Gospel and his purpose; and then we will find ourselves at the core of things and able to begin to give consideration to these opening verses. Some of this will be material that is familiar, and therefore, we will be thankful for the reminder. For others of us, this will be completely new material, and therefore, we might be glad of the discovery.

General Comments on the Gospels

Let me give to you a quote under “General Comments on the Gospels,” a quote from the person who taught me New Testament theology—he’s now in heaven—Donald Guthrie. And this is what he wrote: “The [Gospel writers] were not literary men and were not setting out to be. … They themselves had experienced a remarkable transformation as a result of the stupendous events they related.”[2]

Now, that is a very important point to notice: that we do not have in Matthew and Mark and Luke and John a group of potential literary experts—that they like to sit around and discuss and write books and pamphlets and contribute to theological journals, to put it in contemporary terms. No, they weren’t like that at all. These were ordinary men who had encountered the extraordinary power of Jesus and who determined, under the direction of God’s Holy Spirit, to write down the events as they had experienced them, or as they had had them recounted to them, so that others might in turn come to believe in Jesus.

Each of the Gospels is based on eyewitness accounts. Each of the Gospels is based on eyewitness accounts. And these eyewitness accounts are confirmed by contemporary historians of both Roman and Jewish origin. In other words, people who were not Christians, people who had no design to advance the claims of Jesus, when they write in the historical period that is alongside these Gospel records, they affirm certain things. For example, if you read them, you will discover that they affirm the fact that Jesus’ followers worshipped him as God, called him Messiah, and that this Jesus of Nazareth was executed in Judea when Pontius Pilate was the governor. Now, you say, “Is that important?” Well, actually, it is important, especially when you find yourself on the receiving end of questions and criticisms by friends who believe that when we affirm the truth of the Bible, we are just advancing a cause that has no substantiation at all. So, the Gospel eyewitness records are confirmed by Roman and Jewish historians.

Also, these Gospel records appear within about thirty years after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. So in other words, they appear in the lifetime of people who saw and heard Jesus. Therefore, they appear within a time frame that would allow people to say, “That never happened,” or “I was there, and it is not as you have reported.” The people were alive either to affirm the accuracy of these Gospel records or to deny them if they found there were falsehoods.

Cranfield says the survival of such folks—that is, people who are the contemporaries of the Gospel writers—the survival of such folks “must have set limits to the community’s freedom to invent and embellish.”[3] Because people could easily have said, you know, “Hey, we knew Levi. You’ve written in here that Levi was a tax collector, and he met Jesus, and there was a big party at this house, and he was a transformed man. We knew Levi. He was as bad a rascal on the day he died as the day he was doing the tax collecting! He was a fiddler to the end.” Or, “Who put that stuff in your gospel about Zacchaeus, that little man? We knew Zacchaeus. There’s no change in Zacchaeus.” Nobody came forward to say that. No one came forward to say that what happened in a kind of transformative way in the town of Sychar in Samaria did not happen—that there was a lady who had met Jesus at the well, and as a result of her testimony and her changed life, many in that community actually became the followers of Jesus. Nobody steps forward to say, “No, no, no, no. It didn’t happen.” And the absence of that is significant.

Now, your friends will say to you, “Doesn’t the fact that the writers”—Mark, in this case—“doesn’t the fact that Mark had a vested interest, if you like, in presenting Christ cause him inevitably to fabricate the evidence?” That’s what is often leveled, isn’t it? People say, “Well, you know, he wanted to do this, and therefore, it was in his best interest in order to do these things.” But you don’t find that’s the case. In fact, what you discover is that… And let’s just use Luke as an illustration, since we can do this helpfully. Turn to Luke chapter 3 just for a moment. Luke chapter 3 and the opening verses. And what I want you to notice here is that the Gospel writers, far from fabricating, were at pains to tie the details of, if you like, the gospel drama into the historical and geographical framework of their time.

Now, you remember from our study in Luke that Luke tells us at the very beginning that he had done a very careful investigation of all these things, and he had written them down in an “orderly account” so that people might “know the certainty of the things” they’ve come to believe.[4] There’s no sense of invention in that. There’s no sense of embellishment in that. There’s no notion of somebody sitting around on a rock and dreaming up amazing things and then just writing them down.

The Gospel writers, far from fabricating, were at pains to tie the details of, if you like, the gospel drama into the historical and geographical framework of their time.

And true to his case, this is how he sets the framework for the appearance of John the Baptist on the stage of human history. Luke 3:1: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip [the] tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias [the] tetrarch of Abilene—during the high [priest] of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John [the] son of Zechariah in the desert. [And] he went into all the country [preaching the good news].” It’s quite striking, isn’t it? The people say, “Well, what you have in New Testament Gospels is legend.” I’ve read legend. You’ve read legend as well. This doesn’t read like legend. This is not legend. He’s writing down here historical data, verifiable data, challengeable data—and the historical, geographical, political context in which the Gospels are written is provided for us, in part, so as to take away the leg of that stool in argument.

And furthermore, if the Gospel writers had been determined to embellish or transform things, don’t you think they would have changed the way they come across? What interest do they have in describing themselves as a bunch of cowards that ran away when Jesus was arrested? Don’t you think they would have said, “And we went away, and we had a retreat, and we planned what was going to happen after Jesus was raised from the dead; and after a couple of days, when he was raised, as we fully anticipated, we all went out and had an amazing preaching series in the streets of Jerusalem”? No, no, they said, “We all buzzed off, and we locked the doors, because we were frightened that somebody was going to get come and get us too.”[5] If you’re writing something that is a fabrication, it’s surprising to put that in in such a fashion.

And (and I’ll say this as the last thing), the manuscripts that we have—and there are numerous manuscripts (not just hundreds, but thousands of bits and pieces of manuscripts)—the manuscripts that we have date closer to the events of the life of Jesus than anything else that is in existence in secular history. For example, if you’ve done history at college, I will be surprised if you have ever been on the receiving end of somebody suggesting to you that we have every reason in the world to doubt the existence of Julius Caesar. It hasn’t happened. In fact, they will have affirmed the writings of Julius Caesar, without question. They will affirm the writings of Tacitus, of that most difficult name to pronounce, Thucydides, taking for granted that all that is said about these individuals and written of these individuals is absolutely verifiable data—is material, if you like, fixed-points material—from which we can build a construction of social history.

Well, interestingly, the closest manuscript that you can get to Tacitus is 800 AD; to Caesar, 850 AD; and Thucydides, 1300 AD. Well, what do we have in relationship to Jesus? Well, we have in Manchester University the John Rylands Papyrus, as it’s known because of the archaeological discovery. And that is a fragment of the Gospel of John dated AD 130! So that within a relatively few decades of the passing of Jesus, we have materials that confirm the writings of these Gospels.

In fact, Robinson, who’s an historian at Cambridge, says, “The wealth of manuscripts, and above all the narrow interval of time between the writing and the earliest extant copies, make [the New Testament] by far the best attested text of any ancient writing in the world.”[6] “By far the [very] best attested text of any ancient writing in the world.” Now, this not some yahoo from Teabread University with a doughnut sticking out his ear. This is somebody at arguably one of the most significant universities in the entire world. His academic credibility is such that he’s not about to make outlandish statements concerning these things. I don’t base my convictions on the strength of his affirmation, but I do find it quite encouraging, and I hope you do too.

“But,” says somebody, “if that is the case, why is it that the New Testament documents are constantly called into question? Why is it that you don’t turn over Newsweek and find a huge front-page edition of Newsweek, or Time magazine, questioning the existence and the validity and the accuracy of the writings of Julius Caesar?” Well, one, because nobody really cares, and two, because it wouldn’t sell, and three, because frankly, it’s irrelevant to somebody living in the twenty-first century.

But the Bible outsells every book in the world and continues to do so. The rise of the gospel in South America and in the Southern Hemisphere in general is significant and compelling. Men and women continue to give their lives because they’re unprepared to deny the claims of Jesus of Nazareth. And men and women, recognizing this peculiar authority which attaches to this book, resist it like the plague. And behind that is the activity of the Evil One, who, in Genesis 3, came as the serpent to Eve, and what was his question to her? “Did God really say …?”[7] “Are you going to base your response,” he says to Eve, “on a word from God? Did God say this?” And the Evil One, from then until now, is behind every attempt to undermine, to countermand, to diminish confidence in the verifiability, the accuracy, and the compelling impact of the truth of God’s Word.

And don’t let anybody run you off in the coffee shop by telling you about the discrepancies that exist between the manuscripts. One person in a thousand may even know where to find those manuscripts. And if they were to examine them, they would discover that no discrepancy between the manuscripts has to do with the central tenets of the person and work of Jesus. It may say there were three people there; this one says there were two people there. It may say someone was standing up; it may say somebody was sitting down. But the manuscripts do not disagree with one another wshen they unfold the story of Jesus of Nazareth—Messiah, Son of God, Suffering Servant, Risen Christ, Returning King. And the reason that people do not want to turn to the Bible is because they are unbelievers, and unbelief is sin. And it is sin which clouds our vision and prevents us from believing the gospel.

Now, I take time on that because I think it is absolutely, fundamentally important. Because in the thoroughfare of life, in everyday interchange, if you tell somebody, for example, tomorrow that you went to church, and they said, “And what were you studying?”—you say, “Well, we started to study the Gospel of Mark.” And they say, “Well, why would you even waste your time on that?” What did you say? “It makes me feel good”? Or “I feel so much better when I do”? That’s not going to cut any ice at all. A person says, “Well, funny enough, I’ll tell you what makes me feel good: reading the Plain Dealer and drinking three big cups of coffee. I don’t have to go somewhere with Mark’s Gospel to feel good. I’ve got a ton of ways of feeling good.” So that’s not going to go. What are you going to tell them?

It is in this book that we discover the wonder of God’s love for us in Jesus. It is in this book that we discover our predicament without Jesus.

I’m going to tell them that “in the gospel, I discover that Jesus loves me. In fact, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’!”[8] They say, “Well, isn’t that a children’s song?” “Yes, it is a children’s song. But the reason I know is ‘because the Bible tells me so.’” So this Bible better be a trustworthy, reliable document. Because if I am basing my life, my destiny, on who Jesus is and what he’s done, and this is where I discover that, this is of fundamental importance. It’s not a matter of marginal significance. That’s why I take the time on this, because it is in this book that we discover the wonder of God’s love for us in Jesus. It is in this book that we discover our predicament without Jesus.

So, that’s the first thing. Now we’re at the second thing, and well, it’s questionable whether we’ll ever reach the third thing, so just relax.

Who Wrote Mark?

First of all, some general observations concerning the Gospels. All right? Secondly, what about Mark as the author of the Gospel? What about Mark’s Gospel? Because if you read the Gospel, you’ll discover that there’s nothing in the text which identifies Mark as the author of Mark. So I actually wrote as my heading, number two, my heading was “Who Wrote Mark?” Because you don’t go to it and he says, “Hello, my name is Mark, and I wrote this.” It’s not there. You don’t have it in the way you have in some of the letters. So why is it that we believe? Why is Mark’s name appended to this and has Mark’s name always been appended to this particular Gospel?

Well, in actual fact, the answer to that is largely yes. The earliest documents of the church identify John Mark as the writer of this particular Gospel. Every Gospel, as we said, is based on eyewitness material, and the early writers and the church fathers identify Peter, the apostle Peter, as the source for Mark’s Gospel, so that Mark has relied most heavily on Peter to provide him with the eyewitness details that have enabled Mark to write this Gospel down for the church in his day. After Peter is martyred and gone, Mark remains, and Mark writes this material down.

Now, if that is accurate… And I want to turn you to just one place. If you turn to Acts and chapter 10—you turn to Acts chapter 10—and in the account of Peter at the house of Cornelius, we have an illustration of Peter’s preaching. And from verse 36—and I can’t read it all, but this will just get you started, and if you are diligent, then you can follow up on it—this is Peter preaching. He says,

You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, telling the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. You know what has happened throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached—how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.

We are witnesses of everything [you] did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem.

And then he goes on to talk about his death and so on.

Now, if you just look at that, and then you turn back over to the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, look at what you discover. “You know the message,” he says. “You know what happened, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached.” How does Mark start his Gospel? He starts his Gospel with the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist. Now, that would make sense, wouldn’t it, if Peter was his eyewitness, enabling him to write as he did?

Now, you’re saying to me, “Well, I take your word for it, but I don’t know where to find it.” Well, I’ll tell you where to find it. You want to go to the sources, that’s fine. You go and find the bishop from the second century whose name was Papias, who was the bishop of Hierapolis. He wrote certain things down, Eusebius recorded them for us, and these are extant documents that can be found in libraries. Okay? Here in the big, fat New Testament Introduction, which most of you are not going to buy, and few of you who buy it will ever read it, we have a quote from the aforementioned bishop. This is in the second century, and this is what the bishop says:

Mark indeed, since he was the interpreter of Peter, wrote accurately, but not in order, the things either said or done by the Lord as much as he remembered. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed Him, but afterwards, as I have said, [heard and followed] Peter, who fitted his discourses to the needs [of his hearers] …. Mark, writing some things just as he remembered, erred in nothing; for he was careful of one thing—not to omit anything of the things he had heard or to falsify anything in them.[9]

Okay. So here’s the bishop in the church in the second century, and he is writing for the benefit of those who are under his custody as these men and women are seeking to live for Jesus, as they’re being buffeted and as they’re being threatened, as all hell is let loose against them in persecution, and as they are turning to the Gospel records themselves, and they’re in need of affirmation, and they are in need of support, they’re in need of encouragement, and their dear bishop writes to them and says, “When you read the stuff that Mark wrote down for you, you can be sure that although it’s not written chronologically, it’s all put down there. There’s nothing left out that should be in, and there’s nothing in that should be out. Indeed, you can trust it in its entirety. And it has been written by this fellow called John Mark.”

In fact, Mark, if you like, is just what any intelligent Christian should want the earliest evangelists to have been. What do you want the person who writes the first Gospel to be like? Do you want him to be an imaginative, creative character tempted to flights of fancy? Uh-uh. You want him to be what Mark was: not an inventor, not a creator, but a conscientious compiler of the information. Not somebody who’s sitting around saying, “You know, I think if I did this, or I wrote it in that way,” or whatever it was. No, this is a slogger, if you like. This is somebody said, “Now, let me remember again: when Peter came out of there, and then he went there…” He said, “Hang on a minute. I’ll give you it in just a minute.” And then he wrote it down. And under the direction of God the Spirit… (You understand the dual authorship of Scripture: Mark’s Gospel is written by Mark; it is written by God. God breathes out through human instrumentation.) And as Mark writes in this way, says the bishop, he does so not on the basis of invention but on the basis of compilation.

And if you think about it, he’s only as good as his source. If he is not the source, he’s only as good as his source. And what does his source say? When Peter, the source for Mark, writes to the believers in his day in 2 Peter 1, do you remember what he says? “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the [coming and power] of … [Jesus. No,] we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”[10] “We were there. We were present. We can verify what is written down. That is why we are writing to you as we are.” And if you imagine Mark, as it were, in the shadow of Peter by this point in life, saying to himself, “This is fantastic! I love this stuff! One day, I think I’m going to write some of this stuff down. And if I ever write it down, I’m going to remember what Peter is saying here: ‘No cleverly invented stories. No funny stuff. Eyewitnesses of his majesty.’ That’s how I’ll write it down.” And every sensible, intelligent Christian recognizes that that is what we want in somebody who’s giving us the first Gospel.

Where’s Mark?

Now, with our time virtually gone, let me set you a little exercise for the hours of the afternoon, or the hours of the week, and that is not to play “Where’s Waldo?” but to play “Where’s Mark? Where’s John Mark?” And you can take your Bible—take the Acts of the Apostles, that’s the best place to go—and say, “Now, where do I find this character John Mark?” And I’m just going to get you started, and then we’ll stop.

He lived in Jerusalem, in a big house. His house was so large that they could have a big prayer meeting in it on the occasion when Peter was put in jail. Remember when the angel comes and liberates him, and Peter shows up at the house of someone? He comes knocking on the outside courtyard door, and they’ve been having a big prayer time to say, “Get Peter out of jail.” Peter comes out of jail. Then the lady says, “It couldn’t possibly be Peter out of jail”—which is just like most prayer times, isn’t it?[11] Well, that was John Mark’s house. It belonged to Mary; that was his mom. He lived there.

It is distinctly possible, but a matter of conjecture, that you will find this same house as the location for the gathering of the Last Supper. Possible. And it is distinctly possible that Mark, as is true of certain artists, has painted a little bit of him, albeit a naked little bit of him, into his own Gospel! “What, he painted himself in naked?” Yes! Because I think that the character who eludes arrest in Mark chapter [14] by allowing the people to grab his cloak but not to grab his person and runs off down the street starkers is probably Mark himself.[12] So, you’re starting to like him even more, aren’t you?

He has a cousin who’s rich called Barnabas. He has a lot going for him, and with his cousin Barnabas, he goes off with one of Barnabas’s buddies, a fellow called Paul, and they go off, and they do missionary work. Go find that. Go find where it was, what city was it, where he bails out on Paul and Barnabas and becomes the occasion of disagreement between Paul and Barnabas, so that after that, Barnabas goes off in another direction, and Paul goes with Silas. It’s all in here.[13] And if you look, you will discover just where it is that we discover that all of this resolves, and Paul writes, and he says, “I want you to get Mark and bring him to me, because he’s so helpful to me in my ministry.”[14]

Isn’t it interesting, the kind of people that God uses? You know, if you were thinking of somebody who’s going to write the foundational Gospel, who would you go for? Oh, somebody probably Ivy League, at least. If not that, we go down at “Did you ever go to the University of Virginia? They have a good English department, after all. Maybe somebody coming out of there.” No, just this character.

It’s interesting that he would be the follower of Peter, as well, isn’t it? He who knew what it was to bail out in the face of the challenges of missionary work probably had his greatest sense of empathy for this Peter, who bailed out in the face of the challenges in the courtyard of the high priest.

No, you see, God knows always exactly what he’s doing as he picks up people and puts them in places of usefulness. But the underlying factor was not the peculiar capacity of John Mark, but the underlying factor was the fact that John Mark had encountered the stupendous claims of Jesus, had come to trust in Jesus. His life had been transformed by Jesus. And it was that which caused him to go out and say to people, “I have met Jesus. He has changed my life. Would you like to meet Jesus? He will change your life too.”

And isn’t that really all that this adventure is about—ultimately, at its core? The scattering of this congregation throughout Cleveland and beyond in the course of the next seven days, allowing those who have been transformed by the power of Jesus to seize every opportunity to say just that: “I met him. He changed me. You too may meet him. He’ll change you too.”

And then we come to Mark 1:1.

Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you that while we do not find our confidence in the confirming aspects of archaeology and history and form criticism and documentation, still we do well to remind ourselves that alongside and beyond and underpinning all that which we read routinely is a vast and compelling compendium which reinforces that to which we give our childlike and often fearful affirmations.

Help us, then, O God, so to read the Bible and to meet Christ in it that he might confront us with our need of him and that we might trust ourselves unreservedly to him. And then help us so to move amongst our friends and neighbors and work associates and family members so as to tell them this wonderful good news.

And may the grace of the Lord Jesus—that same Lord Jesus—and the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with all who believe, today and forevermore. Amen.

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[1] John R. W. Stott, “The Biblical Basis of Evangelism,” in Let the Earth Hear His Voice, ed. J. D. Douglas (Minneapolis: World Wide, 1975), 69.

[2] Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, 3rd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973), 14.

[3] C. E. B. Cranfield, The Gospel According to Saint Mark: An Introduction and Commentary, Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 17.

[4] Luke 1:3 (NIV 1984).

[5] See John 20:19.

[6] John A. T. Robinson, Can We Trust the New Testament? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 36.

[7] Genesis 3:1 (NIV 1984).

[8] Anna Bartlett Warner, “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” (1859).

[9] Papias, quoted in Daniel J. Theron, Evidence of Tradition: Selected Source Material for the Study of the History of the Early Church, the New Testament Books, the New Testament Canon (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958), 67, quoted in Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, 4th ed. (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1990), 83. Square brackets are original the source.

[10] 2 Peter 1:16 (NIV 1984).

[11] See Acts 12:12–15.

[12] See Mark 14:51–52.

[13] See Acts 15:36–39.

[14] 2 Timothy 4:11 (paraphrased).