The Gospel of Mark

Pete Sinclair is not a scholar and didn't set out to write a book. When questioned what he believed about Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement, he realized he needed to go back to the beginning and look again--without assumptions, inherited answers, or fear of what he might find. That search took him into the Greek and Roman world, the Greek language, and the writings of the earliest Christian leaders. What did Jesus and Paul actually mean when they talked about the kingdom of God and, more importantly, who they believed was welcome in it? He discovered that Jesus and Paul stepped outside the law and Jewish traditions, opening the door to people who had never belonged before. Christianity grew in ways he hadn't been taught--shaped more by Greek culture and Paul's theology than by the voices of James, John, or Peter. In Mark's Gospel, the author's use of wordplay, structure, and earlier writings craft a story that spoke to Greeks and Romans as much as to Jews. This book is not the final word but the work of someone who followed the evidence where it led and found a story bigger, more human, and more surprising than the one he started with.