First, the mission of Jesus. He is the Messiah whose coming was anticipated and prophesized throughout the Hebrew Bible, also ...

That makes sense to me because Mark is writing to a persecuted community who know what it's like to die. That's how you die, feeling abandoned by God. Over to John. Jesus is not on the ground in John.

It's rather clear from the way that the stories develop in the gospels that the Christians who are writing the gospels a generation after the death of Jesus are doing so from a stock of oral ...