Mark

Galilee was not governed from Rome directly. It was run by Herod Antipas, a client ruler who kept his position by keeping Rome satisfied, and who was building two cities, Sepphoris and Tiberias, out of the region's taxes while this story is set. The lake was a working fishery, licensed and taxed, and the collection apparatus of that system is what the book means when it says tax collectors. These are not villains in a morality tale. They are the visible end of an occupation's revenue.

In this world, illness, madness and misfortune were widely understood as something having taken up residence where it did not belong. Reporting that accurately is not the same as endorsing it, and sneering at it makes the book unreadable. It is worth noticing how close the vocabulary of possession runs to the vocabulary of occupation, and that the book was written for people living under one.

It was written for readers outside Judaism. It stops to explain Jewish handwashing custom to an audience that would not have known it, and it translates every Aramaic phrase it uses. The Greek is rough and fast, mostly in the present tense, and it says immediately more than forty times. Nobody has ever mistaken it for literary prose.

And it was written into a war. The window most scholars give runs either side of the Jewish revolt against Rome and the destruction of the temple in 70. Whatever else it is, it is an account of a Galilean executed by the Roman state, written for people who were watching that same state level Jerusalem.

This stretch is bracketed by the only two blind men in the gospel. At Bethsaida, where the healing takes two attempts, and at Jericho, where a man throws off his cloak and follows on the road. Between them, three times, he says plainly what is going to happen to him, and three times the people closest to him hear something else: Peter rebukes him, they argue about who is greatest, and James and John ask for the best seats. Each misunderstanding is followed by teaching about what following actually costs. That is the construction, and most readers have never been shown it.

The road is literal as well as thematic. From Caesarea Philippi in the far north to Jericho is most of the length of the country, and the final stretch climbs from below sea level to around seven hundred and fifty metres. Mark says they were going up to Jerusalem and that he was walking ahead of them, and every reader knew what was waiting at the top.

Son of Man is the title he uses of himself here, and it settles nothing. It can mean simply a human being, and it is also the figure in Daniel 7 who is given dominion. Mark has him use it of the one with authority to forgive sins and of the one who will be handed over and killed, and never explains the gap between them.

The two-stage healing at Bethsaida is the only one in the gospels that takes more than one attempt, and it opens the movement. Whether that is medical realism or literary construction is worth deciding for yourself. The man who sees people as trees walking, and then sees clearly, sits four verses before Peter half-sees who Jesus is and is rebuked for the other half.

The temple was not a church. It was a working institution, the largest building project in the region, employing thousands, and the centre of a sacrificial economy the law required. Pilgrims arriving for Passover needed unblemished animals and had to pay a temple tax in an acceptable coinage, so the money changing and the animal selling in the outer court were not corruption. They were the mechanism.

Herod's rebuilding of it was still going on within living memory of these events and was finished only a few years before the whole thing was destroyed. The stones a disciple points at in chapter 13 were genuinely enormous, some of them weighing many tons, and pointing at them is what visitors did.

The week matters too. Jerusalem's population multiplied at Passover, a festival commemorating a liberation from an empire, which is precisely why the Roman governor came up from Caesarea with troops for it. That is the room this argument is happening in.

And then the dating problem, which is chapter 13's whole difficulty. Most placings of this gospel put it within a few years either side of 70, the year the temple was destroyed. Whether chapter 13 is prediction, or a text shaped by an event already under way, or both at once, is genuinely argued, and it cannot be settled by preferring one answer.

Crucifixion was not primarily a way of killing people, which could be done faster and more cheaply. It was a public deterrent, used by Rome on slaves and on provincials convicted of sedition, carried out beside roads and outside city gates so that it would be seen. The placard naming the charge was part of the mechanism. King of the Jews is a sedition charge, not a theological one.

Judea was governed by a Roman prefect who held the power of execution, which the council did not, which is why there are two hearings rather than one. The council's problem was to produce a charge Rome would act on, and a claim to kingship was the charge that worked.

The week is the reason for the tension in it. Jerusalem's population multiplied at Passover, a festival commemorating liberation from an empire, and the governor came up from Caesarea with troops for exactly that reason. Arresting somebody at night, away from the crowd, is what the text says they were trying to do, and it is what anybody would have done.

And the burial is unusual. Crucified bodies were often left where they were, which was part of the point, so a body released to a member of the council is irregular enough that Mark has Pilate check first whether he is already dead.