Book Notice: David Garland on A Theology of Mark’s Gospel

David E. Garland

A Theology of Mark’s Gospel
BTNT; Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015.
Available at Amazon.com

David E. Garland (George W. Truett Theological Seminary) has written a superb Theology of Mark’s Gospel (in addition to his very fine and eminently readable Mark commentary in the NIVAC series). Garland provides an introduction to critical matters of authorship of provenance (chapter 1), a short miniature commentary on Mark (chapter 2), an introduction to the Gospel of Jesus the Messiah (chapter 3), survey of the christological titles (chapter 4), the enacted christology (chapter 5), the presentation of God (chapter 6), the kingdom of God (chapter 7), the secrecy motif (chapter 8), discipleship (chapter 9), discipleship (chapter 10), mission (chapter 11), atonement and salvation (chapter 12), eschatology (chapter 13 – of course!), and the ending of Mark’s Gospel (chapter 14).

I know I tend to get over excited about books on this blog, but this really is a great book, Mark is my favourite Gospel (sorry Joel Willitts and Jason Hood, but Mark trumps Matthew IMO), and Garland has produced what is easily the best introduction and thematic survey of it.

Garland thinks John Mark wrote it, probably from Rome,  just before the destruction of Jerusalem, though he accepts Bauckham’s Gospels for all Christians view. He identifies Mark 9:1 with the resurrection of Jesus. Regards Mark 13.24-26 as a parousia reference. Rejects the thesis that Mark has an adoptionist christology. The chapters on kingdom, mission, atonement, and eschatology are excellent. Also, I found that the bibliographies were very current, and Garland has really interrogated the morass of secondary literature and so this volume is very good guide on “What Are They Saying About Mark?”

Finally, I like how Garland says: “This gospel was not intended by its author to be a vessel of theological truths waiting to be quarried but a story in which Jesus is the central figure. Mark’s theology is unfurled through narrative development … [O]ne of the features that sets this gospel apart from the others is that it is filled with enigmas, paradoxes, and unresolved questions. These puzzles and mysterious can cause some readers to undervalue the gospel while they strike others as a sign of its theological depth.”

It was good to see some Aussie scholars get some good billing in the footnotes with Peter Bolt, Brian Incigneri, Victoria Balabanski, and Michael Bird getting mentions (I was very pleased that someone finally cited my JTS article, “The Marcan Community: Myth or Maze?”).

So this is definitely the go-to book on the Gospel of Mark!