Monday with Mounce

A few weeks ago I wrote about Mark 1:41 and how the original text says, I believe, that Jesus was angry. This is one of the seven main passages that Bart Ehrman uses to argue that the early scribes wanted to change people’s perception of who Jesus was, so they changed “indignant” to “felt compassion.”

I agreed with Ehrman that “indignant” or “angry” is the original reading, but I totally disagreed that this changed our understanding of who Jesus was, and you only have to read two more chapters to see why.

A common example of a contradiction in the Bible is the order of the temptations. In Matthew 4 the order is: turn stones to bread; jump off the temple; worship Satan. However, Luke reverses the order of the last two: turn stones to bread; worship Satan; jump off the temple. Can Greek help to solve this problem?

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, he came across a leper who said, “If you are willing, you can make me clean!” (Mark 1:40). The next verse gives an interesting insight into Jesus’ personality.

One of the major cultural issues we have in Western culture is seeing things as individuals. So often a biblical passage addressing a group is interpreted as applying to me as an individual, and we lose the corporate sense of the teaching. But the same can happen in reverse.

One of the most difficult passages in the New Testament to harmonize is the story of Jairus’ daughter. Did Jairus say that his daugther was dead, or at the point of death? Did people come from his house or not, telling him that she had died? The story is told in all three of the Synoptics, and it is a sufficiently unique event that the three Gospels must be telling the same story.