“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet…” (Mark 1:1-2)
This is how Mark opens his gospel account. It differs from the way Matthew starts his gospel with the genealogy and birth of Christ, or the way that Luke starts his with announcements of the births of John the Baptizer and Jesus. While the other two synoptic writers start with the elements that have become a familiar Christmas story for most followers of Christ, Mark starts far before this this by quoting Isaiah:
“Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way,
The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’ (Isaiah 40:3, Mark1:2)
Where the Other Synoptic Gospels Start
It seems like the other synoptic gospel writers start in a logical place. Afterall, if we are going to tell the story of Jesus’ life, then why would you not start with his birth, as Luke does, or maybe his lineage, as Matthew does. But Mark claims to be starting at the “beginning of the gospel” and yet doesn’t start with the familiar Christmas story. He starts with a Jewish prophet heralding the coming of the Lord to his people.
The gospel doesn’t start with the Incarnation or the birth of Jesus; the gospel starts much earlier than that. It’s a theme that runs through the whole Bible from start to finish. It’s a story we see unfolding as we read the scriptures. Christ is simply the fulfillment of that story, the one to whom the Jewish scriptures had been pointing from the very beginning.
Our Modern Temptation
It can be tempting for us to want to skip the Old Testament and just focus on the New Testament. Sometimes the gospels and epistles seem more relevant and less culturally distant than the Old Testament law, histories, or prophets. But this is a temptation that we must resist! The Old Testament is scripture is exactly that, scripture. As Paul tells Timothy later on, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable…” (2 Timothy 3:16).
We must resist the modern urge to “unhitch” ourselves from the Old Testament. Most followers of Christ know this to be true, but sometimes it can be tempting to think that the New Testament scriptures are somehow “more spiritual”. But the gospel doesn’t start as we turn the page from Malachi to Matthew; it starts in the Old Testament. It is rooted in what God has always been doing through all of time to bring about salvation for his people. If we, as followers of Christ, focus only on the New Testament Scriptures, to the exclusion of the old, we will be depriving ourselves of the centuries of revelation from God for his people.
Understanding the New Testament
I’m not suggesting that every follower of Christ needs to be a scholar of the ancient Hebrew scriptures. There are, of course, many things that average lay-people, like myself, will miss as we study the text. We separated from the authors of the Bible by thousands of years and many layers of culture. That is why it is important to not read the scriptures in a vacuum, but to rely on what the church, both modern and historic, has taught in relation to them.
Although studying the Old Testament scriptures can be difficult for modern people at times, and it can be tempting to just focus on the “red letters” and the New Testament, we will miss out on so much if we do that. The New Testament scriptures were written to people whose entire worldview was saturated with the Hebrew scriptures. As such, they can only be properly understood by people who have invested the time to learn those same scriptures.
