Mark: The Gospel of Action

10. And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.
11. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him:
12. And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.
13. And immediately the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness.
14. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.

Mark 1:10-14 (Spoke 19, Cycle 2)

The Gospel of Mark is commonly known as the "fastest" Gospel, in the sense that it moves much more swiftly through the scenes of Christ's life than the others. For example, the quote above spans the Baptism to the Temptation of Christ in a mere five verses, which is short indeed when compared with Matthew’s sixteen and Luke’s fifteen verses used to describe the same events. Its pace is set with the repetitive use of "and" and "immediately." This expresses the essence of the Quph KeyWord qal (swift) which God presented in the Quph verse of Lamentations 4:

• AV Lam 4:19 Our persecutors are swifter (qal) than the eagles of the heaven: they pursued us upon the mountains, they laid wait for us in the wilderness.

Ralph Earle described the unique character of Mark's Gospel in the introduction to his book Mark - The Gospel of Action  (emphasis added):

Mark's gospel is primarily the gospel of action. About two out of three verses begin with "And." In fact, a glance down through the first chapter will show that most of the verses begin that way. As someone has well observed, "His narrative runs." Over forty times we find "immediately," "straitway," or "forthwith" - all translations of the same Greek word. It might be said that while Matthew and Luke furnish us with color slides of the life of Jesus, Mark gives us a moving picture.

Earle’s observations are common knowledge amongst scholars who study the Synoptic Gospels. Almost every commentary makes mention of the striking frequency of eutheos (immediately, straightway, forthwith) in Mark, just as they note the distinctly high incidence of "righteousness" in Matthew (BW book pg 323) and of "friend" in Luke (BW book pg 346). The miracle of the Wheel is that it reveals the supernatural integration of all these extremely obvious distinctions with the Alphabetic KeyWords that God established in Alphabetic Verses. The graph makes the preeminence of eutheos in Mark visually evident. It should be remembered that though Mark is the smallest Gospel, yet it contains far and away the largest number of occurrences of this characteristic word. This word distribution does double duty since it also distinguishes the five New Testament History Books, where we find 95% of all occurrences of eutheos, from the Twenty-Two Epistles where it occurs only four times. This is the Tapestry of God – every thread is interwoven with every other!

Next article: His Narrative Runs

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