The Gospel According to St. Mark: A Devotional Commentary

Volume 1

The commentators tell us that the phrase “the Gospel of Jesus Christ” may mean one of two things. (a) It may mean the Gospel which Jesus Christ Preached. (b) It may mean also the Gospel of which Jesus Christ is the subject.

It is in this latter sense Mark uses the phrase here. He is thinking not so much of the Gospel Jesus preached, as of the Gospel He was. He is about to tell us the good news about Jesus, and—man of action as he is—he finds the “beginning” of it in our Lord’s first public appearance and definite entrance upon the work of His ministry. And that, of course, was a very real beginning. As far as the great world was concerned, it was the beginning, for it knew nothing of the Gospel, the Gospel had no existence for it, until Jesus came teaching and preaching. But, as Dr Morison says, “Mark might have gone further back, and found other fountains, the feeders of the fountains at which he pauses.” That is to say, there are other “beginnings of the Gospel,” carrying us further back than this “beginning” of St Mark. Let us think for a moment of some of these other “beginnings.”