The Gospel of St Mark is the shortest, roughest, rawest of the Gospels. It’s written in Koine Greek, like the other Gospels, but it’s significantly less polished than the Greek of the other three Gospels. It’s now generally agreed by scholars to be the earliest Gospel to be written.
In this new translation, Michael Pakaluk keeps the original roughness rather than smoothing it out as most translations do. He retains the tense switching, where the Gospel moves in the same scene from the past tense to the present tense and back again. He includes the breathless ‘and thens’ and ‘immediatelys’ and the other connectives. And in doing so he demonstrates well his basic point: that this Gospel is the written record of Peter’s own account of Jesus’s life and death.
In 1977, the actor Alec McCowen, one of the greatest actors of his generation, stood on stage and recited all of Mark’s Gospel, from memory, at the University Theatre in Newcastle. He went on to tell the story at the Riverside Studios, the West End and Broadway. It took about an hour and a half.
Peter, telling his tale to listeners sitting around him, would have taken about the same length of time. Speaking as the witness to these events, he often omits his own name where the other Gospels name him. He includes the actual Aramaic words Jesus spoke. And the whole text is suffused with the sense of breathtaking urgency that comes from someone who watched this all unfold without the slightest notion of how the story would play out.
As such, it’s a way of reading the Gospel in a manner as close as is possible to those first hearers, sitting clustered around the big fisherman telling his story with the same astonished urgency with which he first witnessed it.
