So this one skips the whole Joseph and Mary shit and just jumps right in to John the Baptist. As it was revealed in Matthew’s gospel, John the Baptist was either Elijah the Prophet reincarnated (even though elijah never died) or sent back from heaven (which would explain his crazy clothes) or jesus was just losing it and started making shit up.
So John the Baptist wandered around the Judean province dunking people in water, wearing camel skins, and eating grasshoppers and honey because he was as crazy as he was … crazy. He was trying to prep everyone for Jesus. He was like, “I just dunk your ass in water! Soon this new guy’s gonna come and dunk you in the holy spirit!” Everyone was like, “I don’t know what that means. But you’re definitely scaring my kids.”
Well as we learned from the last book, Jesus got baptized and heaven opened up so that god could give his approval on Jesus. Then Jesus wandered off into the desert and Satan fucked with him a little bit by making really stupid offers. Jesus refused and eventually went back into civilization.
Eventually John the Baptist got locked up for pissing everyone off and Jesus started wandering the streets healing people and grabbing fisherman away from their jobs. He also exorcized a lot of people and at one point tried to pretend he was gonna just a paraplegic’s sins but then totally healed him on the way out. Whammo!
Anyways, Jesus liked grabbing fishermen and tax collectors to follow him around. This pissed people off and Jesus was like, “Fuck you guys. I’m here for the people who aren’t living their lives right.” Then someone asked him why his followers don’t fast and he responded in riddles about bridegrooms and wineskins. Apparently this was good enough to write down.
People also fucked with him about other religious bullshit and he basically responded, “All of these stupid rules were made for you. Not me.” Then he wandered off and healed a bunch more people and started attracting huge crowds. He would cast out demons and they’d call him out, “Hey! I know you! You’re god’s kid.” And Jesus would say, “Shut up! Don’t tell anyone.”
Well so many people were following Jesus, that he had to appoint 12 disciples to help him with his healing and shit. He appointed Simon (whmo he just started calling Peter for some reason and Simon just went with it now being known as Peter forever), James, John (whom he started calling Bo-an-erges, but that one didn’t catch on), Andrew, Phillip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, a different James, Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot.
Unfortunately for Jesus and everyone involved the 12 disciples couldn’t cast demons or heal nearly as well as Jesus, so he had to go help them out a lot. He’d say things like, “Don’t you get it? You gotta tie up a large man before robbing his ass. Also a house divided can’t stand. Oh and if you ever talk shit on the Holy Spirit, you’re fucked. There’s no coming back from that. You’re fucked forever.”
Then Jesus called everyone his mothers and brothers. He said, “if you do what I want you to, you’re my brother. Or my mother. Also, plant your seeds in good soil, not shitty soil. If you plant seeds in shitty soil it won’t grow. This is me talking in parables and riddles. But that’s also good advice for farming, too.”
He told a bunch more parables about seeds and lamps, but never really explains them. It says that he explained them to his disciples in private, but none of them bothered to write that shit down.
A lot of this book is just the same stories that we heard in Matthew, so I’m just gonna skim over them. Jesus called a storm down, pulled a bunch of demons out some guy and put them in a drift of pigs, then made the pigs drown themselves, raised a little Roman girl from the dead and healed a random old lady who just grabbed his robe without asking, mocked some false prophets, and sent his 12 disciples to go do shit apart from him.
Also, a story that needs to be retold. Herod, (the second Herod) started fucking his brother’s wife. John the Baptist thought this was gross. Herod’s step-daughter/niece did a striptease for him and Herod got a boner and told her she could have whatever she wanted. For some reason she wanted John the Baptist’s smelly homeless head on a silver platter. Herod was like, “Okay.” Then he fucking did it.
Jesus fed a shitload of people with 5 fish and two loaves of bread, 5000 men and an unspecified number of women and children. Because the Bible is as feminist as it is fun to read. Then Jesus walked out onto the lake in the middle of a storm to comfort the people stranded out there in a boat.
When he got back to shore he healed a bunch more people and a bunch of Pharisees started fucking with him. “Hey Jesus, why don’t your disciples wash their hands before they eat?” I think that’s a valid question. Wash your hands before you eat. But Jesus was like, “Fuck you. I’m so holy that there’s no reason to. It’s not what goes into your mouth that makes you unclean. It’s what comes out your mouth.” Side note: Wash your hands before you eat.
After this he healed and fed a bunch more people and told his disciples not to worry about Herod or the Pharisees. Peter blurted out all of a sudden, “Holy shit! You’re the fucking christ!” Jesus told him to keep his goddamn mouth shut. Actually, it seems like anyone who said that Jesus was god’s kid or the christ or messiah, Jesus just told them immediately to shut the hell up.
Jesus knew that all this talk of him being the christ was gonna get him killed eventually and he mentioned it to everyone. But then he said, “I’m totally telling the truth right now, some of us here will totally go to heaven without dying.” Unfortunately, to my knowledge, all of them died. So he was not telling the truth.
He brought a few people up to a mountain and talked to Elijah and Moses. Then god came and told everyone to listen to Jesus. Jesus ominously hinted towards the idea that Elijah and John the Baptist were the same guy.
After coming down from the mountain, Jesus healed an epileptic boy, told everyone not to worry about the hustle of life, and said, “If people are doing good things in my name, don’t fuck with them.”
Then he again makes it very clear, “ Don’t fuck with little kids. Also, if your hand makes you piss me off, cut the thing off. Also, I like little kids more than grownups cuz they’re not all bitter and sure of themselves. Also, fuck rich people.”
Jesus and his 12 disciples rode into Jerusalem. Jesus was riding a colt in this version. In Matthew it said donkey. I’m confused. Also in this book they’re throwing their coats and branches from their fields into the street. As soon as he got there, he got anointed at Bethany, cursed a tree for pissing him off, and fucked up the market inside the temple.
He rambled on about angry vineyard workers, paying taxes, the idea of marriage in the afterlife (there won’t be any), and the importance of respecting god and other people. Then they saw an old broke woman give an insignificant amount of money to the church. Jesus said, “Like I said before, fuck rich people. This broke old lady didn’t have shit, and she gave it all to the church.”
Then Jesus made a bunch of predictions about the end of this age, which we’re coming up on in like 135 years. So we’ll see, I guess. His predictions were so broad that they’re almost guaranteed to happen, “Nations will rise up against nations (happened), earthquakes will happen in various places (happened), Children will kill their parents (happened), The sun and the moon will stop giving off light (won’t happen for a long goddamn time) and the stars will fall from the sky (no they won’t)”
That was him predicting his own return. So Jesus had his passover dinner with his disciples at some unnamed guy’s house, had the first communion, called Judas out for being a dick and selling him out, and then went to Gethsemane to get arrested.
When they arrested Jesus they had swords and armor and clubs. Jesus was like, “What the fuck is this shit? Am I that much of a threat that you come here looking for a fucking battle? I was in plain sight this whole time, talking in temples and shit, and you didn’t do a goddamn thing.” Some guy was hanging out in a linen sheet, then he ran away naked. I don’t know why they included that part.
The Sanhedrin (the high priests of the Judean province) had a trial of Jesus. They were like, “Hmmm. We hate you and you’re annoyingly self-righteous. But what can we charge you with?” People started making shit up, but nobody could keep their stories straight, so that didn’t work. One guy said, “He said he could destroy the temple and rebuild it in 3 days!” The priests were like, “So the fuck what? That’s not a reason to kill a guy.” This whole time Jesus just sat there quietly.
The head priest asked him, “Are you the christ?” Jesus said, “Yep.” The priests agreed that saying you were the christ even though they didn’t like you was enough to kill the motherfucker. They started beating the shit out of him and telling him to prophesy. He didn’t.
While all the shit was going down, Peter was going around telling everyone that he didn’t know who the hell this Jesus guy was. Then he felt like an asshole because Jesus told him he was totally gonna do this exact thing.
Jesus stood before the Roman Governor Pilate and Pilate kept asking why the hell they wanted Jesus dead so badly. He didn’t understand the customs of the province he was in charge of, but understood rioting crowds and the power of religious leaders, so he decided that killing Jesus in the most horrible way possible was a good solution.
He even let this guy Barabbas go free, just to make room for Jesus to die. Again, they made him carry his own cross all the way to Golgotha, but he was so heated up that he couldn’t. So they grabbed a random Libyan guy named Simon out the crowd to carry it for him. They nailed his wrists and feet to the wooden cross and left him there to die. He freaked out a little bit, but mostly just took it. He died several agonizing hours later.
They buried him in a small cave with a giant rock and armed guard outside of it. He got sick of being dead and just stood the fuck up and shoved the rock out of his way. People were freaking out when they saw him up and walking around, but he was like, “it’s cool. I was dead and now I’m not. So calm down.” People didn’t calm down. They were pretty weirded out.
This part is kind of goofy. The bible that I’m reading literally says here, “The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses don’t include Mark 16:9-20” Which are the next 12 verses and the end of the book. But then it prints them anyways.
So apparently this sex worker named Mary Magdalene realized he wasn’t dead anymore and went and told everyone but no one believed her. Then Jesus showed himself off to a few people but no one believe them either. He gathered up the 11 of his 12 disciples who hadn’t killed themselves (judas killed himself for betraying Jesus) and told them that they were dicks for not believing that he could rise from the dead.
He left them with these words, “Go tell everyone on the fucking planet about me and the shit that I’ve been telling you this whole time. Whoever believes and lets you dunk them in water will go to heaven, everyone else will go to hell. In my name you can pick up snakes and cast out demons, you can purify water and heal sick people.”
Then he just peaced the fuck out and went right up to heaven.
That is the Gospel According to Mark.
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