Introduction
Two months after the youngest member of our family was born, the oldest member of our family died. Granny Betty grew up in England during World War II, and when London was being bombed by German pilots every night, the children in London were sent away to live in the countryside. Granny Betty went to live with her aunt on a strange little island called the Isle of Man, where cats don’t have tails. You might be thinking this sounds made up. But it’s absolutely true!
If you have grandparents or great-grandparents, I bet they’ve told you stories from when they were young. They won’t remember everything that happened years ago, but they’ll remember all the most important things—like the day they started at a new school and got bullied, or the day they got married, or the day their first child was born. They’ll also remember stories they were told, songs they learned, and things they memorized in high school.
The Gospels in our Bibles, known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written when the people who saw Jesus live and teach and die and rise again were getting old. Like grandparents passing stories on to their children and grandchildren, they wanted the stories about Jesus to be remembered after they died. But while most stories told by grandparents are precious because of the family connection, the stories told by the eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life mattered far beyond their local community. In fact, these stories about Jesus changed the world. So, how do we know they were remembered rightly?
Unlike our Granny Betty’s stories from her childhood, the stories about Jesus that we find in the Gospels didn’t depend on just one person’s memory. Jesus had twelve official disciples—sometimes called “apostles”—and dozens of other disciples who followed Him wherever He went. It was their full-time job to be with Jesus and to memorize His sayings. The authors of the Gospels wanted to make sure that the stories of these first eyewitnesses of Jesus were remembered accurately.
Mark’s gospel was the first one to be written. Mark was not himself an eyewitness, but he knew the apostle Peter, who was one of Jesus’ closest friends. Mark’s gospel is mostly based on Peter’s memories, though it also points to other eyewitnesses. Peter was an “act first, think later” kind of guy, so Mark’s gospel is an action-packed book. You may notice that Mark uses the word “immediately” a lot!
Experts think Mark’s gospel was written between thirty-five and forty-five years after Jesus died—maybe even earlier. That might sound to us like a long time to remember something accurately. But Jesus’ teaching changed people’s lives. If your parents are between thirty-five and forty-five years old, try asking your grandparents to tell you about the day one of your parents was born. I bet they’ll remember it like it was yesterday!
Mark wrote his gospel so that everyone could hear the good news about Jesus, and we’ve written this Bible study to help you read Mark’s gospel for yourself. We’ve worked on it together, because we wanted to combine what author Rebecca has learned about Mark’s gospel over the years with the perspectives of two people—Miranda (twelve) and Eliza (ten)—who are about your age. We also included feedback from a friend named Nathan Ridlehoover and his twelve-year-old son Jonah, because—like Mark’s gospel—this is a book for both boys and girls.
When Rebecca was a kid, she visited the Isle of Man with Granny Betty. To get there, they had to fly on a small plane, so she saw the little island first from the air before she walked around it. We thought you’d find a bird’s-eye view of Mark’s gospel helpful too, so we’ve broken it up into six acts—a bit like a play is divided into acts—with a summary at the start of each.
We’ve also divided the book up into sixty-six days. That may sound like a weird number, but there are sixty-six books in the Bible, and studies in psychology have shown that it takes sixty-six days of doing something every day to really form a habit. So, in sixty-six days, you can work through Mark’s gospel—either by yourself, or with your friends or family. And if you’re new to reading the Bible, you can start a new habit of reading a bit of God’s Word every day! We’ve based this study on the New International Version (known as the NIV), but there are many other good translations. In each, you’ll find large numbers (1–16) at the beginning of each chapter of Mark, and small numbers breaking each chapter down into verses. Of course, these weren’t in the original Mark wrote, but the whole Bible has been broken down like this to help us navigate each book—like street names and house numbers help us navigate in a city.
Don’t worry if you miss days here and there. We try to read the Bible together as a family every day before bedtime, but some days we run out of time, or everyone’s too tired, or our sin gets in the way and makes us not want to read God’s Word. Don’t be surprised if that happens to you too. Satan really hates it when people read the Bible, so he tries to distract us or tell us we’ve got better things to do. Sometimes, it feels like a fight to get the Bible open. But when we do read it, we’re always glad we did.
There are two other ways in which Satan might try to trick you as you read God’s Word. The first is that he might tempt you to feel superior to others on days you read the Bible. You’ll see as you walk through Mark’s gospel that Jesus’ disciples sometimes had this problem. They wanted to look important, so they argued about which of them was the greatest. We can be tempted to think we’re great for reading the Bible and to look down on others who don’t read the Bible as often as we do. So, watch out for that. But the other way Satan tries to trick us is by making us feel really bad on days we don’t manage to read the Bible. But Jesus doesn’t love us any more on days we do read or less on days we don’t! He knows we’re sinners, and (as we’ll see in Mark) He loves us so much that He died for us! Reading God’s Word helps us see more of His love and character.
Throughout the study, we’ve added “Fun Facts” (or sometimes Not-So-Fun Facts) to help you understand what’s going on. Here’s one to get you started: Mark’s gospel is written in Greek, which was the closest thing people had at that time to an international language. But Jesus Himself would have spoken another language called Aramaic—a bit like a lot of people in America today grow up in Spanish-speaking families, but also speak English. So, while almost all of Mark’s gospel is written in Greek, we’ll sometimes hear Jesus say things in Aramaic too.
Here’s another fun fact: Jesus’ life and teachings have had such an incredible impact on the world that we count our years from the approximate time of Jesus’ birth. The years before Jesus are labeled “BC” for “Before Christ.” The years after are labeled “AD,” which is short for “Anno Domini”—the Latin term for “The year of our Lord.” So, for example, 2023 means two thousand and twenty-three years after Jesus’ birth! (You may also see this written as BCE “Before Common Era” or CE “Common Era” in some of your schoolbooks.)
When Granny Betty was living on the Isle of Man, everyone was worried that the German army would conquer and occupy Britain. But thanks to help from the United States, this didn’t happen. The war ended when my granny was thirteen and she was able to move back to London. But when Jesus was born, God’s people (the Jews) had been living under foreign rule for hundreds of years. They’d disobeyed God and been thrown out of their country. And even though they’d been allowed to return and rebuild God’s temple, their country was ruled over by the Romans. They were waiting for God to rescue them. But God hadn’t even sent a prophet for four hundred years. Until … well, that’s where Mark’s gospel starts the story. So, let’s begin!