In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel. His ...

The orthodox view of Christianity is that Jesus preached the same doctrine to all men—there was no inner circle of “initiates” with special knowledge, as in Gnosticism and the mystery religions. The ...

A Saint (Mark?) Reading, a painting by Bartolomeo Vivarini at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, circa 1470 (Wikimedia Commons). Why does Jesus rebuke Peter, admonishing him to “Get behind me, Satan”?

If any man have ears to hear, let him hear: “The KJV actually sang quite well.” When composer Christopher Tyler Nickel set out to create an oratorio of Mark’s gospel, he made an ambitious decision to ...

If you were asked, could you explain to someone what the gospel is? Do you have an explanation for, or a definition of what the gospel actually consists of? This is kind of important because in 1st ...

For centuries, the strange ending of Mark’s Gospel has provoked heated debates. Is it possible that the “original” Gospel, the first “edition” of Mark, ends ...

Beyond being a namesake and possible author of one of the four established Christian gospels, Mark is a central figure in the early church. His family’s home might have been a meeting place for Jesus ...