The First Gospel

What this episode covers

For this episode, we’re diving into the Gospel of Mark. We unpack why Mark was likely the first Gospel written, who it was written for, and what was happening politically under Roman occupation. Drawing on scholarly interpretation, we look into how Mark’s storytelling and its urgency, as well as its focus on common people, challenge the Empire and center the marginalized. This perspective also redefines discipleship as active resistance through themes like repentance, liberation, and community transformation, showing how Mark’s “good news” remains a radical call to action for today’s world. Resources: Join our online community at Sanctuary Collective Community If you want to support the Patreon and help keep the podcast up and running, you can learn more and pledge your support at patreon.com/queertheology This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions. 1 (10s): Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G. Murphy. 2 (13s): And I’m Father Shannon TL Kerns. We’re the co-founders of queer theology.com and your hosts from 1 (17s): Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news, LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how 2 (23s): Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. Welcome back to the Ology podcast. This week we are gonna do a deep dive into the gospel of Mark, and I am so excited. This is 1 (40s): Me too. 2 (41s): This is where I get to be like super nerdy and this is my favorite stuff in the world. And so, yeah, so I’m excited to dive in. I, I feel like we’ve talked about this a lot, but I know that for me, I was not raised with looking at the historical context at all of the Bible where even reading the gospels right, we like try to jam all four of them. 1 (1m 7s): Yep. Yeah. Together 2 (1m 8s): Into one coherent narrative. And so we are not gonna do that on this, this podcast. We’re really gonna dig, take a deep dive into looking at just what does Mark say and why does Mark say it and all of those things. And I’m, I’m super excited. Brian, why are you excited to talk about the gospel of Mark? I 1 (1m 28s): Mean, for a lot of those same reasons, I think before I, so I studied film production in college, but I also studied religion in college. And when I added religion as a second area of focus, my parents were like, when we said double major or minor, we meant like math or business, not another, not useless, but not another soft area of study. So I am, I stu, this is like my jam. I studied religion in undergrad. One of my classes that I took was actually just the entire name of the class was called Jesus. So I kept saying I have to go to Jesus class. And I think my friends all semester long thought that I was like, it was actually like religion 4 0 3, like the world of the New Testament or something like that. 1 (2m 11s): And they were, and it was like, no, it was like religion 4 0 3 colon, Jesus. So I’m really excited to sort of like be nerdy about that. I also, like you, I think before, before studying this had a similar approach of the gospels of like, they all tell different parts of the same story and we can sort of like smush them all together to get a coherent picture. And you know, even just sort of like a, an activity pageant at church has the gospel of Matthew and the gospel of Luke smush together and there’s no births and they’re totally, totally different, but they get smushed together in our popular imagination and there’s no birth story in in Mark, which we’ll get to. 1 (2m 54s): But, so I’m excited about that just from like a nerdy sort of like I get to dive into this world of academia that I I that I find it fascinating and hopefully make it interesting for y’all. But I think also on a personal level that this sort of work of seeing the gospels for w