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through the lens of Matthew, Luke or John.
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We're going to take Mark's own Gospel as standing on its own.
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So we're not going to rush off to another Gospel,
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or to Acts, or the letters of Paul
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to provide an interpretative clue for how to read Mark.
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We're going to read Mark as Mark by itself,
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and that's one of the fundamental rules of historical criticism
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is don't harmonize different texts in the Bible.
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Take them each individually.
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Another one is you have to avoid anachronism that
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is you can't attribute a meaning to the text of Mark
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that doesn't make sense in the first century in his own context.