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Steve Walton has made his slides introducing the Gospel of Mark available here.
Ian Paul has a very interesting post here on Jesus' use of bread in the Gospels. He discusses the feeding of the 5,000, the feeding of the 4,000, the Last Supper, and the meal at Emmaus.
Mark Goodacre has an interesting discussion here concerning Mary the mother of Jesus in Matthew and Mark.
I have been revisiting Rhoad’s and Michie’s insightful, Mark as Story. Here is one of the helpful insights from the book.
"When the narrator is omniscient and invisible, readers tend to be unaware of the narrator’s biases, values, and conceptual view of the world. The reader tends to trust the narrator as a disinterested observer of the events of the story. But the omniscient narrator is not a disinterested observer. Rather, the narrator functions as would the director of a movie., as someone who is responsible for the presentation of the whole story. Viewers observe the scenes and characters from the director’s perspective, although they never see the director. Similarly, the narrator of a story in literature is responsible for not just the asides but for the presentation of the whole story. The narrator narrates the story with certain loaded words, in a certain order, and with various rhetorical techniques. So the narrator is always there at the reader’s elbow shaping responses to the story—even, and perhaps especially, when the reader is least aware of it."
David Rhoads and Donald Michie, Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 39.
Ian Paul does a nice job here in unpacking some of the details of Jesus' calling of the first disciples.
Ian Paul has a very interesting post here on the Transfiguration in Mark's Gospel.
Steve Walton has made two sets of slides from a recent presentation on the Gospel of Mark available as pdfs here.
"The allusions to the Old Testament are actually the key to understanding the brief pericope itself. The allusions indicate that Jesus as Son obeyed under temptation and trial, was consequently blessed, and dealt a decisive blow to Satan in the wilderness."I doubt whether understanding these allusions are the "key." One could probably understand that, "Jesus as Son obeyed under temptation and trial, was consequently blessed, and dealt a decisive blow to Satan in the wilderness" without picking up on the allusions. One could also question whether Mark's primarily Gentile audience have picked up on these subtle allusions.
