Mark 1:14

Note

The voice in the wilderness has been silenced in prison, and at that very moment Jesus begins to proclaim. Mark's first picture of His public work is a man preaching the gospel.

Mark passes in a few verses through John's ministry, Jesus' baptism and the temptation in the wilderness, and arrives here. The sentence runs on into the next verse, which gives the words Jesus proclaimed. The verb behind "the arrest of John" (paradothēnai) means "to be handed over," and Mark will use it again of Jesus Himself: "The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands of men" (Mark 9:31). The gospel begins where the forerunner is handed over, and the road of the One who preaches it already leads the same way.

What Jesus proclaims is euangelion, the noun. Two verbs divide His steps: He "came" (ēlthen, aorist) into Galilee, "proclaiming" (kērussōn, a present participle of kērussō): one arrival, then a steady preaching. The genitive "of God" names where the news comes from. It is not a human hope dressed as an announcement but a message sent by God. Paul uses the same phrase for his own calling, "set apart for the gospel of God" (Romans 1:1), and for what he preached in Thessalonica: "we proclaimed to you the gospel of God" (1 Thessalonians 2:9).

The manuscripts differ here. The Greek text the KJV was made from reads "the gospel of the kingdom of God," and the KJV and the LSV both have it: "preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God," "proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God." The older manuscripts, which the BSB follows, read simply "the gospel of God." The sense does not change, since the next verse announces that the kingdom of God has come near. The versions also choose differently for John's fate: the BSB's "the arrest of John," the KJV's "John was put in prison," the LSV's literal "the delivering up of John." Only the last keeps the echo of the verb Mark later uses for Jesus.

In the Catena, Bede finds the timing fitting: "when the Law ceases, the Gospel arises in its steps" Bede, and Pseudo-Jerome says the same in other words: "When the shadow ceases, the truth comes on" Pseudo-Jerome. Bede also notes that John's Gospel records teaching and signs before John's imprisonment (John 3:24), and explains that Mark and the others began their account from the time after it. Matthew Henry draws a plainer lesson from the scene, that God's work does not hang on one servant: "If some be laid aside, others shall be raised up, to carry on the same work" Matthew Henry.

Josephus also records John's imprisonment. Herod the tetrarch, he writes, saw how the crowds were moved by John's words and feared that his influence might lead to a revolt, so he sent him as a prisoner to the fortress of Machaerus and put him to death there Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.116–119. Mark gives the reason as Herodias (Mark 6:17–18). Either way, it was the power of the land that handed John over.

The preaching of the gospel did not wait for better times. It began at the moment someone tried to silence it. It is news that does not depend on the state of the world to be true.