little heading spit

Mark 1:16

I think the fact that we have little headings in our bible can break it up a tiny bit- Its almost like in Mark they give us little pauses- when it doesn't really seem like this was his intention. v16 perhaps an example- The NRSV and NIV both have As Jesus ... passed along the Sea of Galilee /walked beside the sea of Galilee – whereas the greek has the participle paragwn- and passing by ... then the verb eiden he was seeing – he saw. So the word 'Jesus' is not there- it obviously is Jesus- (and this may be nothing) but it seems at Mark's pace and also the way he's 'telling' the story, this is not needed. In some ways having the heading Jesus calls the first Disciples is a bit annoying. Mark is doing an excellent job of telling a rollicking (French's word I think) story- and he's being over edited. I think it can have unfortunate effects – a bit like at the Salvo's where simplistic messages are often given. Like the back cover of Peter Renner's book

“If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straightjackets of Christianity. Protestant or Catholic, neither one is structured to contain a mass of devoted people who long for spiritual depth. We are structured towards infancy. (Gordon Cosby).

In some ways a little heading is overly directive- and I think what it can do as we read, is for us to sum up what the passage is about before we have actually read it. It can put a slant in there about what the main point is- whereas if we were just reading the work- we would have to come up with the main points ourselves- and be more in the hands of where the author was leading us. I think the problem is mostly we know the outline of the story- in many ways in churches we've been hearing it simplistically explained for years, I grew up with it- you can think you know the story- see the little heading- oh this is that part, and then the mind actually shuts down.

And often the way we've been directed to 'read' the story may not actually be a very good interpretation- it's somehow been put through the processes of this big teaching institution- gone through the editorial department, the pedagogical department, the dogmatic department and we can end up with something less than the story. Of course its not all faceless suits – we read in ways that can take away from the story ourselves- bring our own presuppositions to the texts- but worldview is very powerful and I think usually not really thought through. The default settings are what we often revert to.

Something that relates and it's written by Helmut so I have to include it,

But as we said, hermeneutics is so fascinating and a student can so delight in his precosity that he goes on putting it in first place- and then, frequently enough gets stuck there, never pushing on to the laborious task of boring into the hard wood of the text and gaining material knowledge. We often discover this in our examinations. There it not infrequently happens that a student is able to explain to his examiners very precisely and fluently how the New Testament is to be understood – if one were to read it! But often this has not been done...

Helmut Thielicke 1967 Between Heaven and Earth p56, James Clarke and Co, London