Fifteen Words, and Four

• Anchor Bible Dictionary — “Mark, Gospel of,” “Son of Man,” “Sabbath,” “Blasphemy,” “Beelzebul,” “Abiathar,” “Herodians,” “Bread of the Presence.”
• Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (IVP) — “Controversy Stories,” “Forgiveness of Sins,” “Sabbath,” “Demon, Devil, Satan,” “Family,” “Sin, Unforgivable.”
• New International Dictionary of NT Theology and Exegesis — ἐξουσία, ἀφίημι, βλασφημέω, σάββατον, πώρωσις.
• Dictionary of NT Use of the OT (Beale & Carson) — on Mark 2:23–28 and the 1 Samuel 21 background it treats there.

This shelf states the versification offset on every page, including the pages where there is none. This is one of them.

Chapters 2 and 3 are identical in both columns, so every reference on this page is a single number. Across the Gospel as a whole, five numbers carry no text in the SBLGNT — 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, 15:28 — and the ESV prints those five in footnotes rather than in the text. The two agree; they differ only in whether the number is printed with an empty slot. None of the five is in this passage. The longer ending, 16:9–20, is a separate question and does not touch these chapters.

The offsets that do bear on this page are in the Old Testament. Mark 2:25–26 summarises 1 Samuel 21, and the Hebrew and Greek of that chapter run one ahead of the English: MT and CATSS 1 Kingdoms 21:2 = ESV 1 Samuel 21:1, and the bread of the Presence is handed over at 1 Kingdoms 21:7 = 1 Samuel 21:6. Every 1 Kingdoms reference here is in Hebrew and CATSS numbering, and the English number is given beside it whenever it matters. Two other Greek Old Testament rows in Stage 4 are in CATSS numbering too: Psalm 50:13 = ESV Psalm 51:11 and Jeremiah 45:11 = ESV Jeremiah 38:11.

Mark 2:26 says the David incident happened ἐπὶ Ἀβιαθὰρ ἀρχιερέως. Here is exactly what the three columns held on this shelf say.

Three things are measurable and this page reports all three.

(1) The Hebrew and the Greek Old Testament do not agree with each other about this priest’s name either. The Hebrew has Ahi-melech, brother of the king; the Greek column held here has Abi-melech, father of the king — the name of the Philistine kings of Genesis 20 and 26. The divergence is already there before Mark is involved. Searched across all 30,637 Greek verse units on this shelf, a form beginning Αχιμελ- stands in seven verses, none of them in 1 Kingdoms 21 or 22.

(2) Ἀβιαθάρ occurs once in the whole Greek New Testament — Mark 2:26 — and in twenty-eight verses of the Greek Old Testament held here. The first is 1 Kingdoms 22:20, where he is introduced as the one son of Abimelech who escapes the massacre at Nob and flees after David. In the story as the Greek Old Testament tells it, Abiathar is in the next chapter, and he is the priest’s son.

(3) The parallels do not have the name. Matthew 12:4 and Luke 6:4 tell the same incident, both mention the priests as a class (τοῖς ἱερεῦσιν, τοὺς ἱερεῖς), and neither names a priest at all. Checked by reading Matthew 12:1–8 and Luke 6:1–5 off disk.

⚠️ What this page does not do. It does not call Mark wrong, does not call the phrase a gloss, does not argue that ἐπὶ means in the passage about, and does not decide whether Matthew and Luke had the name and dropped it or never had it. Every one of those is a position in a long argument, and settling it needs a critical apparatus, which was not consulted. The page prints the three names and stops.

The regulation Mark 2:26 is standing on is Leviticus 24:5–9, and the Greek of it can be read here.

Leviticus 24:8 sets the bread out τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῶν σαββάτων, on the day of the sabbaths; 24:9 says it belongs to Aaron and his sons and that they shall eat it in a holy place. So the loaves David took were Sabbath loaves, replaced weekly — which is why the incident is worth citing in a Sabbath argument at all, and the Greek says so in as many words.

The phrase itself is rare in Greek. The exact four-word sequence τοὺς ἄρτους τῆς προθέσεως stands in exactly two verses of the Greek Old Testament held here — 1 Kingdoms 21:7 and 1 Chronicles 23:29 — and in three New Testament verses: Mark 2:26, Matthew 12:4 and Luke 6:4. The word πρόθεσις in any form stands in eighteen Greek Old Testament verses.

Searched across all 30,637 Greek Old Testament verse units held here: Βεελζεβούλ occurs zero times. Not in a variant spelling, not in a proper name, not anywhere.

The god commonly connected with the name is the one Ahaziah sends to consult in 2 Kings 1 — 4 Kingdoms 1 in the Greek. And the Greek column does not transliterate that name; it translates it: τῇ Βααλ μυῖαν θεὸν Ακκαρων, Baal the fly, god of Ekron, at 4 Kingdoms 1:2, 1:3, 1:6 and 1:16 — four verses, and the same four words each time.

In the New Testament the name occurs in seven verses and never outside the Beelzebul controversy: Matthew 10:25, 12:24, 12:27; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15, 11:18, 11:19. Mark uses it once.

What is and is not being claimed. That the two names are related is the standard proposal and it is a proposal. What is measurable is that the form the scribes use in Mark 3:22 is not in the Greek Old Testament held here, and that the Ekron god reaches that Greek as a translation rather than a name. No Ugaritic material was consulted, no inscription, no Second Temple demonology — and the name’s etymology, whether lord of the height, lord of the dwelling or lord of the flies, is not decided here.

The Pharisees’ objection at 2:24 assumes a definition of work that Mark does not supply, and this page cannot supply it either.

The standard reference frame is rabbinic: the thirty-nine classes of forbidden labour, of which reaping is one, set out in the Mishnah tractate Shabbat; and the Sabbath code of the Damascus Document from Qumran, which is stricter still. Neither was consulted for this page. They are named here as the kind of evidence the question turns on, not as something checked. The Mishnah is also two centuries later than Mark, which is a real problem for using it, and this page is not in a position to weigh it.

What the text itself supplies is narrower and can be counted. ἔξεστιν, it is lawful, stands three times in this passage — 2:24, 2:26, 3:4 — and all three are in the last two of the five controversies. The word for Sabbath stands in six verses of the passage: 2:23, 2:24, 2:27, 2:28, 3:2, 3:4. Nowhere does Mark say which rule is being broken.

Every lemma in Mark 2–3 was counted against every lemma in the whole MorphGNT corpus. Six of them occur exactly once in the New Testament, and all six of those occurrences are here.

Three of the six are the most physical things in the passage — a roof, a needle and thread, and a man’s face. The list is a count, not an argument: a hapax legomenon tells you a word is rare in this corpus and nothing at all about why.

Mark 3:17 gives James and John a name and then translates it: Βοανηργές, ὅ ἐστιν Υἱοὶ Βροντῆς — which means Sons of Thunder.

The Greek form occurs once in the New Testament and its underlying Semitic form is disputed; this page can measure the first fact and not the second. What the translation shows is an audience that could not read the name, which is the same reason Mark stops to explain hand-washing at 7:3–4. Compare 5:41 and 15:34, where he does it again.

Every verse of the Greek New Testament was screened against every verse outside its own book. Of 7,927 verses, 244 reach a cross-book run of ten or more, 46 reach fifteen, 36 reach sixteen and 28 reach seventeen. Mark 2:10 and Matthew 9:6 are one of five pairs at exactly fifteen, and only eighteen pairs anywhere are deeper.

⚠️ Read the top row before the others. The deepest cross-book agreement in the New Testament, at 34 words, is two books quoting the same Old Testament passage. Depth of run does not tell you what kind of relationship you are looking at. The table also ignores everything inside a book, so it says ‘across a book boundary’ and nothing wider.

Luke 5:24 has every single one of the fifteen words in Mark 2:10, and against Mark 2:10 it measures 5.

Two phrases swapped, and the number falls by ten. This is the clearest demonstration on the page of what the screen actually measures: contiguous sequence, not shared vocabulary. A low run does not mean two verses are unrelated. It means they do not say the same words in the same order. Luke is as close to Mark here as Matthew is; the screen cannot see it.

All 63 rows of Mark 2–3 screened against 30,637 Greek Old Testament verse units. Across the 63 rows: 62 reach two, 50 reach three, 22 reach four, 4 reach five, 3 reach six, 1 reaches seven, and nothing reaches eight.

Read the top row and the bottom row together. The deepest run in the passage is a crowd saying your mother and your brothers, and its partner is Jacob asking whether he and Joseph’s mother and brothers are to bow down. Seven words, tie band one, and no relationship of any kind between the two sentences. Meanwhile Mark 2:20 reaches four with a tie band of thirty-three — the same four words, on that day, standing in thirty-three different Old Testament verses. The band is what tells you which is which.

Every commentary pairs these verses with Old Testament passages. Here is what the measurement returns for three of the best-known pairings.

All three pairings are thematically strong and all three are invisible to a contiguous-run screen. That is a limitation of the instrument, not a verdict on the pairings, and a page that printed only the high numbers would be lying by selection.

And one in the other direction. Mark 2:17 measures 1 against Greek Hosea 6:6. Matthew 9:13 and Matthew 12:7, at the same two points in the same two stories, both measure 5 against it — ἔλεος θέλω καὶ οὐ θυσίαν. Matthew’s versions of these scenes carry a Scripture citation that Mark’s do not. The page reports that and does not explain it.

Mark 2:23–28 and its two parallels were read off disk in full. Three things are in one Gospel and not the other two, and all three are measurable.

Measured against all 2,217 verses of Matthew and Luke together, Mark 2:27’s deepest run is 3, tie band one — and the three words are καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς, and he said to them, which Luke 6:5 uses to introduce the sentence that follows this one. The four deepest rows in the same passage measure 15, 12, 11 and 10 — 2:10, 2:20, 2:19 and 2:17 — while inside the Sabbath story itself the rows measure 7, 6, 5, 4 and 3, and 2:24 measures 3 as well. The sentence is in one Gospel and not the other two.

⚠️ Direction of influence is not asserted. Nothing here says Matthew and Luke dropped the sentence, that Mark added it, or that any of the three is reading either of the others. The measurement establishes that the sentence is in one Gospel and not the other two, and stops there.

The lowest-scoring row in the passage against Matthew and Luke together is Mark 3:30 — for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit” — which measures 1 with a tie band of 344. It is Mark’s own one-line explanation of what the eternal sin was, and no other Gospel carries it. Read the zero convention correctly: on the Greek-side screens used here a row that shares no two-word sequence still reports 1 if any single word matches, so 1 means “shares no two consecutive words with anything in Matthew or Luke” and not “shares nothing.” The outer slices of the sandwich are nearly as low: Mark 3:20 measures 2 with a band of 11, and Mark 3:21 measures 3 with a band of 5.

No critical apparatus was consulted on any side. Not for the Greek New Testament, not for the Greek Old Testament, not for the Hebrew. That matters more than usual on this page, because the Abiathar question at 2:26 is a text-critical question as much as a historical one — part of the manuscript tradition of Mark does not carry the phrase at all, and this page is in no position to weigh that. It prints the SBLGNT reading and says what the other columns say.

The concentric reading of 2:1–3:6 is a proposal and the page labels it one. What is not a proposal is the topic sequence and the escalation of the objection; those can be read off the text. Whether 2:18–22 is a pivot or simply the third of five is an argument, and the diagram says so. A fabricated chiasm is a serious error on this shelf and the way to avoid it is to say which parts of a shape are counted and which are read.

The run screen finds verbatim contact. It does not find allusion. Three of the best-attested Old Testament pairings in this passage measure 1, 1 and 2, and they are printed in Stage 4 for exactly that reason. If a page reported only its high numbers it would be making an argument out of what its instrument happens to be able to see.

Where the page is weakest is Stage 2. The Sabbath halakhah that the objection at 2:24 presupposes is the single most important piece of background to the second half of this passage, and none of it was consulted. The Mishnah, the Damascus Document, Jubilees, Philo and Josephus are all named on this page or in its reading list and none was read for it. What was measured instead is narrower: which Greek words occur where.

No rabbinic material. No Qumran text — and the Damascus Document’s Sabbath code is a real gap here. No Targum, Syriac, Vulgate or Old Latin. No patristic citations. No papyri. No Ugaritic material for the Beelzebul question. No archaeology of Capernaum, and nothing on first-century roof construction, which is what the hapax at 2:4 is actually about.

Three specific things this page states and cannot settle.

(1) Abiathar. The page prints three names in three columns and does not decide among the explanations. (2) Beelzebul. The page establishes that the name is absent from the Greek Old Testament held here and that the Ekron god arrives in Greek as a translation. It does not establish that the two names are the same name. (3) The eternal sin. Nothing on this page interprets Mark 3:29. What is reported is that αἰωνίου ἁμαρτήματος occurs once in the New Testament, that Mark supplies his own explanation at 3:30, and that the saying is introduced by the first Amen, I say to you in the Gospel.

One more limit, and it is about the English column. The ESV is quoted here under Crossway’s standing permission, which caps a study at half of any one book. This page quotes seventeen verses of Mark. The English column is the ESV and nothing else. Where it and the Greek printed beside it differ, the difference is the translators’, not the manuscripts’, unless the row says otherwise — and at 3:14 it does say otherwise.

• R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark (NIGTC).
• Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8 (Anchor Yale Bible 27).
• Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1–8:26 (Word Biblical Commentary 34A).
• Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark (Hermeneia).
• Joanna Dewey, “The Literary Structure of the Controversy Stories in Mark 2:1–3:6,” JBL 92 (1973).
• James R. Edwards, “Markan Sandwiches,” Novum Testamentum 31 (1989).
• None of these were consulted for any number on this page. The measurements were run on the text files named in the footer, and the concentric reading in the structure diagram is labelled a proposal because it is one.

In the seventh verse of this passage some scribes think a word to themselves: he is blaspheming. Nobody says it out loud. Twelve chapters later a high priest tears his clothes and says it out loud, and it is the last word of the trial.

Counted, not asserted: βλασφημέω and its noun stand in six verses of Mark, and four of the six are here or at the cross. The charge is laid in chapter two and the verdict is delivered in chapter fourteen using the same word. Mark does not comment on it.

And the passage answers the charge before it is finished. The scribes ask who can forgive sins but God alone? (2:7). Twenty-one verses later a different group asks a Sabbath question and gets the answer the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath (2:28). Both replies are made by the same figure — the Son of Man — and those two verses are the first two times Mark uses the phrase. The first claims authority to forgive; the second claims lordship over a commandment.

Mark 2:12: the crowd is ἐξίστασθαι, beside itself, at what it has just seen. Mark 3:21: his own family says ἐξέστη — he is beside himself. Same verb, opposite verdict, and the passage puts them one chapter apart.

By the end of chapter 3 the scribes have said he has a demon, the Pharisees have gone out to arrange his death with the Herodians, and his mother and brothers are standing in the road outside the house asking for him. The people inside, sitting in a circle on the floor, are the ones he calls his family.

And the list he gives has a member the list outside does not. The crowd’s message names a mother and brothers (3:32). His answer names brother and sister and mother (3:35). There is no sister outside. The new family is one relation larger than the one that came to fetch him.

One of six Mark studies on this shelf, and the earliest by chapter — the first to cover chapters 2 and 3. The next along is Mark 4:35–41, one chapter later, where the disciples ask the question this passage has been raising all along: who then is this? The rest are Mark 8:1–38, Mark 10:1–11:33, Mark 13:1–37 and Mark 15:1–16:20.