Forgiveness at the Center of the Argument

“It was noised” is ēkousthē, it was heard. “In the house” can mean simply “at home”, which suggests Capernaum has become Jesus’ base, perhaps in the house of Simon and Andrew from 1:29. “After some days” gives time for the report of 1:45 to die down, though it plainly has not.

The doorway of 1:33, where the whole town gathered, is now blocked solid. “Preached the word” is literally “spoke the word”, and “the word” becomes Mark’s shorthand for the message itself, the seed of the sower in 4:14.

“Palsy” is a shortened form of paralysis that came into English through Old French. “Borne of four” pictures a pallet with a man at each corner. Mark counts the carriers but never names them or the sick man.

Village roofs were flat, beams laid across walls and covered with branches and packed clay, reached by an outside stair. “Uncovered” is literally unroofed, and “broken it up” is exoryxantes, dug out: they dug through earth. Luke, writing for readers who knew tiled roofs, speaks of tiling (Luke 5:19). The “bed” is a krabattos, a poor man’s mat.

“Son” is teknon, child, an address of warmth to a grown man. “Be forgiven” is a present tense, the sins are forgiven now, and the passive voice leaves the forgiver unnamed. Many scholars read that as the reverent passive that implies God as the one acting.

In a room where people cannot even stand at the door, the scribes are “sitting”, which suggests they had places of honour at the front. “Reasoning” is dialogizomenoi, turning a matter over and debating it, here silently. Mark does not say where they came from; in 3:22 he names scribes “from Jerusalem”.

“This man” is dismissive in the Greek, a curt houtos. Blasphemy is the charge on which the council will condemn him in 14:64, so its first appearance in Mark comes early and quietly. “Who can forgive sins but God only?” echoes Isaiah 43:25: “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions.”

Reading the heart was claimed for God alone in Solomon’s prayer: “thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of men” (1 Kings 8:39). “Perceived” is epignous, knew fully. Jesus answers thoughts the scribes had not spoken, which is already an answer to their question in verse 7.

“Whether” in 1611 English is an interrogative meaning “which of the two”. “Arise” is egeire, the verb of waking and raising. Both sentences cost the speaker the same breath; the question is which one can be caught out.

The sentence breaks mid-way, turning from the scribes to the sick man, and Matthew 9:6 and Luke 5:24 keep exactly the same break. “Son of man” recalls Daniel 7:13–14, where one like a son of man receives dominion. It is the first time Jesus uses the title in Mark.

“I say unto thee” puts “thee” first in the Greek, singling the man out after an argument conducted over his head. The man came in through the roof on a mat carried by four; he is told to leave through the door carrying the mat himself, and to go home.

The crowd that blocked the door must now make way for the man walking out through it. “On this fashion” is houtōs, “like this”. Mark’s “all” who glorified God could include the scribes, and he does not say whether it did.

“Again” brings Jesus back to the shore where he called the fishermen in 1:16. The lakeside becomes an open-air classroom, with no roof to break and no door to block. “Resorted” is an imperfect: people kept arriving.

Capernaum lay on the road near the border between Herod Antipas’s Galilee and Philip’s territory to the east, so goods crossing paid a toll there. Levi sat at the “receipt of custom”, the telōnion, probably collecting for Antipas. Another “son of Alphaeus”, James, is listed in 3:18; Mark does not say whether they were brothers.

“Sat at meat” is reclined at table, the posture of a proper dinner rather than a snack. “His house” could be Levi’s or Jesus’; Luke 5:29 says Levi’s. This is the first time Mark uses the word “disciples”, and he introduces them eating beside tax men.

Older manuscripts read “the scribes of the Pharisees”, scribes belonging to that party, rather than two groups. This is the Pharisees’ first appearance in Mark. They ate ordinary meals in a state of purity, so sharing a table meant more to them than a meal; it signalled acceptance.

“Call” is kalesai, the ordinary word for inviting guests to a dinner, apt at a crowded table. Greek writers had used the physician comparison before; Diogenes the Cynic is reported to have said physicians spend their time among the sick. “To repentance” is absent from older manuscripts of Mark, though present in Luke 5:32.

The Law required only one fast, on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:29). Pious Pharisees fasted twice a week (Luke 18:12), and the early church manual called the Didache names Mondays and Thursdays. “Used to fast” may mean they were fasting that very day, which would sharpen the question at a feast.

“Children of the bridechamber” is a Hebrew idiom for the bridegroom’s attendants and wedding guests. Wedding celebrations lasted about a week, as Samson’s did (Judges 14:12), and fasting in that week would have insulted the host. Jesus answers a question about religious rules with a picture from village life.

“Taken away” is aparthē, a verb found in the New Testament only here and in the two parallel sayings. The King James follows manuscripts reading “in those days”; older ones have “in that day”, pointing to a single day of loss. It is the first hint in Mark of a violent end.

The “new cloth” is agnaphos, unfulled: new wool not yet washed and shrunk by the fuller. Sewn onto an old garment and then wet, it shrinks and drags the weave apart. “That filled it up” is plērōma, the fill, the patch meant to complete the garment.

Old skins lose their stretch and grow brittle, and fermenting wine gives off gas that a stiff skin cannot absorb. The Gibeonites, pretending a long journey, carried “wine bottles, old, and rent, and bound up” (Joshua 9:4). Here both are lost at once: the wine is spilled and the skins are ruined.

“Corn” in 1611 meant any grain; here it would be wheat or barley. Deuteronomy 23:25 allowed a traveller to pluck ears by hand from a neighbour’s standing field, so theft is not the charge. The Greek says the disciples “began to make a way, plucking”, and some read it that they were clearing a path.

Pulling off ears of grain was counted as reaping, and rubbing them as threshing; the Mishnah later lists both among the thirty-nine kinds of work forbidden on the sabbath. The Pharisees address the charge to Jesus, since a teacher answered for his disciples.

“Have ye never read” is a pointed question to men who spent their lives in the text. “An hungred” is the 1611 form of an hungered, hungry. In 1 Samuel 21:2 David arrives at Nob alone and speaks of young men waiting elsewhere; the companions are part of what he tells the priest.

The shewbread, “bread of the presence”, was twelve loaves set out each sabbath on the golden table and then eaten by the priests (Leviticus 24:5–9). 1 Samuel 21:6 says David received the loaves removed when “hot bread” replaced them, which places his visit on or near a sabbath. “The house of God” here is the tabernacle at Nob.

Only Mark records this sentence. A close rabbinic parallel is attributed to Rabbi Simeon ben Menasya: “The sabbath is given to you, not you to the sabbath” (Mekilta on Exodus 31:14). “Was made” reaches back to creation, where the seventh day was blessed and hallowed after man was made (Genesis 2:3).

“Also” is kai, even: the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath. Some scholars argue that the Aramaic idiom behind “son of man” could mean humanity in general, so that man is lord of the sabbath. Most readers take it as the title Jesus used in verse 10, the reading the capital in the King James assumes.