Glory on the Mountain, Arguments on the Road

In Greek this saying belongs with the end of chapter 8; the chapter divisions were added in the thirteenth century and split it off. “Taste of death” means to die, a Semitic way of putting it. “Come” is a perfect participle, “having come”. Many readers, from the early church on, have taken the transfiguration six days later as its first fulfilment.

Mark rarely dates anything before the passion, so “after six days” stands out. At Sinai the cloud covered the mountain six days, and on the seventh God called Moses (Exodus 24:16). Tradition names Mount Tabor, but Hermon, near Caesarea Philippi, fits the setting better. “Transfigured” is metemorphōthē, from which comes metamorphosis.

A fuller cleaned and whitened new cloth with lye, fuller’s earth and trampling; Malachi 3:2 speaks of “fullers’ soap”. Only Mark has this workshop comparison, which measures the glory by what no human craftsman could achieve. The words “as snow” are missing from older manuscripts.

Mark names Elijah first; Matthew and Luke put Moses first. Both men met God on the same mountain, Sinai or Horeb (Exodus 33, 1 Kings 19), and both left the world strangely: Elijah taken up in a whirlwind, Moses buried by God in a grave no one knew (Deuteronomy 34:6).

“Master” here is Rabbi, a title meaning “my great one”. “Tabernacles” are skēnai, booths or tents, the shelters Israel built each year at the Feast of Tabernacles to remember the wilderness (Leviticus 23:42), and the word used of the tent where God met Moses.

“Wist” is the past tense of the old verb to wit, to know. “Sore afraid” is ekphoboi, terrified. The early church writer Papias says Mark wrote down Peter’s recollections, and if so, this frank explanation of Peter’s blurted offer may be Peter’s own admission.

“Overshadowed” is the verb used in the Greek of Exodus 40:35 for the cloud that settled on the tabernacle so that Moses could not go in. “Hear him” recalls Deuteronomy 18:15, the prophet like Moses: “unto him ye shall hearken”. At the baptism the voice spoke to Jesus; here it speaks about him to the three.

“Suddenly” is exapina, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament. The Greek sets “only” at the point of the sentence: no one any more, but Jesus alone. The glory has gone and so have the visitors; the man they came up the mountain with is who remains.

The three disciples carry something they cannot tell the other nine. Years later, 2 Peter 1:16–18 recalls it: “we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” and heard the voice “when we were with him in the holy mount.” “Charged” is diesteilato, gave strict orders.

“Kept that saying” is ekratēsan, they held on to it; the phrase can also mean they kept the matter among themselves. Many Jews expected a resurrection of the dead at the end of the age (Daniel 12:2). One man rising alone before that day was the puzzle.

Malachi 4:5 had promised Elijah “before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the LORD”. The scribes used it as a test: if the Messiah has come, where is Elijah? The three have just seen Elijah on the mountain, which makes the question sharper.

“Restoreth all things” picks up Malachi 4:6, where Elijah turns the heart of the fathers to the children. “Set at nought” is exoudenēthē, treated as nothing, like the man “despised and rejected” of Isaiah 53:3. Jesus asks how both can be written and leaves the question hanging.

“Listed” is the 1611 word for wished or pleased. No Old Testament text says Elijah would suffer; the nearest is the old prophet hunted by Jezebel (1 Kings 19:2, 10), a pattern that returns in Herodias’s grudge against John. “As it is written of him” may point to that pattern rather than to a single verse.

The glory on the mountain meets a quarrel at its foot. Many readers have seen the pattern of Moses coming down Sinai to find the people in disorder around the calf (Exodus 32). “Questioning” is syzētountes, disputing, and the scribes are pressing the disciples in public.

“Greatly amazed” is exethambēthēsan, a strong word only Mark uses, again of Jesus in Gethsemane (14:33) and of the women at the tomb (16:5). Mark gives no reason for the crowd’s amazement. Some have wondered whether a trace of the mountain still showed, as Moses’ face shone (Exodus 34:30).

Jesus puts the question to the scribes, but it is a man from the crowd who answers. The professional disputants say nothing more in the scene; the argument they were winning is replaced by a father’s need.

“Master” is didaskale, teacher. The spirit is named by what it does: alalon, speechless. The father says “I have brought unto thee my son”, though what he found at the foot of the mountain was the disciples, not Jesus.

“Pineth away” is xērainetai, becomes rigid or dries up, the verb of the withered hand in 3:1. Matthew 17:15 calls the boy “lunatick”, moonstruck, the ancient word for seizures. “They could not” is ouk ischysan, they were not strong enough, from the root of the “strong man” in 3:27.

“Faithless generation” recalls Deuteronomy 32:20, “children in whom is no faith”. “How long shall I suffer you?” uses the verb for bearing with someone, and has the sound of Moses’ complaint in Numbers 14:27: “How long shall I bear with this evil congregation?”

The spirit sees Jesus and reacts at once, before Jesus says a word, as the spirits did in 1:24 and 5:6. “Tare” is synesparaxen, convulsed, and “wallowed” is ekulieto, rolled about. The attack happens in front of the crowd that has come running.

Nowhere else in Mark does Jesus ask for a history of the illness, as a physician would. “Of a child” is ek paidiothen, from childhood. The answer tells the crowd the disciples were facing a long-established affliction, not a passing fit.

Fire and water were the dangers of every village: open cooking fires, wells, cisterns and the lake. “If thou canst” comes after watching the disciples fail. “Help” is boēthēson, a verb traditionally explained as running to someone at a cry for aid.

The Greek is abrupt: “The ‘if thou canst’!” Jesus quotes the father’s own words back to him with a definite article, as if holding them up. The King James follows manuscripts that add “believe”; the shorter reading turns the father’s doubt about Jesus’ ability into a question about the father’s faith.

The father repeats his own verb from verse 22: “help”, boēthei, but now for his unbelief rather than for his son. “With tears” is absent from older manuscripts. The reply is immediate, “straightway”, with no time to phrase it well.

“Came running together” is episyntrechei, a word found only here in the New Testament: the crowd is converging. Jesus adds “deaf” to the father’s description and gives an order found in no other exorcism in the Gospels: “enter no more into him.”

The boy lies like a corpse, nekros, the word in the phrase “risen from the dead” that puzzled the three in verses 9 and 10. The chapter’s question about rising is about to be answered in miniature at the foot of the mountain.

Two verbs follow: “lifted him up”, ēgeiren, and “he arose”, anestē. These are the two words the New Testament uses for resurrection. Jesus takes the hand as he took the hand of Jairus’s daughter; the crowd’s verdict in verse 26 is simply overruled.

The pattern of private questions indoors repeats (4:10, 7:17). “We” is emphatic, hēmeis: why could we not, when we were given authority over unclean spirits (6:7) and had cast many out (6:13)?

“And fasting” is absent from the oldest manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and was probably added as fasting grew in the church’s practice. “This kind” implies that spirits differ, and that this one needed more than a command spoken on borrowed authority.

This is the last journey through Galilee in Mark; in 10:1 Jesus goes into Judaea and does not return north before his death. “Passed through” suggests travelling on without stopping to teach the crowds.

“Is delivered” is a present tense, paradidotai: the handing over is already under way. There is a play in the words, the Son of man delivered into the hands of men. This is the second of three predictions of the passion (8:31, 10:33–34), and the briefest.

“Understood not” is ēgnooun, the verb behind the English word ignorance. After each of the three predictions the disciples misunderstand: Peter rebukes (8:32), the twelve argue about greatness (9:34), and James and John ask for the seats at his right and left (10:37).

Capernaum appears here for the last time in Mark, the town where the preaching began in 1:21. The question comes in the house, after the walk. Jesus had been ahead of them on the road, and had heard enough to ask.

“The greatest” is meizōn, literally “greater”, the comparative used for the top. Rank mattered in seating at meals and in synagogues (12:39). The Community Rule from Qumran fixed each member’s place by rank, to be kept at every meeting.

“He sat down” is the teacher’s posture for formal instruction. “Called the twelve” is a formal summons, though they were already in the room. “Servant” is diakonos, the man who waits on tables; the verb returns in 10:45, “not to be ministered unto, but to minister”.

“Taken him in his arms” is enankalisamenos, a verb found only in Mark, here and in 10:16. The Aramaic word talya could mean both child and servant, and some scholars suggest that link lies behind the move from verse 35 to this verse.

“Receive” is dechomai, the verb of welcoming a guest. A Jewish legal principle held that “a man’s agent is as himself” (Mishnah Berakhot 5:5); the chain here runs from child to Jesus to the one who sent him.

John speaks on his own only once in Mark, here. The scene recalls Numbers 11:26–29, where Eldad and Medad prophesy outside the tent and Joshua asks Moses to forbid them. Moses replies, “Enviest thou for my sake?”

“Lightly” is tachy, soon: a man cannot use the name for a mighty work and quickly turn to cursing it. Acts 19:13–16 records what happened to exorcists who used the name of Jesus without knowing him: the sons of Sceva fled naked and wounded.

Matthew 12:30 has the reverse: “He that is not with me is against me.” Both sayings were kept. This one concerns “us”, the disciples’ circle; the other concerns “me”, a person’s stance toward Jesus himself.

In a hot, dry land, water was the smallest gift anyone could give. “Because ye belong to Christ” is literally “in the name that ye are Christ’s”; it is the only place in Mark where Jesus uses the title Christ in speaking of his own followers.

“Offend” is skandalisē, to trip or trap; a skandalon was the stick that sprang a snare. The “millstone” is mylos onikos, a donkey millstone, the heavy upper stone of a mill turned by an animal, not the small stone of a woman’s hand mill.

“Hell” is Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom south of Jerusalem, where children had been burned to Molech (2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 7:31). The name of a real place of horror became a name for final judgment. “Maimed” is kyllon, crippled.

The oldest manuscripts lack the line. Scribes seem to have copied verse 48 here and at verse 46, turning the warning into a refrain sung three times, once after each limb.

“Halt” is the 1611 word for lame. The foot is the limb that carries a person where they should not go: “refrain thy foot from their path: for their feet run to evil” (Proverbs 1:15–16).

Like verse 44, this line is missing from older copies. “Worm” is skōlēx, the maggot that feeds on the dead; Acts 12:23 says Herod Agrippa was “eaten of worms” before he died.

Leviticus 21:18–20 barred a priest who was blind, lame or broken-handed from serving at the altar. Here the one-eyed, the lame and the maimed are the ones who enter. “The kingdom of God” stands where “life” stood in verses 43 and 45, so the two phrases name the same thing.

The words are the last verse of Isaiah (66:24), describing the corpses of rebels outside Jerusalem. So harsh is that ending that Jewish readers in the synagogue repeat the verse before it after reading it, so the reading does not close on judgment.

The second half, “every sacrifice shall be salted with salt”, is missing from older manuscripts and may have been added from Leviticus 2:13: “with all thine offerings thou shalt offer salt.” The first half is one of the hardest sayings in Mark to pin down.

Salt dug from the Dead Sea was mixed with other minerals; if damp leached out the sodium chloride, a tasteless residue was left. Salt eaten together sealed friendship, and Scripture speaks of “a covenant of salt” (Numbers 18:19). The chapter ends on eating together at peace, after an argument about rank.