k (i. 38); He meets with a significant
silence their obtrusive remonstrance when the woman with the issue of
blood caused Him to ask, "Who touched My clothes?" (v. 30, 31); He
tells them with affectionate care "to rest a while," when they had been
too busy even to eat (vi. 31); He rebukes them gravely when they put a
childish interpretation upon His command to beware of the leaven of the
Pharisees and of Herod, the formalists and the Erastian (viii. 17);
they are unintelligent and uninquiring when He prophesies His death and
resurrection (ix. 32), and after this prophecy they actually dispute
about their own precedence (ix. 34); when Christ goes boldly forward to
Jerusalem, they follow with fear and hesitation (x. 32); He rebukes the
niggardly criticism of those who were indignant with the "waste" of the
perfume poured upon His head (xiv. 6); and in Gethsemane "they all left
Him and fled" (xiv. 50).

Among these disciples, St. Peter is prominent, and though his
confession of the Messiahship of Jesus is recorded, a confession which
is necessarily central in the Gospel (viii. 29), St. Mark neither
records that our Lord designed him as the rock, nor his commission to
feed the Lord's lambs and sheep. On the other hand, St. Mark inserts
things which were often of a nature to humble St. Peter. He records
the crushing reprimand which he received when he criticized the Lord's
mission (viii. 33); it was Peter's fanciful plan to erect three
tabernacles on the scene of the Transfiguration (ix. 5), it was Peter
who informed the Lord that the fig tree had withered after His curse
(xi. 21), it was Peter whom Christ awoke in Gethsemane by uttering his
name "Simon" (xiv. 37); and Peter's denial appears doubly guilty in
this Gospel, inasmuch as he did not repent until the cock crew _twice_
(xiv. 68, 72). At the {58} beginning (iii. 16) and at the end (xvi. 7)
Peter occupies a special position. But the conduct of Peter is
narrated in a fashion which renders the notion of fiction quite
impossible. The Gospel cannot have been written by a hero-worshipper
wishing to glorify a saint of old, but must surely have been written by
"the interpreter of Peter."

In comparing the contents of Mark with those of Matt. and Luke, we are
struck by the absence of many of our Lord's discourses. Yet we find an
eschatological discourse about the second coming in xiii., though much
shorter than those in Matt. xxiv. and xxv. The genuineness of Mark
xii