Mark 10 Footnotes

10:19 Jesus was not confused about the Ten Commandments; that any first-century Jew could be is inconceivable. Jesus probably replaced “Do not covet” (Ex 20:17) with “Do not defraud,” since fraud was commonly assumed to be the particular form of covetousness the rich manifested in the first-century Mediterranean world. Economics were viewed as a zero-sum game, and the rich were understood to obtain more wealth only by defrauding others of their fair share.

10:21 The demand placed on the rich man was radical and one that Jesus did not require of all his disciples. Jesus’s goal was to discover the extent to which the man really desired eternal life and to underscore the radical self-denial of discipleship (8:34-38), a self-denial more difficult for “the haves” (the first) than the “have nots” (the last).

10:35 Matthew tells us that it was James and John’s mother who made the request of Jesus, whereas Mark has the brothers approaching Jesus directly. Matthew’s version (Mt 20:20-28) is probably more accurate, since it was common in Mediterranean culture to broach delicate requests through a respected intermediary. Nevertheless, Jesus understood that the mother was speaking for the sons, so that even in Matthew, Jesus responded directly to the brothers rather than to the mother and focused on their untoward request as the main issue. Mark simplified the story in the interests of this main point.

10:45 This saying combines allusions to the Son of Man of Dn 7 and the Suffering Servant of Is 53. These ways of understanding Jesus were rare, if not nonexistent, in the early church, and thus it is improbable that the church (instead of Jesus himself) would have created this saying. In fact, a similar saying in 1Tm 2:5-6 is reworded in a much more Hellenistic style, highlighting the antiquity and Semitic background of Mark’s version. The cross was central to Jesus’s messianic self-understanding (Mk 14:24).