1:40 Now 4 a leper 5 came to him and fell to his knees, asking for help. “If 6 you are willing, you can make me clean,” he said.
9:9 As they were coming down from the mountain, he gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
1 tn Grk “proclaimed, saying.” The participle λέγων (legwn) is redundant in contemporary English and has not been translated.
2 tn Grk “of whom I am not worthy.”
sn The humility of John is evident in the statement I am not worthy. This was considered one of the least worthy tasks of a slave, and John did not consider himself worthy to do even that for the one to come, despite the fact he himself was a prophet.
3 tn The term refers to the leather strap or thong used to bind a sandal. This is often viewed as a collective singular and translated as a plural, “the straps of his sandals,” but it may be more emphatic to retain the singular here.
4 tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “now” to indicate the transition to a new topic.
5 sn The ancient term for leprosy covers a wider array of conditions than what we call leprosy today. A leper was totally ostracized from society until he was declared cured (Lev 13:45-46).
6 tn This is a third class condition. The report portrays the leper making no presumptions about whether Jesus will heal him or not.
7 sn Neither Matt 10:9-10 nor Luke 9:3 allow for a staff. It might be that Matthew and Luke mean not taking an extra staff, or that the expression is merely rhetorical for “traveling light,” which has been rendered in two slightly different ways.
8 tn Or “no traveler’s bag”; or possibly “no beggar’s bag” (L&N 6.145; BDAG 811 s.v. πήρα).
9 tc ‡ The witnesses here support several different readings: αὐτῇ πολλά (auth polla, “to her insistently”) is found in D Θ 565 700 it; πολλά is the reading of Ì45vid 28; both words are lacking in L pc; and א A B C2vid Ë13 33 2427 Ï lat have just αὐτῇ. The best candidates for authenticity, on external grounds, are αὐτῇ πολλά and αὐτῇ. So the issue revolves around whether πολλά is part of the text. On the one hand, πολλά used adverbially is a distinctive Markanism (10 of the 16 NT instances are found in Mark; of the other Gospels, Matthew alone adds a single example [Matt 9:14]). It could be argued that such an unremarkable term would go unnoticed by the scribes, and consequently would not have been inserted in imitation of Mark’s style observed elsewhere. On the other hand, the largest cluster of instances of an adverbial πολλά are in Mark 5-6, with the most recent example coming just three verses earlier (Mark 5:23, 38, 43; 6:20). Scribes may well have imitated the usage so recently and so frequently seen. Further, the best Alexandrian witnesses, as well as good representatives of the Western and Byzantines texts, lack πολλά. On the whole, though a decision is difficult, it is probably best to read the text without πολλά. NA27 places the word in brackets, indicating some doubt as to its authenticity.
10 sn The expression up to half my kingdom is a proverbial comment meaning “great wealth.”
11 tn Or “lap dogs, house dogs,” as opposed to dogs on the street. The diminutive form originally referred to puppies or little dogs, then to house pets. In some Hellenistic uses κυνάριον (kunarion) simply means “dog.”
sn The term dogs does not refer to wild dogs (scavenging animals roaming around the countryside) in this context, but to small dogs taken in as house pets. It is thus not a derogatory term per se, but is instead intended by Jesus to indicate the privileged position of the Jews (especially his disciples) as the initial recipients of Jesus’ ministry. The woman’s response of faith and her willingness to accept whatever Jesus would offer pleased him to such an extent that he granted her request. This is the only miracle mentioned in Mark that Jesus performed at a distance without ever having seen the afflicted person, or issuing some sort of audible command.
12 tn Grk “Truly (ἀμήν, amhn), I say to you.”
13 tn Grk “in [the] name that of Christ you are.”
14 tn Or “bear the Messiah’s”; both “Christ” (Greek) and “Messiah” (Hebrew and Aramaic) mean “one who has been anointed.”
sn See the note on Christ in 8:29.
15 tn Grk “baptism I am baptized with.” This same change has been made in v. 39.
16 tn Grk “And answering, he said to it.” The participle ἀποκριθείς (apokriqeis) is redundant and has not been translated.
17 sn Mark 11:12-14. The incident of the cursing of the fig tree occurs before he enters the temple for a third time (11:27ff) and is questioned at length by the religious leaders (11:27-12:40). It appears that Mark records the incident as a portent of what is going to happen to the leadership in Jerusalem who were supposed to have borne spiritual fruit but have been found by Messiah at his coming to be barren. The fact that the nation as a whole is indicted is made explicit in chapter 13:1-37 where Jesus speaks of Jerusalem’s destruction and his second coming.
18 sn With the statement not one stone will be left on another Jesus predicted the total destruction of the temple, something that did occur in
19 tn Grk “not one stone will be left here on another which will not be thrown down.”
20 tn Grk “it is not yet the end.”
21 sn See 1 Cor 1:25-31.
22 sn But the one who endures to the end will be saved. Jesus was not claiming here that salvation is by works, because he had already taught that it is by grace (cf. 10:15). He was simply arguing that genuine faith evidences itself in persistence through even the worst of trials.
23 tn In the Greek text of this clause, “me” is in emphatic position (the first word in the clause). To convey some impression of the emphasis, an exclamation point is used in the translation.