Decoding Mark

by John Dart

Using both his background in interpreting biblical research and his interest in word-puzzles, nationally known journalist John Dart "decodes" the "Gospel of Mark," with explosive results that will shake the foundation of New Testament studies. Dart uses ancient, puzzle-like writing devices called "chiasms," which are found throughout "Mark," to reconstruct the original Gospel. By the presence or absence of these chiasms, he identifies sections of the Gospel that were added by a later editor, and he recovers passages from the "Secret Gospel of Mark" (a work discovered in 1958) that the pattern of chiasms indicates had been deleted from canonical "Mark." The results are stunning and certain to be controversial.

Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

John Dart was an American religion journalist and editor, known for his long career at the Los Angeles Times and later as news editor of The Christian Century. He wrote extensively on New Testament research and religion reporting, earning numerous awards, including recognition from the American Academy of Religion. Dart authored and coauthored several influential books such as The Laughing Savior and Decoding Mark. He also contributed to advancing religion journalism through research and teaching, and was widely respected for his insightful, in-depth coverage of complex religious topics.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decoding Mark turned out to be more worthwhile than expected. It is easy for these books, based on library catalog descriptions alone, to turn out to be nutty nonsense. I prepared for numerology; instead, I got a serious journalistic account of Morton Smith’s alleged Secret Mark discovery, which I knew about prior. But here Dart uses chiasms—an inverse paralleling of words—to discern that Secret Mark may have been original Mark, which was edited out by the authors of Matthew and Luke, or before they got their hands on it.
Secret Mark is important since it unexpectedly aligns with my research into the Gnostics, particularly the Carpocratian sect mentioned in Clement’s disputed letter, who were accused of an antinomian libertine interpretation of Christianity.

The most surprising insight of this book is the centrality of the unnamed young men in cloth being the one who appears at the tomb before the women—the one who is initiated into the kingdom by what Dart contends was an ancient baptismal ritual. My additional connections are that this figure may be Lazarus and the Beloved Disciple in John as well: a sort of reader insert to be the true subject of Jesus’ teaching.

What Dart does say from his chiastic analysis is that Mark had a very critical take on the apostles, the women, Jesus’ family, and the Nazarenes, who all misunderstood him, while the household at Bethany were the only ones who understood fully. The woman anointed him and the man—Lazarus perhaps—rolled away the stone. That gives a radically different meaning to the gospels that Matthew and Luke deliberately changed to make said groups (apostles, women, family, community) directly aware of who Jesus was from conception.

This misunderstanding motif extends directly to the Elijah/Elisha parallels. In Mark, Jesus is constantly misidentified—most clearly on the cross, where his cry of "Eloi" is misheard as a call for Elijah. In Mark, this functions as a tragic "misunderstood messiah" theme. But when Matthew and Luke redacted Mark, they inflated the miracle counts (reaching an 8 \times 3 = 24 structure) to flatten Mark’s subtle, tragic motif into a straightforward "greater than Elijah" narrative.

Reading Dart alongside his work on Thomas (Unearthing the Lost Words of Jesus) pulls the entire ritual context together. Thomas Logion 37 describes stripping off garments without shame and treading on them like little children, which directly mirrors the neaniskos dropping his linen cloth in Gethsemane and later sitting at the tomb in a white robe.

Ultimately, if Secret Mark and Thomas preserve this secret baptismal rite, the retort is: so what? What does it say about early Christianity? It demonstrates that esoteric initiation, active shifts in consciousness, and a present-tense "realized eschatology"—where the Kingdom is experienced now rather than waited for in a future, Pharisaic general resurrection—were not late 2nd-century Gnostic corruptions. They were embedded in the foundational strata of original Markan practice before the institutional tradition sanitized them to build a public, future-focused church.

This makes Secret Mark and Thomas unexpectedly relevant today. You see the exact same impulse in modern phenomena like "reality shifting,” using parapsychology and popular adaptations of quantum interpretations (like Everett’s Many-Worlds). The difference is that where early Christianity framed this state shift as a cosmic, salvific transformation of the soul, modern practices have secularized it. It has become fundamentally therapeutic in intent—a psychological tool for altering perception, healing identity, and stepping out of a restrictive world-model into a present, self-directed reality. That doesn’t diminish its importance but shows how these old texts can generate practical interest into early Christianity.

[Jacob G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Dart presents Kiasms he has found in the Book of Mark - introduction to ending, and five sections making up the entire book and Kiastic to each other. He claims these Kiasms proves the fragments that Morton Smith found were part of orignal Mark but we have a version of Mark where those were take out, and a long series of miracles were inserted (Mark 7 and 8 IIRC).
Morton Smith to my eye looks untrustworthy, but I have no problems with the fragments. They say the rich young man that Jesus loved is basically Lazarus. If so that adds a lot of depth to the story. The other thing is the fragments make mention of a week long sacred rite which involves dressing up and re-enacting important events in scripture that correspond to the framework of our lives, creation:birth, fall:loss-of-innocence, death, resurection, etc. This understanding and the fragments clearly make sense of Mark 14:51 - that young man is the initiate, going through this sacred rite, and is at the stage where you wear the linen burial sheet.
That said his exact Kiasms didn't completely convince, and his understanding of the 7 day long sacred rite seems to be what he wants it to be, because there is no surviving description or explanation of it.