An Experiment in Deep Learning with the Gospel of Mark at St. Columba's
Before Easter: A Play
- A 90 minute, fully immersive play entirely from memory
- Word for word re-telling of The Gospel of Mark, Chapters 1-10
- The entire life of Jesus before the events of Holy Week
Join a Live Discussion on Mark!
Please consider yourself invited to Joshua Daniel’s long running small group on the Gospel of Mark which restarts after Easter (first class is on Wednesday, April 7th 2024 @ 6:45pm, right here at StCs). You can also join via zoom. Click here for more information.
Listen to the Podcast!
Episodes for the podcast will appear here as they are released:
https://thewaywepractice.substack.com/t/gospel-of-mark
In celebration of StCs 150th Anniversary, we commissioned this four episode podcast in conjunction with this play.
- Hosted by The Rev. Dr. Joshua Daniel and The Rev. Ragan Sutterfield.
- The Podcast will give an in depth look at the heart of the Gospel and offer a few ways to understand its essential message and some of the hard-to-understand passages.
About The Hosts
Ragan Sutterfield is a writer, teacher, and agrarian living in his native Arkansas. Ragan is the author of Farming as a Spiritual Discipline, a contributor to the book Sacred Acts: How Churches Are Working to Protect the Earth's Climate, and the author of numerous articles on food, faith, and ecology. He works to live the good life in partnership with his wife, Emily, and daughter, Lillian.
Joshua Daniel is the Senior Associate Rector at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C. Born and raised in Bentonville, AR, Joshua studied philosophy and theology at Greenville College, Oxford University, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy (2015) from the University of Arkansas, writing a dissertation on Wittgenstein and Religion. He has served parishes in the Arkansas Delta, Maryland, Virginia, and worked as the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Arkansas for a number of years before completing an M.Div. at Virginia Theological Seminary (2018). While at VTS, Joshua co-edited Reasonable Radical? (Pickwick 2018) with the Dean and President of the seminary, the Very Rev. Dr. Ian Markham.
Further Reading
The play used the work of New Testament scholar Ched Myers for much of its “interpretive frame.” Though the play features no verbal commentary, how the play was staged and produced reflects a considerable amount of thought and interpretation.
A great introduction to Mark can be found in Ched Myers’ Say To This Mountain (Orbis Books, 1996); for a more complex and nuanced account see Ched Myers’ Binding the Strongman (Orbis Books, 1988).About the Play
How the Play Came to Be
For the first few centuries of the Jesus movement, there was no single scroll or book that contained what we recognize as the New Testament. Physical texts were few, so Christ-followers largely shared stories in community about who Jesus was and why he mattered to them.
Many of those stories were passed on orally. “Gospellers” (many not literate themselves) would memorize what they could and travel to small house churches in their region. Thus the Gospel would be proclaimed most often without a text, in something that resembled a public speech or simple performance.
Before Easter intends to recreate some of that early church feel. It offers the Gospel of Mark from a single narrator from memory. The entire Gospel before Jesus descends the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem, Mark chapters 1-10; everything before the events we remember as “Holy Week.”
The play is fully immersive; the main locations and participants of the Gospel will “inhabit” different sections of the church and willing audience members will be called into telling and recreating the story itself. The play will call all the children present (who are willing!) to the front two different times. We hope that the play will hopefully be very compelling for them (imaging, specially, children of all ages 4 and up).
