Unlocking the Puzzle

A shorter, simpler first draft of the Gospel of Mark has been theorized by New Testament scholars for almost two hundred years. Using literary tools, David Oliver Smith strips away interpolation and redaction from the canonical Gospel to reveal that long-sought first draft--the Original Gospel of Mark. Original Mark, shorter than the canonical version and with several large blocks of text replaced in their original locations, reveals a coherent structure and a different picture of who Jesus is. But it is anything other than simple. The Original Gospel also presents puzzles for the curious reader of Mark to solve, and Smith has found the keys to their solution. Analysis of the text that was interpolated into Mark reveals who that redactor might have been. Evidence is presented that it was the author of the Gospel of Luke who redacted the first-written Gospel, jumbled its structure, and changed its Christology. Follow the analysis of literary structures created by the genius who wrote Mark's Gospel and discover the astounding design of the Original Gospel of Mark.

""Nobody doubts that Mark's Gospel is a puzzle, and nobody unlocks it better than David Smith. His key is called a 'chiasmus,' a literary form, sometimes called inverted parallelism, that pervades many books of the Bible. Using his fantastic chiastic skills, David unearths Mark's original Gospel, as well as several plausible theories involving both St. Paul and Josephus. This is a must-read for anyone interested in finding the historical Jesus.""
--Bill Cummings, author of The Checkered Church and Oh My God

""In Unlocking the Puzzle, Smith analyzes the Gospel of Mark as a huge chiastic (AB-B'A') structure, made of longer and shorter chiasms (pericopes and groups of them displaying the same structure). . . . The end product is a hypothetical reconstruction of the Gospel as Mark originally wrote it. It is staggering to imagine this eagle-eyed scholar's fantastic grasp of this ancient text! Mark himself would learn a thing or two from Unlocking the Puzzle!""
--Robert M. Price, host of The Bible Geek podcast; author of The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and The Amazing Colossal Apostle

""Unlocking the Puzzle is significant for people interested in learning what Mark wrote in the original version of his Gospel, who may have modified it, and why. Smith applies literary forensic methods to Mark's writings to determine what was redacted from the original, changed, and rearranged, things ancient authors apparently feared. By the analysis, Smith solves a perplexing problem about the Gospel of Mark that has intrigued scholars for decades.""
--C. J. Ransom, Plasma Physics

David Oliver Smith (JD, Duke University) is a retired lawyer who began his study of the Gospel of Mark after his retirement in 2006. He is the author of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul (2011). He lives in La Quinta, California.