⭐ The opening line fronts the vineyard before the man who plants it, and the four things built into it are Isaiah’s own list. Mark’s Greek word order puts ampelōna, “a vineyard,” first in the sentence, ahead of its own subject — an odd shape in Greek, and one this translation keeps rather than smooths into ordinary English word order. The four things the man does to it — plant it, wall it, dig a wine-vat, build a tower — are the identical four of Isaiah’s Song of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5:1–2, not yet on these pages): dug, cleared of stones, planted with the choicest vine, a tower built in the midst of it, a wine-vat hewn out. Anyone who knew that song already knew this parable was about Israel before the tenants do a single thing.

⚠ Three waves of servants, escalating — and Mark alone gives the second one a rare, ugly verb. Ekephaliōsan (v4) is built on kephalē, “head,” and means something like “struck on the head” or “wounded in the head” — a verb that occurs nowhere else in the New Testament and is rare enough in surviving Greek that its precise sense is argued over. Luke’s own telling of this scene (20:11–12, not yet on these pages) has no equivalent word at all; Matthew compresses all three waves of servants into two undifferentiated batches (21:35–36, already on these pages) with no head-wound, no beating-by-name. Mark is the only Synoptic that individuates a specific injury on a specific messenger.

⭐ The son is called “beloved,” the word this Gospel has already used twice from heaven. Huion agapēton, “a beloved son” (v6), is the identical phrase the voice from heaven uses of Jesus himself at his baptism and again at the transfiguration — a title the reader already carries into this parable, though no character inside the story could possibly hear it that way. The owner’s own reasoning — “they will respect my son” — is presented as a plausible hope, not an obviously naive one, which is what makes the tenants’ calculation in the next verse land as a real decision rather than a foregone one.

⭐ The tenants’ plan only makes sense against a real legal background: an unclaimed inheritance could pass to whoever held the land. “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours” (v7) has struck many readers as a strange calculation — killing an heir does not ordinarily transfer his property to his killers. The reading argued from Jewish legal custom of the period is that ownerless land (here, an absentee owner presumed to have no other heir once this one is gone) could be claimed by whoever was in possession of it; if that is right, the tenants are not being irrational, they are gambling on a real legal gap. The library reports the reading rather than asserting the custom as settled fact — the point of the parable does not depend on which is true.

⚠ Mark kills the son inside the vineyard and casts the body out; Matthew’s parallel reverses the order. Here the tenants “killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard” (v8) — death first, expulsion of the corpse after, the ancient insult of denying a burial. Matthew’s telling of the identical moment has them “threw him out of the vineyard and killed him” (21:39, already on these pages) — expelled while still alive, killed outside. The two Gospels do not agree on where the killing itself happens, and neither this translation nor the manuscripts smooth the difference away.

⭐ Mark’s Jesus asks the closing question and answers it himself; Matthew’s crowd answers it for him, with a wordplay Mark’s version has no room for. “What will the owner of the vineyard do?” (v9) gets no reply from any listener here — Jesus supplies the verdict in the same breath that asks the question. Matthew’s parallel has the crowd answer instead: “He will destroy those wretches wretchedly” (21:41, already on these pages), kakous kakōs apolesei — a genuine paranomasia, the same root twice in a row, that exists only because someone other than Jesus is speaking the line. Mark’s version, plain and unadorned, has no audience left to supply it.

The quotation is Psalm 118:22–23 (not yet on these pages), the identical two verses Matthew’s parallel quotes at exactly this point in the story — and the same psalm whose closing acclamation the crowd sang nine verses into the previous chapter of this Gospel, on Jesus’s own entry into the city. In one week, by this Gospel’s own account, the crowd sings the end of Psalm 118 over him and the authorities hear the middle of the same psalm quoted against them — the fixed rendering head of the corner and the divine name Jehovah, already established at that earlier scene, are kept identical here for the same reason.

⚠ Matthew’s version of this same moment does not stop where Mark’s does. Mark ends the scene at v12 with the authorities backing off, afraid of the crowd. Matthew’s parallel adds two verses with no equivalent here at all — the kingdom taken away and given to a fruit-bearing nation, and the stone that shatters whoever falls on it or is crushed by it (21:43–44, already on these pages). Whether Mark simply stopped short of material Matthew later supplied, or Matthew expanded on a shared original, is a question about the Synoptic relationships this library does not try to settle from inside a single chapter; what is checkable is that Mark’s own text, as it stands, contains neither verse.

“They knew that he had spoken the parable against them” (v12) makes explicit what the parable had only shown: the chief priests, scribes and elders who demanded his credentials one chapter earlier (11:27–33, already on these pages) are themselves the tenants of the story they have just heard.

⚠ Mark’s verb for the plot is a hunting term; Matthew’s is a snaring term, and the two are not the same image. Agreusōsin (v13), “to catch, to hunt down,” is built on the same root as agra, a catch or haul — the vocabulary of pursuit. Matthew’s parallel uses pagideusōsin, from pagis, a snare or bird-trap — a stationary device set to spring, not a chase. Both verbs describe the identical plot; neither is the more “correct” word, and the choice of image is each evangelist’s own. The alliance itself is the same coalition already flagged three chapters earlier: Pharisees and Herodians, together only when there is a plot against him.

⭐ Mark doubles the question where Matthew asks it once, and names the accusers’ own motive a stronger word than Matthew does. “Should we give it, or should we not give it?” (v14) has no equivalent clause in Matthew’s version of the identical trap (22:17, already on these pages) — a redundant doubling-back that is one of this Gospel’s recognizable habits. And where Matthew’s narrator says Jesus perceived their ponēria, malice (22:18), Mark’s narrator names it hypokrisis (v15) — hypocrisy specifically, the performance of sincerity over its absence, a sharper diagnosis of the flattery that opens their question (“you do not look at people’s faces”) than a general charge of ill will.

The poll-tax (kēnsos, from the Latin census) was a head-tax paid directly to Rome by every adult in occupied Judea — not a customs duty or a temple due, but the plainest possible mark of subjection to a foreign power. Answer yes, and he alienates a crowd that had shouted about a coming kingdom of David one chapter earlier; answer no, and the Herodians in the room have a capital charge ready to carry to Pilate. Full treatment of the trap’s mechanics, the image and inscription on the coin, and “give back” (apodote, kept over the flatter “give” some shelf versions print) is at Matthew 22’s own note, which this scene repeats almost word for word; what is new here is Mark’s own reaction line, “they were utterly amazed” (exethaumazon, an intensified compound of the ordinary verb “to marvel”) against Matthew’s plain ethaumasan (22:22) — a stronger response to the identical answer.

Shelf comparison on the tax itself: KJV and ASV both print “tribute,” a general word for a subject people’s payment; the NWT 1984 is more technical, “head tax”; the TLB paraphrases past the Latin term entirely, “is it right to pay taxes to Rome, or not?” This translation follows the NWT’s precision, matching the choice already made at Matthew 22:17.

The riddle itself, the Sadducees who reject a resurrection, and the argument from the present tense of “I am the God of Abraham” are covered in full detail at Matthew 22’s parallel note, which tells the identical exchange nearly word for word. The legal background is Deuteronomy 25:5–10, already on these pages — a childless widow’s brother-in-law obliged to marry her and raise an heir for the dead man; run seven times, the Sadducees think, it produces an absurdity at the resurrection.

⭐ “In the passage about the bush” is the exact phrase a note nine chapters back promised would arrive here. Epi tou batou (v26) uses epi with the genitive in a sense that is not “at” or “in the time of” but “in the passage concerning” — a citation formula, naming a section of the book of Moses by its subject rather than its chapter. Mark 2’s own note on “epi Abiathar archiereōs” flagged this construction as the strongest defence of that earlier, harder puzzle — where Mark names Abiathar as the priest of the shewbread episode when 1 Samuel names his father Ahimelech — arguing that “in the passage about Abiathar the high priest” would mean the section of 1 Samuel in which Abiathar becomes the notable figure, not a claim about who held the office that day. This verse is the promised evidence: Mark does use the construction exactly that way, here, unambiguously, of a section of Exodus everyone already calls “the passage about the bush.” It does not prove the Abiathar reading; it does prove the idiom is Mark’s own habit and not an invented defence.

Shelf comparison on the phrase: ASV parses it the same way this translation does, “in the place concerning the Bush”; the Spanish NVI reads «en el pasaje sobre la zarza», word for word the rendering adopted here. KJV and Geneva both instead read it as a plain location, “how in the bush God spake unto him”, and the Douay-Rheims reads the same way in its own wording, “how in the bush God spoke to him” — the older, simpler parse, and not obviously wrong on the Greek alone. ⚠ The TLB goes further than any Greek word licenses, naming the source outright: “have you never read in the book of Exodus about Moses and the burning bush?” — Mark’s own text says only “the book of Moses,” and the book-name is the paraphrase supplying an answer the Greek leaves as a citation formula, not a title.

⭐ Mark closes the exchange with a line Matthew’s parallel does not have. “You are quite mistaken” (v27, poly planasthe) is Mark’s own addition to the rebuke; Matthew’s version ends the sentence at “he is not the God of the dead but of the living,” with no closing verdict on the questioners themselves. The same verb, planasthe, opened the rebuke at v24 (“you go astray”) and closes it here, bracketing the whole answer between two accusations of being led astray rather than one.

⭐ This is the fourth term Deuteronomy’s Hebrew never had, and Mark keeps it where Matthew drops it. The me’od dictionary entry, at Deuteronomy 6:5, already tracked this exact discrepancy forward: the Hebrew Shema asks for love with heart, soul and me’od — “utmost,” an intensifier turned noun, not a fourth organ or faculty — and the Greek New Testament could not settle on one equivalent. Matthew’s version of this same commandment has only three terms, substituting dianoia, “mind,” for the Hebrew’s strength. Mark’s quotation (v30) keeps both: dianoia AND ischys, mind and strength, heart and soul and mind and strength, four organs answering three Hebrew ones. ⚠ Confirmed directly against the archived Greek: Luke 10:27 (not yet on these pages) also has all four, so Mark is not alone in this — but Luke orders them differently. Luke’s list runs heart, soul, strength, mind — ischys before dianoia — where Mark’s runs heart, soul, mind, strength. Three witnesses to one Hebrew intensifier, and no two put the same four words in the same order. Since the quotation is direct scripture, quoting the same divine name already fixed at Deuteronomy 6:4 and at Mark 11:9’s own note, this translation reads “Jehovah our God, Jehovah is one” through both v29 and v30 rather than “the Lord” — the identical divine name, with no second referent in the sentence to confuse it with (contrast vv35–37’s own note, nine verses later in this same chapter, where the choice runs the other way). ⚠ This does not quite match an already-published choice. Matthew 22:37 quotes the very same clause — agapēseis kyrion ton theon sou, “you shall love the Lord your God” — on its own, with no “Hear, O Israel” declaration in front of it, and that chapter reads “the Lord your God,” not “Jehovah your God.” Taken by itself, Matthew’s clause is exactly as strong a candidate for the divine name as this one. This translation follows Mark’s own fuller quotation as one continuous unit governed by v29’s declaration rather than splitting the two verses’ treatment apart mid-sentence — a judgment call, not a rule the two chapters apply identically, and stated here rather than left for a reader to notice unexplained.

⭐ The scribe does not simply repeat the answer back — he rewrites it, and his rewrite is what the me’od entry was tracking too. Restating Jesus’s own four terms in v33, the scribe drops “soul” and “mind” and reaches instead for synesis, “understanding” — a fifth word for the same Hebrew intensifier, used by neither Jesus in this chapter nor Matthew’s parallel. Three witnesses, three different solutions to one untranslatable Hebrew adverb, inside two chapters of one New Testament: Matthew’s dianoia, Mark’s Jesus giving dianoia AND ischys both, and Mark’s scribe substituting synesis for the first two entirely.

⚠ A real textual variant sits inside the shelf at v33. The Greek text behind this translation reads three terms at v33 — heart, understanding, strength — matching ASV, “with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength”, and NWT, “with one’s whole heart and with one’s whole understanding and with one’s whole strength”. KJV, following the Byzantine text tradition, prints FOUR: “with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength” — an added psychēs the earlier manuscripts behind this translation do not carry. This is a genuine manuscript difference, not a translation choice on either side.

⭐ The scribe values the two commandments above temple sacrifice, standing inside the temple, and he is not the first person in this Gospel to say so. “More than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” echoes Hosea 6:6 (not yet on these pages) without quoting it — the same principle Jesus himself quotes outright, twice, earlier in this shared tradition: Matthew 9:13 and 12:7: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” A scribe, of all people — the class this Gospel has shown opposing Jesus repeatedly — arrives independently at a judgment Jesus has already made twice, which is presumably why the commendation that follows is real and not sarcastic.

“Thoughtfully” (v34, nounechōs) is a genuine rarity: it occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, built from nous, “mind,” plus echō, “to have” — literally “mind-having-ly.” “You are not far from the kingdom of God” is the closest thing to unqualified praise this Gospel gives any scribe, and it closes the string of hostile questions that began with the authority challenge one chapter earlier (11:27–33, already on these pages): “no one dared question him any more” sits here, at v34, one exchange before the David’s-son riddle — which Jesus himself asks, of no one in particular, once the authorities have gone quiet.

⭐ Nine verses after the Shema quote settled on “Jehovah,” this quote deliberately does not. Psalm 110:1 (not yet on these pages) is quoted from the Greek Old Testament, where both the Hebrew’s divine name and its ordinary word for “my lord” are rendered by the identical Greek word, kyrios — a distinction the Hebrew keeps and the Greek has already erased before Mark ever quotes it. Matthew’s note on the identical quotation lays out the reasoning this translation follows here too: printing the divine name for only the FIRST kyrios would manufacture a distinction Mark’s own Greek source does not draw, and the argument itself depends on both being the same word — David calling his own descendant by the identical title he uses for God is the whole riddle, and the riddle needs one title, not two. So “The Lord said to my Lord” is kept exactly as printed at Matthew 22:44, against the pull of the fixed rendering used nine verses earlier in this very chapter (vv28–34) for a quotation with no such second referent to confuse.

Shelf comparison: most of the shelf leaves both instances as “Lord” — KJV, ASV, NIV, Geneva, the Douay-Rheims, and the Spanish RV/RV60/NVI alike. Only the NWT, in both its 1984 and 2013 editions, restores the divine name for the first occurrence — “Jehovah said to my Lord” — the doctrinal choice this translation’s own naming convention exists to flag honestly rather than adopt silently. ⚠ The TLB paraphrases past the ambiguity a third way, “God said to my Lord,” sidestepping the pun that the whole argument is built on.

⭐ Mark places the silencing of the authorities one exchange earlier than Matthew does — so here, it is the CROWD, not the authorities, left listening. Matthew’s parallel closes this exact riddle with “no one was able to answer him a word… from that day on” (22:46, already on these pages) — the silence falls immediately after the David’s-son question itself. Mark already spent that line one exchange earlier, after the scribe’s own commendation (v34): by the time Jesus asks his own unanswered question here, the hostile interrogation has already stopped, and what closes this scene instead is “the great crowd was listening to him gladly” (v37) — a line Matthew’s own telling of this riddle does not have. Where Matthew ends on the authorities’ silence, Mark ends on the crowd’s pleasure.

⭐ “Long robes” pays off a promise made from inside the last book of this project. The stolē dictionary entry, first written at Revelation 22:14, named this exact verse among the garment’s occurrences — “what the scribes walk about in” — before this chapter existed to link it to. Stolais (v38) is the long, formal, distinguishing garment; walking around in one, being greeted by name in the marketplace, taking the first seats in synagogues and the first places at feasts (v39) are all status performed in public, the identical vocabulary Matthew’s much longer discourse against the scribes and Pharisees uses for the same two honors, seats and dinners (already on these pages) — though Matthew’s chapter 23 has no equivalent line about long robes or devoured houses at all; those two charges are Mark’s own (and Luke’s parallel, 20:46–47, not yet on these pages).

⚠ “Devour” is a compound built for exactly this appetite. Katesthiontes (v40) is esthiō, “to eat,” with the intensifying prefix kata- — to eat entirely, to consume down to nothing. The specific charge, exploiting the property of women with no husband to protect their legal interests, is the harshest concrete accusation Mark’s Jesus brings against the scribal class as a whole, and it is followed at once by a widow who has nothing left for anyone to devour.

“For a show” (prophasei) is built on phainō, “to show, to appear” — an outward display standing in for the thing it displays, the identical accusation the scribes and Pharisees receive at length in Matthew 23:5, already on these pages: “all their works they do in order to be SEEN.”

⭐ Mark glosses a small Jewish coin in Roman terms, the identical habit this Gospel uses for Aramaic. A lepton was the smallest coin in circulation in Judea, worth a fraction of a Roman as; Mark explains its value to a reader who may not know the local currency by naming what two of them equal in Roman money, a quadrans (v42) — exactly the move this Gospel makes when it keeps an Aramaic phrase and translates it on the spot (talitha cumi, Ephphatha, neither yet on these pages), reaching here for currency instead of language. The coin both the rich and the widow use is called by the same word, chalkon (v41), literally “copper” — the rich pour in copper by the handful, and copper is exactly what the widow has two of.

Shelf comparison on the coin: KJV and ASV both keep the ancient units outright, “two mites, which make a farthing” — the source of the English idiom “the widow’s mite” — while Geneva reaches for a rarer word still, “a quadrin.” NWT drops the named units for a description, “two small coins, which have very little value”, and NIV does the same, “two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents”; the TLB modernizes furthest of all, “two pennies.” The Spanish RV keeps its own archaic Spanish coin names, «dos blancas, que son un maravedí», where RV60 keeps “blancas” but glosses the second word as «un cuadrante» rather than a maravedí — a third, later Spanish attempt at the same problem Mark himself was solving for his own first readers.

⭐ The last word of the chapter is the same word for “livelihood” and “life,” and this translation cannot keep both senses at once. Bion (v44) is the ordinary Greek word for one’s means of living, one’s livelihood — and it is also, in a different sense of the identical word, simply “life” (the root of English “biology”). “Her whole bios” says, in one word, both that she gave everything she had to live on and that she gave her whole life — a pun this translation can only gesture at, since English keeps the two senses in two different words. The contrast the chapter closes on is exact: the rich give ek tou perisseuontos, “out of what overflows,” a surplus that costs nothing to part with; she gives ek tēs hysterēseōs, “out of her lack” — the measure is never the amount given, but what is left over afterward.