The Passover plot opens with a verb this Gospel has been saving. Kratēsantes, “having seized,” is the word Mark 3's own note flagged when Jesus's family came kratēsai auton, to take hold of him, and it called it “the same verb used of the arresting party in Gethsemane” (3:21). That promise lands in this chapter five times over: the plotters want to seize him (v1), Judas tells the crowd to seize him (v44), they seize him (v46), he reminds them they never seized him in the temple (v49), and they seize a young man who slips out of their hands (v51). The word that began with a family's worry ends with a squad's orders.

“Not during the festival, or there will be an uproar” is a plan the chapter immediately defeats: the arrest happens on the festival's own night, and the reason it can happen quietly is the one thing the plotters had not counted on — an insider walking in with an offer (v10). Dolos, “trickery,” is the same word Matthew 26:4 uses of the same plan; this translation keeps its rendering. KJV reads ‘by craft’; NWT 1984 reads ‘by crafty device’; NIV softens it to ‘secretly’, which keeps the stealth and loses the deceit.

“The Passover and the Unleavened Bread” are two festivals that had long since run together: the Passover lamb was slaughtered on the fourteenth day of the first month (Exodus 12:6, already on these pages) and the seven-day feast of unleavened bread began on the fifteenth (Leviticus 23:5–6, already on these pages). Mark names both, plainly, and ta azyma is literally “the unleavened things” — a plural the English capitalizes as a feast.

⭐ Mark's sandwich again, and this one explains itself. The chapter starts a story (the priests plotting, vv1–2), interrupts it with a completely different one (a woman pouring out a fortune on Jesus's head, vv3–9), and then finishes the first (Judas walking over to the priests, vv10–11) — the technique Mark 3's note named at its first clear appearance and said to watch for. The two halves interpret each other: in the middle a woman spends three hundred denarii on him and is told she will be remembered; on either side of her, men are arranging to be paid for him.

Nardou pistikēs — “pure nard” — and an adjective whose meaning is disputed. Nard is spikenard, an aromatic oil from a plant of the Himalayan foothills, which is why it cost what it did. Pistikos stands in exactly two verses of the New Testament, this one and John 12:3's account of the same kind of oil (not yet on these pages), and nothing else in the New Testament explains it. The main proposals: from pistis, “trustworthy,” so GENUINE, unadulterated; from pinō, “drink,” so LIQUID; or a trade name, perhaps from the pistachio. NWT 1984 reads ‘genuine nard’; ASV and NIV read ‘pure nard’; KJV and Geneva skip the adjective and print ‘spikenard’. This translation prints “pure” — the reading most scholars favor, and the one that commits the reader to the least — and records the range here. See the new nardos pistikē entry.

⚠ Only Mark has her break the jar. Syntripsasa, “crushing, shattering”: an alabaster flask was sealed at the neck, and she does not unstop it, she snaps it. Matthew's parallel has her simply pour, and John's (12:3, not yet on these pages) has her pour a pound of it on his feet; neither breaks anything. Mark alone records the gesture that makes the gift unrepeatable — a jar that cannot be closed again, spent all at once.

⭐ Who complains grows more specific in each Gospel. Mark says “some” (tines); Matthew says “the disciples”; John's account names one man, Judas Iscariot (John 12:4, not yet on these pages). Mark also gives the price — “more than three hundred denarii,” where Matthew says only “much” — and a denarius was a labourer's wage for a day (Matthew 20:2, already on these pages), so the jar was roughly a year of work poured out in a minute. “Scolding her sternly” is enebrimōnto, the snorting-with-anger verb this translation met at 1:43, where Jesus “sternly” warned the healed leper; here it turns the other way, on the one person in the room who has done something for him.

“The poor you always have with you” is a quotation with its second half attached. Deuteronomy 15:11 (already on these pages): “the needy will not cease from within the land — therefore I am commanding you… you shall surely open your hand.” Matthew and John keep the first half. Mark alone keeps a clause restating the second: and whenever you want, you can do good to them. The saying has been quoted for centuries as a shrug about poverty; in Mark it arrives with the Law's own obligation still attached.

⭐ She perfumes a body that will not get its perfume. “She has perfumed my body beforehand for its burial” uses myrisai, a verb that stands in this one verse and nowhere else in the New Testament; entaphiasmos, the preparation of a body for the tomb, stands only here and in John 12:7. Mark's own ending will send women to the tomb with spices to anoint him, too late to do it (16:1, not yet on these pages). The only anointing of his body this Gospel records is this one, done before he died, by a woman the men at the table rebuked for it.

⚠ “In memory of her” — and her name is not given. Jesus promises that what she did will be told wherever the good news goes, and Mark tells it, and does not say who she was. John's Gospel names a woman at Bethany who anoints him as Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus (12:3, not yet on these pages); whether that is the same event, told differently, or a second anointing is a question interpreters answer both ways, and this library reports both. Simon the leper, the host, is named; the woman who is promised a memorial is not — see the new Simon the leper entry.

⚠ A definite article that should not be there. The earliest text calls Judas ho heis tōn dōdeka — not “one of the Twelve” but THE one of the Twelve. It is the only place in the New Testament where that exact phrase carries the article, and the Byzantine tradition behind the KJV moves the article onto “Iscariot” instead, leaving ‘one of the twelve’. The readings on offer: the article is simply loose Greek, a Semitic “one” with no weight; or it means the one already known, the Judas the list in 3:19 introduced as “the one who also handed him over”; or it means the one of the Twelve who would do this. This translation prints the article, strange as it is, because the strangeness is in the Greek. ASV alone on the English shelf hears it: ‘he that was one of the twelve’.

Mark names no price. In Matthew 26:15 Judas asks “what are you willing to give me?” and the priests weigh out thirty pieces of silver. In Mark he asks for nothing; the priests are glad, and it is THEY who offer, “promised to give him silver” — argyrion, the metal, with no amount. Mark has no motive for Judas at all, and no sum; the act stands without an explanation.

“Hand over,” not “betray” — kept here as throughout this Gospel. Paradidōmi sounds in seven verses of this chapter (10, 11, 18, 21, 41, 42, 44), and this translation renders it “hand over” every time, as at 3:19 and 10:33. The reason is the verb’s own range, not a verdict on Judas. Paradidōmi is built on didōmi, “give,” and in this same Gospel it is what happens to John the Baptist when he is arrested (1:14), what the disciples are warned will be done to them before councils (13:9), and what the chief priests will do with Jesus the next morning when they bring him to Pilate (15:1). “Betray” fits Judas, and it can be carried through the passives here too: ‘the Son of man is betrayed’ stands at both v21 and v41 in the KJV. But it names a breach of trust the Greek word does not carry on its own, and it cannot follow the verb out of Judas’s hands into the priests’ and Pilate’s. One English verb lets the reader hear one Greek verb pass from hand to hand. NWT 1984 and NIV read ‘betray’ at v10; ASV reads ‘deliver him unto them’. The paradidōmi entry sets out the whole pattern.

“When they would sacrifice the Passover”: here pascha is the animal. The one Greek word covers the festival (v1), the meal (vv12, 14, 16) and the lamb itself, and in this clause only the lamb makes sense — you do not sacrifice a meal. Ethyon is imperfect, the customary thing done that day each year, which the English “would sacrifice” carries. NWT 1984 brackets an explanatory word: ‘the passover [victim]’; NIV writes it out, ‘the Passover lamb’; KJV keeps it bare, ‘when they killed the passover’. See the pesach entry.

⚠ The Last Supper chronology question starts in this verse. Mark's phrase ties the day to the slaughter of the lambs, which by the Law fell on the fourteenth (Exodus 12:6, already on these pages), and he makes the meal of v17 a Passover meal. John's Gospel instead puts the crucifixion itself on the day the lambs were killed, with the Passover meal still ahead (John 18:28; 19:14, neither yet on these pages). The proposed reconciliations — two calendars in use at once, a Passover-like meal held a day early, or a dating shaped by theology on one side or the other — are all old, and none is decisive. This library prints both Gospels' dates and does not vote.

⭐ Mark gives the sign; Matthew gives a blank. Mark's instructions are concrete: a man carrying a clay jar of water — keramion, an earthenware vessel, which stands only here and in Luke 22:10's telling of the same errand (not yet on these pages) — will meet you; follow him; say this to the master of the house. Matthew 26:18 reduces all of it to pros ton deina, “to a certain man,” a Greek placeholder for a name the speaker will not say. Here Mark is the more specific of the two about everything except a name: a man, a jar, water, a door, a room upstairs. The room itself is a katalyma, a guest room (v14 — see the katalyma entry), and an anagaion, an upstairs room, “furnished” — estrōmenon, literally spread, with couches or carpets for reclining; see the Upper Room entry, where this verse is one of the two in the New Testament that use the word.

⭐ Only Mark adds “one who is eating with me,” and it is a psalm. Matthew 26:21 has “one of you will hand me over” and stops. Mark's extra phrase, ho esthiōn met' emou, points to Psalm 41, whose Hebrew complains of ish shelomi… okhel lachmi, “my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, who eats my bread” (Psalm 41:10 in the Hebrew numbering, 41:9 in most English Bibles; not yet on these pages). The words are not quoted, only echoed; the Hebrew phrase okhel lachmi, “who eats my bread,” stands in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, that one. Mark lets the table do the accusing: the one who will hand him over is one of the Twelve (v20) and has his hand in the same bowl.

“Surely not I?” — mēti egō, a question built to expect the answer no. Matthew's disciples add “Lord” and Matthew's Judas asks separately and is answered (26:22, 25); Mark's Judas is never singled out at the table at all. Each asks it “one after another,” heis kata heis, a colloquial doubling (“one by one”) the Byzantine tradition elaborated: KJV adds ‘and another said, Is it I?’, and RV60 keeps it in Spanish, «Y el otro: ¿Seré yo?» — absent from the earlier manuscripts: ASV reads only ‘Is it I?’, and NWT 1984 ‘It is not I, is it?’.

“It would be good for him if that man had not been born.” The earliest text has no verb in the first clause — kalon autō, “good for him” — and the Byzantine tradition supplies one (“good were it”). “The Son of Man goes, just as it is written about him” names no text; Mark does not say which scripture he means, and this translation does not choose one for him.

⭐ The supper is told in the words of the two feeding miracles. “Taking bread and blessing it, he broke it and gave it” is the sequence of 6:41, the five thousand, and “giving thanks” over the cup is the verb of 8:6, the four thousand. Mark keeps the two verbs apart exactly as Matthew 26's note set out — eulogēsas, blessed, over the bread; eucharistēsas, gave thanks, over the cup — so a reader of this Gospel has heard every gesture of this meal before, on a hillside.

⚠ In Mark they drink first, and are told what it was afterwards. “And they all drank from it. And he said to them, This is my blood…” — the narration completes the drinking before the words of interpretation. Matthew's order is a command: “Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood” (26:27–28). Over the bread, likewise, Mark's Jesus says only “Take”; the Byzantine tradition adds “eat” from Matthew, which is where KJV's ‘Take, eat: this is my body’ comes from, and ASV's ‘Take ye: this is my body’ does not follow it.

“The blood of the covenant” is Moses's sentence. At Sinai Moses sprinkles the people and says “Behold the blood of the covenant” (Exodus 24:8, already on these pages), dam ha-berit. Mark's to haima mou tēs diathēkēs keeps that phrase and adds one word to it: MY. ⚠ The Byzantine tradition adds a second word, kainēs, “new,” out of Jeremiah 31:31's “new covenant” (31:30 on this site's page, which follows the Hebrew numbering) and the familiar wording of Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25 (neither yet on these pages) — which is where KJV's ‘my blood of the new testament’ comes from; Douay and Geneva have ‘new testament’ as well, and RV60 reads «nuevo pacto». ASV, NIV and NWT 1984 all read ‘blood of the covenant’ with no “new.” The diathēkē entry traces why “testament” and “covenant” are both on the shelf.

⭐ “For many,” with a third preposition. Hyper pollōn, “on behalf of many,” appears in this verse and nowhere else in the New Testament. Four chapters ago the Son of Man came to give his life a ransom anti pollōn, “in exchange for many” (10:45); Matthew's supper has peri pollōn, “concerning many” (26:28). Behind all three stands the servant of Isaiah 53:12 (already on these pages), who “bore the sin of many.” Mark does not add Matthew's “for the forgiveness of sins”; he leaves the phrase at “many.”

⚠ Shelf comparison on estin, “is,” at vv22 and 24: NWT 1984 reads ‘this means my body’, and the same verb again over the cup at v24; its Spanish twin TNM 1987 likewise «esto significa mi cuerpo». The Greek verb is the ordinary “is”; “means” is an interpretation of it, reflecting a symbolic reading of the supper, and is flagged here as a doctrinal rendering rather than adopted. ASV, KJV and NIV print ‘this is my body’, and so does this translation — which also takes no side in the old dispute over what that “is” asserts.

“I will never again drink” is ouketi ou mē, a stacked triple negative — no longer, not, by no means — that ordinary English cannot stack. The pledge ends on “new,” kainon, the word the scribes wanted one verse earlier: the NEW thing in Mark's own text is the wine of the kingdom, not the covenant.

“When they had sung the hymn.” One participle, hymnēsantes, as in Matthew 26:30. The Passover order later written down in the Mishnah (Pesachim 10:6–7) splits the Hallel psalms around the meal and finishes them over the last cup, and that is the likeliest thing sung here; Mark does not say, and this translation adds nothing to it.

Zechariah's sword becomes God's hand. “I will strike the shepherd” quotes Zechariah 13:7 (not yet on these pages), where the Hebrew is an order to a sword: hakh et-haro'eh, “strike the shepherd,” an imperative. Matthew 26's note sets out the shift; Mark has it identically, pataxō, “I will strike,” and without Matthew's additions — no “because of me this night,” no “sheep of the flock.” ⚠ The Byzantine tradition supplies the first of those from Matthew; KJV reads ‘All ye shall be offended because of me this night’, where ASV reads only ‘All ye shall be offended’. “Made to stumble” is the passive of skandalizō: see the skandalizō entry, and note that NIV's ‘fall away’ drops the trap the word is named for.

⭐⭐ Mark alone has two crowings. “Before a rooster crows dis, twice” — and the word dis appears in no other Gospel's version of this prediction. Matthew 26:34, Luke 22:34 and John 13:38 (the last two not yet on these pages) all have one crowing, and in the courtyard Matthew, Luke and John each report one (Matthew 26:74; Luke 22:60; John 18:27). Mark alone counts: a first crowing after the first denial (v68), a second after the third (v72), and Peter remembering the word “twice” exactly as it was said. The count was troublesome enough that the manuscripts disagree over the first crowing, set out at vv66–72.

“He kept insisting all the more.” Ekperissōs elalei — an imperfect, he kept saying it, with an intensive adverb used nowhere else in the New Testament (Paul has a still longer compound built on it, hyperekperissou). Peter's “yet not I” (v29) is his whole boast in three words, where Matthew's Peter says more (“I will never stumble”). And “they were all saying the same”: every one of them promised; nineteen verses later, “they all fled” (v50).

⭐⭐ “Keep watch and pray” — the pairing a scribe once wrote into Mark 13. At 13:33 the Byzantine manuscripts behind KJV add “and pray” to Jesus's command to watch, and that chapter's note suggested the scribe was reaching forward to this verse rather than sideways to Matthew. Here is the verse: grēgoreite kai proseuchesthe, a command to stay awake paired with prayer in the same order, spoken this time by Jesus in the earliest text with no variant on the pairing (the stay-awake verb at 13:33 is agrypneite, here grēgoreite). Read with this scene in mind, the addition at 13:33 looks like a copyist's memory of Gethsemane carried back into the discourse that predicted it.

⭐ And Mark 13 predicted the whole scene. That chapter's parable ended: keep watch, “so that he does not come suddenly and find you sleeping” (13:36). Here he comes and finds them sleeping (v37), comes again and finds them sleeping (v40), and comes a third time to tell them to sleep on (v41). This translation keeps Mark 13's own rendering of grēgoreō, “keep watch” (vv34, 37, 38), rather than the “stay awake” Matthew 26 uses for the same verb, so that the English reader can hear the discourse coming true.

“Overwhelmed with alarm” is a verb only Mark uses. Ekthambeomai occurs in four verses of the New Testament, all of them in this Gospel: the crowd that sees him come down from the mountain (9:15, “overwhelmed with amazement”), this verse, and the women at the empty tomb (16:5–6, not yet on these pages). The same word covers wonder and horror; here it is the horror (see the new ekthambeomai entry). Matthew 26:37 replaces it with lypeisthai, “to be grieved,” and keeps only Mark's second verb, adēmonein, “anguished.” KJV reads ‘sore amazed’; ASV ‘greatly amazed’; NWT 1984 ‘stunned’; NIV ‘deeply distressed’. “My soul is deeply grieved” is perilypos, the adjective of the Greek Psalter's refrain in Psalm 42, “why are you deeply grieved, my soul?” (42:6 and 42:12 in the Hebrew numbering; not yet on these pages).

⭐ Abba. Matthew's Jesus prays “My Father” (26:39); Mark's says the Aramaic word and then translates it, Abba ho patēr, “Abba, Father.” Abba occurs three times in the New Testament — here, Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 (not yet on these pages) — and every time with the Greek beside it. The abba entry explains why it survived, and why “daddy” is not what it means. TLB renders the whole phrase ‘Father, Father’, which is literal about the meaning and loses the sound. “All things are possible for you” is Mark's alone; Matthew has “if it is possible.” And “this cup” is the one he asked James and John about in 10:38–39 — two of the three men now asleep a stone's throw away.

⚠ “Simon, are you sleeping?” In 3:16 Jesus “laid on Simon the name Peter,” and from that verse on, this Gospel calls him Peter. This is the only place after it where he is called Simon — by Jesus, in the garden, asleep. Matthew 26:40 has no name in the rebuke at all.

“Come into testing” — and Matthew's “enter.” Mark's earliest text reads elthēte, “come,” where Matthew 26:41 reads eiselthēte, “enter,” and the Byzantine tradition gives Mark Matthew's verb; KJV reads ‘lest ye enter into temptation’, while NWT 1984 keeps the earlier verb, ‘in order that YOU do not come into temptation’ — and supplies a vocative the Greek does not have, ‘Men,’, which TNM 1987 copies as «Varones». “Testing” for peirasmos matches this translation at 1:13; see the peirasmos entry.

“They did not know what to answer him” (v40) is the sentence Mark used of Peter on the mountain of the transfiguration, “he did not know what to answer” (9:6); the phrase stands in those two verses of the New Testament and no others, and both times the same three men are there — once on a mountain in glory, once in a garden in the dark.

⚠ Apechei — “it is enough” — is the hardest single word in the chapter. Its ordinary commercial sense is “it is paid in full,” the receipt-word; it can mean “it is far off,” as at 7:6, where a heart is far from God; and it is read here, by most, as “enough!” The proposals include a receipt said of Judas (“he has been paid”), a question (“is the end far off?”), and the exclamation. This translation prints the usual “It is enough,” and records the range. The sentence before it is also doubly readable: “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?” as a question, or KJV's command ‘Sleep on now, and take your rest’; NIV takes the question.

An “agreed signal” — syssēmon, a word used only here in the New Testament. Syn-, together, plus sēma, a sign: a signal fixed in advance between parties. Matthew 26:48 uses the plain sēmeion, “sign.” As in Matthew, the sign is philēsō, “I kiss,” and the act is katephilēsen, “kissed him warmly,” the intensive compound; Matthew 26's note sets out the change of word. NWT 1984 reads ‘kissed him very tenderly’; KJV flattens both to ‘kissed’. Mark's Judas says one word, “Rabbi”; Matthew's says “Greetings, Rabbi,” and Matthew's Jesus answers him (“Friend…”). In Mark, Jesus says nothing to Judas at all. ⚠ KJV's ‘Master, master’ follows a Byzantine doubling of the title the earlier manuscripts do not have.

⭐ A sword, an ear, and no names — Mark's version, like Matthew's, names no one. “A certain one of those standing by” strikes “the slave of the high priest.” Mark does not say who swung, whose slave it was, or which ear, and Matthew's account is just as silent. Luke gives the side, “his right ear” (Luke 22:50, not yet on these pages), and John's account names both men and the side: “Simon Peter… struck the high priest's slave and cut off his right ear; the slave's name was Malchus” (John 18:10, not yet on these pages). Mark and John share one detail the other two do not: the word for the ear, ōtarion, a diminutive (literally “little ear,” though in the Greek of the period diminutives often lose their smallness), which stands only in these two verses of the New Testament; Matthew has ōtion. ⚠ Mark also has no rebuke — Matthew's “all who take the sword” and Luke's healing of the ear are both absent.

“As against a bandit” — lēstēs, the armed robber or insurgent, the word of the lēstēs entry and of the “den of robbers” Jesus threw at the temple (11:17). KJV's ‘as against a thief’ loses the violence; NIV's ‘Am I leading a rebellion’ keeps it and turns the clause into a question about himself.

⚠ The sentence Jesus does not finish. “But — so that the scriptures may be fulfilled.” The Greek, all' hina plērōthōsin hai graphai, has no main verb: literally “but in order that the scriptures be fulfilled,” and it stops. Matthew 26:56 completes it (“all this has happened so that…”). The shelf splits on whether to complete it: ASV supplies ‘but this is done that the scriptures might be fulfilled’, KJV and NIV turn it into a statement of necessity, ‘the scriptures must be fulfilled’, and Douay leaves it hanging, ‘But that the scriptures may be fulfilled’. This translation leaves it hanging too, with a dash where the missing verb would go, because that is what Mark wrote. As at v21, no scripture is named.

“And leaving him, they all fled.” Nineteen verses after “they were all saying the same” (v31). The two “all”s are the same Greek word, pantes.

⭐ No other Gospel has these two verses, and Mark does not explain them. A young man, following with Jesus after everyone else has run, wearing only a sindōn, a linen cloth, over his bare body; they grab him; he leaves the cloth in their hands and runs away naked. He is not named, not introduced before, and never mentioned again — unless he is.

Two words to watch. Sindōn, linen cloth, occurs in five verses of the New Testament: these two, and the three Gospel accounts of the linen Joseph of Arimathea wraps Jesus's body in — Matthew 27:59 (already on these pages), Luke 23:53, and this Gospel's own 15:46, one chapter ahead. Neaniskos, young man, is Mark's word for the figure in a white robe the women find sitting inside the empty tomb (16:5, not yet on these pages). A young man in linen runs from the arrest; a body is wrapped in linen; a young man is waiting in the tomb. Whether Mark means the reader to connect them is a question interpreters answer every possible way; the words are in the text, and the library reports that and stops.

Older texts in the background. Two are often brought alongside. Genesis 39:12 (already on these pages): Joseph, seized by his garment, “left his garment in her hand and fled” — the same two actions, leaving and fleeing. And Amos 2:16 (not yet on these pages): on the day of disaster “the bravest of the mighty shall flee away naked,” arom yanus in the Hebrew. Neither is quoted; both are there to be heard.

⚠ “Was it Mark?” A popular suggestion makes the young man the Gospel's own author, signing his work with an embarrassing memory. It is a guess; the text neither confirms it nor rules it out. See the new sindōn and neaniskos entries. KJV reads ‘and the young men laid hold on him’, a Byzantine addition naming the soldiers as young men too; ASV reads only ‘and they lay hold on him’.

⭐ Another sandwich, and the sharpest. Peter goes into the courtyard and sits by the fire (v54); the trial happens upstairs (vv55–65); Peter is still in the courtyard below (v66). Inside, Jesus is mocked with “Prophesy!”; outside, in the same minutes, his prophecy about Peter is coming true word for word. The two halves interpret each other, as 3:20’s note said they always do.

⚠ Mark never names the high priest. Not here and not anywhere in this Gospel: the name Caiaphas does not occur in Mark. Matthew 26:57 names him, and the Gospel of John names both him and his father-in-law Annas; Mark says “the high priest” seven times in this chapter and never once who he was. See the Caiaphas entry.

“Warming himself in the firelight.” Mark writes pros to phōs, “toward the light,” not “at the fire,” and the light is the point: it is by it that the servant girl sees him (v67). ASV reads ‘warming himself in the light of the fire’ and NWT 1984 ‘warming himself before a bright fire’; KJV and NIV have plain ‘the fire’.

The witnesses who could not agree. The Law will not put anyone to death on one witness: “at the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses” (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15, both already on these pages). Mark says twice that the testimonies were not isai, equal, matching (vv56, 59) — the court had witnesses and no case. The charge they reach for is a garbled version of what he did say (13:2: not one stone upon another), turned into a threat he never made. ⭐ Only Mark has it as “this sanctuary made with hands… another, not made with hands.” Acheiropoiētos, “not made with hands,” occurs in three verses of the New Testament, this one and two in Paul (2 Corinthians 5:1; Colossians 2:11, neither yet on these pages); Mark's is the only one in the Gospels. Naos is the sanctuary building, as at Matthew 26:61.

⭐ “The Son of the Blessed” — a title that avoids a name. The high priest does not say “God.” Eulogētos, “blessed,” stands in eight verses of the New Testament, and in the other seven it is an adjective in a sentence of praise (“Blessed be the God and Father…”); only here is it a title standing in for the divine name. Douay puts the name back, ‘the Son of the blessed God’; NIV reads ‘the Son of the Blessed One’. Jesus answers in kind: “the right hand of the Power” — dynamis, another reverent substitute. Both men speak around the name. See the new eulogētos entry.

⭐⭐ “I am.” Matthew's Jesus answers the same question with “You said it” (26:64); Mark's says Egō eimi, the two bare words he spoke walking on the water (6:50) and warned that impostors would borrow (13:6). It is the first time in this Gospel that Jesus answers the question of who he is outright, in public. See the egō eimi entry. Then he quotes two texts at once: the right hand of Psalm 110:1, which he quoted in the temple two chapters ago (12:36), and the Son of Man “coming with the clouds of heaven” — Daniel 7:13's own preposition, Aramaic ‘im ananei shemaya, where Mark 13:26 had “in clouds” and Matthew 26:64 has “on the clouds” (Psalm 110 and Daniel 7 are not yet on these pages). Mark 13's note asked whether that coming is an arrival before God's throne or a descent to earth; this verse sets “sitting at the right hand” beside it, and still does not say which.

The torn tunics, and the Law against it. The high priest “tears his tunics” — chitōnas, the inner garments, plural. NWT 1984 alone on the English shelf keeps that, ‘ripped his inner garments’; ASV and KJV read ‘rent his clothes’. Leviticus 21:10 (already on these pages) forbids the high priest to “tear his clothes” — in its setting a mourning gesture over the dead. The Mishnah, written down about two centuries later, prescribes the opposite for blasphemy: the judges “stand on their feet and make a tear in their garments” on hearing it, and it defines the capital offense narrowly: the blasphemer is not liable unless he utters the divine Name itself (Sanhedrin 7:5). Whether that later procedure was in force in Jesus's day is disputed, and on its terms the answer he gave — which says “the Power” and never the Name — would not qualify. The library reports the tension and does not settle it.

“Prophesy!” Mark's mockers cover his face and say one word. Matthew 26:68 fills it out: “Prophesy for us, Messiah! Who is it that hit you?” Mark's version is shorter and sharper, and he has already arranged the answer: downstairs, the prophecy about the rooster is being fulfilled while they speak. “Took him over with slaps” renders rhapismasin auton elabon, literally “received him with slaps”; ASV keeps the idiom, ‘received him with blows of their hands’.

The servant girl — paidiskē, not thyrōros. Mark 13's note set the doorkeeper of 13:34 beside the one in John 18, “the servant girl doorkeeper” who questions Peter. The scene rhymes; the words only partly do. Mark calls her mia tōn paidiskōn, “one of the servant girls,” and never uses thyrōros of her; Matthew calls her paidiskē as well (26:69). John 18:17 (not yet on these pages) uses BOTH words together, hē paidiskē hē thyrōros, “the servant girl, the doorkeeper.” So Mark's word is the ordinary one for a slave girl; the doorkeeper's title is John's, and the link to the watching doorkeeper of Mark 13 runs through John's wording, not Mark's. The thyrōros entry now says so.

Three denials, climbing. To the girl: “I neither know nor understand what you are saying” — two near-synonyms, oute oida oute epistamai, the evasion of a man pretending not to follow the question. To her again, before the bystanders: he “was denying it,” imperfect, again and again. To the bystanders: curses and an oath, and now a flat “I do not know this man.” She “looked hard at him” — emblepsasa, a fixed look, the verb of Jesus looking at the rich man before loving him (10:21). The actual denials use the simple verb arneomai (vv68, 70); the prediction and the remembering use the compound aparneomai (vv30, 31, 72) — the same division the aparneomai entry found in Matthew. “The forecourt,” proaulion, is a word used only here in the New Testament; he is edging toward the way out.

⭐ The first cockcrow, and the manuscripts that dropped it. “And a rooster crowed” at the end of v68 is printed in the Greek edition used here, and by Nestle-Aland and Tregelles; Westcott and Hort leave it out, following the oldest manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus among them, which do not have it. The shelf divides the same way: ASV and KJV have ‘and the cock crew’, NIV ends the verse at ‘went out into the entryway’, and NWT 1984 at ‘went outside to the vestibule’. Either way, v72's “a second time” (ek deuterou) assumes a first. A scribe who found two crowings in Mark and one everywhere else had a reason to delete one, and none to invent it; this translation prints the clause without brackets.

⚠ “And your speech matches” is in brackets for a different reason. The Greek edition printed above includes kai hē lalia sou homoiazei at the end of v70; Nestle-Aland, Westcott-Hort and Tregelles all omit it, and it is absent from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. It looks borrowed from Matthew 26:73, where the bystanders say “your accent gives you away” — the same noun, lalia. KJV has it, ‘and thy speech agreeth thereto’, as does RV60, «y tu manera de hablar es semejante a la de ellos»; ASV ends the sentence ‘for thou art a Galilaean’, NIV ‘for you are a Galilean’, and NWT 1984 ‘you are a Gal·i·leʹan’, with nothing about his speech. The brackets mark a clause this translation thinks Mark did not write, printed so the reader can see it.

⚠ “Call down curses” — on whom? Anathematizein has no object in the Greek. He may be calling a curse down on himself if he is lying, which is how an oath worked; or, a darker reading some take, on Jesus. The verb gives no answer. Matthew uses a different compound, katathematizein (26:74); Mark's anathematizō occurs elsewhere in the New Testament only in Acts 23 (not yet on these pages), of men who bound themselves under a curse not to eat until they had killed Paul. See the anathema and katathematizō entries.

⭐⭐ Epibalōn eklaien — the famous untranslatable phrase. Epiballō means to throw on, lay on, put to; used alone, without an object, it has no settled sense. The proposals, all of them old: “thinking on it” (as if “putting his mind to it”); “covering his head” (throwing his cloak over it); “breaking down”; “beginning” to weep; “rushing out.” The shelf spreads across them: KJV and ASV read ‘when he thought thereon, he wept’; Douay, translating the Vulgate, reads ‘he began to weep’; NWT 1984 reads ‘he broke down and gave way to weeping’, and NIV ‘he broke down and wept’; Geneva ‘weighing that with himself, he wept’; RV60 «pensando en esto, lloraba». This translation prints “broke down” as the reading that commits least to a gesture Mark does not describe, and flags it here. Eklaien is imperfect, and the verse prints it that way: he went on weeping. Matthew makes it a single act and adds a place and a manner: “going outside, he wept bitterly” (26:75).

⭐⭐ The four watches, kept. Mark 13:35 warned the doorkeeper that the master might come “in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning.” This chapter begins its night “when evening had come” (v17, opsias, a cognate of the discourse's opse) and ends it with the cock crowing (v72); the next chapter opens “early in the morning,” prōi (15:1, not yet on these pages), the fourth. Midnight is not named. The doorkeeper was told to stay awake through all four; the disciples slept through the garden and Peter, awake by the fire, denied him at cockcrow.