⚠ Verse 1 is not a loose saying tacked onto the end of chapter 8 — it is the introduction to the scene that follows six days later, and this Gospel means it literally. “Some standing here will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God having come in power” is answered, on this reading, by the very next paragraph: three of those standing there see exactly that, in miniature, on a mountain. Other readings exist (the resurrection, Pentecost, the fall of Jerusalem), and this page reports rather than settles the question — but Mark’s own placement, with no narrative gap at all between the promise and the mountain, is the strongest argument for the reading that needs the least imported machinery.

⚠ “Transfigured” (v2) is a word the New Testament uses in only four places, and this is the earlier of its two tellings of the same scene. Matthew’s account of this same mountain keeps the identical verb (Matthew 17:2, already on these pages); Luke’s does not — his own retelling reaches instead for a plainer ‘the appearance of his face became different’ (Luke 9:29, not yet on these pages), possibly because metamorphoō already carried, in the Greek-speaking world, the shape-changing gods of pagan myth. The word’s only other two occurrences are both Paul, both metaphorical, and both already flagged on the dictionary entry: believers are ‘transformed’ by a renewed mind (Romans 12:2) and ‘transformed’ from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18) — the second inside a passage about Moses’ own shining face, which is exactly the imagery of this mountain. The dictionary entry there was written before this chapter existed and undercounted its own word by one; it has been corrected to include this verse.

⚠ Mark’s version of the shining has a launderer in it; Matthew’s has a sun. Here the garments become “white — the kind of white no gnapheus, no launderer, on earth could bleach them” (v3), a tradesman’s-eye comparison with nothing celestial about it. Matthew’s telling has no launderer at all: ‘his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as the light’ (Matthew 17:2) — and says nothing about Jesus’s face, which Mark never mentions either way. Two Gospels describing one moment, and neither borrows the other’s image.

⚠ Elijah comes first in this Gospel’s word order, and the preposition is not the ordinary one. Mark writes “Elijah appeared to them, syn Moses” — with Moses, using a preposition of accompaniment rather than the plain ‘and.’ Matthew’s telling reverses both the order and the connective: ‘Moses and Elijah appeared to them’ (Matthew 17:3), the lawgiver named first and joined to the prophet by a bare kai. Neither Gospel comments on the sequence; this page notes it without deciding what, if anything, it means.

Peter’s three tents (v5) reach for the vocabulary of the Feast of Booths — the pilgrim festival built around living in temporary shelters — offered, on this reading, to freeze a moment of glory into something that can be lived in rather than passed through. ⚠ The fear that explains his outburst is placed differently in the two Gospels. Here it comes first, as the narrator’s own aside on why Peter did not know what to say (v6, “they had become terrified”); Matthew places the identical fear AFTER the voice speaks — ‘when the disciples heard it they fell on their faces and were terrified’ (Matthew 17:6) — and adds a whole scene Mark does not have at all: Jesus comes, touches them, and says, ‘Rise, and do not be afraid’ (17:7). Mark’s three disciples get no touch and no reassurance; the scene simply ends.

⚠ “Listen to him” (v7) is two words that point straight at a passage already on these pages. Deuteronomy 18:15 promises Israel a prophet like Moses, “to him you shall listen” — and the cloud’s command echoes exactly that instruction, aimed at the very moment Moses himself stands beside Jesus and says nothing. ⭐ Compared word for word against this Gospel’s own baptism scene, the voice has changed both its person and its content. At the Jordan it spoke to Jesus, in the second person: “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased” (1:11, already on these pages). Here it speaks about him, to the disciples, in the third person — “This is my Son” — drops “I am well pleased” entirely, and adds the one thing the baptism voice never said: an imperative. Matthew’s version of this second voice keeps ‘in whom I am well pleased’ from the baptism and adds ‘listen to him’ on top of it (Matthew 17:5) — Mark trades the old approval for the new command rather than keeping both.

The chapter closes its first scene the way it opened: “by themselves, alone” (v2) becomes “Jesus alone” (v8) — the same solitude, emptied of everyone but the one voice just told them to listen to.

⚠ This silencing has an expiry date the earlier ones did not. Every previous command to say nothing in this Gospel was open-ended; this one is tied to a specific future event — “until the Son of Man had risen from the dead” (v9) — which is itself the thing they cannot make sense of (v10). The secret is not permanent; it has a release clause the disciples do not yet understand.

The scribal teaching behind v11 (“Elijah must come first”) reads Malachi’s closing promise — a messenger sent ‘before the great and terrible day of the LORD’ (Malachi 4:5–6, not yet on these pages) — as requiring Elijah’s literal return ahead of the Messiah. ⭐ “Restores” (v12, apokathistanei) is the identical verb the apostles themselves use of a different restoration, at the very end of this story. Just before the ascension they ask Jesus, ‘Lord, is it at this time that you are RESTORING the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1:6, already on these pages) — the same verb, turned from Elijah’s job onto Jesus’s own. Here it names a general repair Jesus does not dispute; his own question — how then must the Son of Man suffer? — sets a restoration ahead of the disciples against a suffering they still refuse to hear.

⚠ “Elijah has already come” (v13) is Mark’s flattest unexplained identification in the whole Gospel. He does not say who. Matthew’s telling of this same exchange closes the loop for the reader: ‘Then the disciples understood that he had spoken to them about John the Baptist’ (Matthew 17:13, already on these pages). Mark leaves it exactly where the ambiguity of Elijah-as-John already stood earlier in this Gospel — Herod fearing John risen (6:16) beside others guessing Elijah outright (6:15, both already on these pages) — and does not resolve it even now, at the one moment it would be easiest to. “They did to him whatever they wished” is as close as this verse gets to naming Herod’s banquet and the platter, already told in full three chapters back.

⚠ Mark describes the boy’s condition by its symptoms alone; Matthew names it. Matthew’s much shorter telling of this same healing has the father say his son is ‘moonstruck,’ selēniazetai — the ordinary folk-diagnosis for the falling sickness, blamed on the moon’s phases (Matthew 17:15, already on these pages) — and then compresses the whole cure into a single verse, with no dialogue at all between Jesus and the father. Mark has no diagnostic word anywhere in his fifteen verses; instead he has convulsions, foam, grinding teeth, and a father who argues with Jesus. ⭐ “Goes rigid” (v18, xērainetai) is, underneath the translation, the same verb Mark has already used once — for a withered hand. The man in the synagogue “had a withered hand” (3:1, already on these pages), exērammenēn, built on the identical root: to dry up, to stiffen. A permanent condition and a passing seizure share Mark’s one word for the body going lifeless.

⚠ The father’s own request contradicts itself, and the contradiction is the whole scene, not a slip. He says “if you can do anything” (v22) — conditional, hedged, nine years of failed cures behind it, including the disciples’ own failure moments earlier. Jesus throws the condition straight back at him: “‘If you can’ — all things are possible to the one who believes” (v23), turning the man’s own doubt into the object of the sentence. The father’s answer does not resolve the tension; it names it: “I believe — help my unbelief” (v24), a present claim and a present admission in the same breath, addressed to the very thing that can supply what is missing. Nothing in the Greek smooths the two clauses into one consistent state of mind, and this translation does not smooth it either.

⚠ The healing itself borrows the exact gesture of an earlier raising in this Gospel. “Taking him by the hand” and lifting him up, so that “he stood up” (v27), is the identical pairing of verbs Mark used for Jairus’s daughter — ‘taking the child by the hand’… ‘and she got up at once’ (5:41–42, already on these pages). Both scenes pass through the same brink: the crowd’s verdict here is “he is dead” (v26), just as mourners had already pronounced Jairus’s daughter beyond help. Mark tells one raising with a corpse that was never actually dead and one with a body everyone present called dead; the same two verbs close them both.

⚠ “By nothing except prayer” (v29) is exactly as far as the earliest text goes, and a scribe’s addition to it created a matching gap two chapters into Matthew. The KJV reads ‘this kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting’; the GNV, ‘this kind can by no other means come forth, but by prayer and fasting’; the Spanish RV 1909 and RV60 both read «con oración y ayuno». The ASV reads ‘by nothing, save by prayer’, the NIV ‘only by prayer’, and the NWT 1984 ‘cannot get out by anything except by prayer’ — all three without fasting — and this translation follows them: the addition is absent from the earliest manuscripts and looks like the same ascetic instinct that produced a much larger version of itself one book over. Matthew’s own account of this healing closes with a mustard-seed saying about faith and nothing about fasting at all (Matthew 17:20) — and the very next verse in the Textus Receptus family supplies, word for word, this chapter’s missing clause: ‘this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting,’ printed at Matthew 17:21 by exactly the same four witnesses and absent from the critical text there for exactly the same reason (already on these pages, and flagged there before this chapter existed). One accretion, borrowed sideways from Mark into Matthew, explains both gaps.

The pattern set at the first passion prediction repeats and hardens. There, Peter argued out loud and was rebuked for it (8:32–33, already on these pages); here, no one argues at all — they “did not understand the saying, and were afraid to ask him” (v32). Incomprehension has not been replaced by understanding between the two predictions; it has simply stopped being spoken.

“After three days” (v31) is the second of the three identical passion predictions this Gospel makes in this exact phrase — meta treis hēmeras, not the ‘on the third day’ that Matthew and Luke both write in their own parallels — a difference already noted in full at the first prediction (8:31) and repeated here without further comment; the third comes at 10:34, not yet on these pages.

⚠ Jesus already knows the argument before anyone tells him, and the disciples answer his question with silence rather than a confession. Asked what they were discussing on the road, they say nothing — the narrator supplies the answer the men themselves will not (v34). Matthew’s version of this scene skips the concealment entirely: there the disciples ask the question outright, ‘Who then is greatest in the kingdom of the heavens?’ (Matthew 18:1, already on these pages), no shame and no silence attached to it.

⚠ Jesus’s answer here is a paradox about status; in Matthew it is an instruction to change. Mark’s Jesus states a reversal — “if anyone wants to be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all” (v35) — and only then sets the child in front of them. Matthew’s Jesus tells the disciples to become something they are not: ‘unless you turn and become like little children, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of the heavens’ (Matthew 18:3). One Gospel measures greatness by a role reversed; the other by a transformation required.

“In the middle of them” (v36, en mesō autōn) is the exact three-word phrase Matthew’s own parallel keeps (Matthew 18:2, already on these pages) and later reuses for a different promise — ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the middle of them’ (18:20) — so that the child’s literal place in this scene becomes, three chapters into Matthew’s own discourse, the place Christ himself claims to stand. Mark uses the phrase once and does not extend it; Matthew builds an entire later saying on top of it.

⚠ Mark’s version of the receiving-saying carries a clause Matthew’s twin of it does not. Here, receiving a child in Jesus’s name receives not only Jesus “but the one who sent me” (v37) — a second remove, reaching past Jesus to the Father. Matthew’s parallel sentence stops one step earlier: ‘whoever receives one such little child in my name receives me’ (Matthew 18:5), with no further clause at all. This is the same shape the Transfiguration voice already showed — Mark, in this chapter, keeps reaching one step further toward the Father than his own parallel material does.

The disciple who reports the stranger is John — one half of the pair this Gospel nicknamed ‘Boanerges, Sons of Thunder’ at their calling (3:17, already on these pages), a temperament this small scene fits without needing to say so: a man not of their number is doing exactly what the Twelve themselves failed to do fifteen verses earlier, and John’s instinct is to stop him rather than to wonder why it worked.

⚠ “Whoever is not against us is for us” (v40) is not a general principle this Gospel repeats elsewhere — and read beside a saying from a different Gospel, it sounds like the exact reverse of it. Matthew’s Jesus, accused of casting out demons by Beelzeboul, says instead: ‘Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters’ (Matthew 12:30, already on these pages). The two sayings answer two different situations rather than contradicting one law: Matthew’s is spoken to an accuser who claims Jesus works for the wrong side; Mark’s is spoken of a stranger already working, uninvited, in Jesus’s own name. A hostile verdict gets the narrower rule; a helpful outsider gets the wider one. This page reports both sayings as they stand and does not force one into the shape of the other.

The “cup of water” saying (v41) is the smallest unit of kindness this Gospel names — not a healing, not an exorcism, a single drink given “because you belong to Christ” — set immediately after a warning against stopping a stranger’s exorcism, so that the chapter’s two examples of unauthorized-but-approved action, one large and one small, sit side by side.

⚠ The “donkey-millstone” (v42, mylos onikos) is a specific, heavy piece of equipment, not a poetic exaggeration. A household hand-mill was a woman’s tool, small enough to turn by hand; a mylos onikos was the large, animal-driven stone used for milling grain at any real scale — naming it by the beast that turned it draws the biggest, heaviest stone available into the image, hung around a human neck. This exact phrase, mylos onikos, recurs word for word in Matthew 18:6 (already on these pages), which is this same saying’s other telling — see the dictionary’s skandalon entry for the trap-trigger image the verb skandalizō is built on.

⚠ Mark spends three verses and three refrains on what Matthew’s parallel says in two verses and none. Matthew’s version of this warning folds hand and foot into a single sentence (‘if your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off’, Matthew 18:8) and treats the eye separately in the very next verse (18:9) — two verses, no repeated refrain, and a version of the same warning already given once before that, in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:29–30, already on these pages, though there it treats only the eye and the hand, in that order, with no foot at all, and frames the loss as one member against the whole body rather than as entering life maimed). Mark instead treats hand, foot and eye as three parallel, symmetrical cases, each originally closing on the identical sentence — “where their worm does not die, and the fire is not put out” (v48). ⭐ That symmetry is very likely what invited the very corruption the panels above report. A refrain stated once at the end of a three-part list is an easy thing for a copyist’s eye, or a preacher’s ear, to want repeated after every part; the earliest manuscripts have it only the once, and this translation follows them.

⚠ “Their worm does not die, and the fire is not put out” (v48) is a near-verbatim quotation, unmarked as a quotation, of the last verse of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah closes on the same image, in the same order: “their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched” (Isaiah 66:24, not yet on these pages), describing the corpses of the rebellious lying outside the city, an abhorrence to all flesh. Mark gives no citation formula at all — no ‘as it is written,’ nothing — the same habit of quoting prophecy unlabeled that this Gospel has already shown at least twice before (7:32, already on these pages). Gehenna itself is the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, where children were burned to Molech at the high place the dictionary entry names — so Isaiah’s corpses-outside-the-walls image and this chapter’s valley-of-fire word are drawing on the same real geography, already marked by fire, from two different centuries.

⚠ “Everyone will be salted with fire” (v49) is one of the most obscure single sentences in this Gospel, and the manuscripts show real strain around it. The KJV reads ‘for every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice shall be salted with salt’, and the GNV the same, ‘every sacrifice shall be salted with salt’; the Spanish RV 1909 and RV60 both read «todo sacrificio será salado con sal» (compare Leviticus 2:13, already on these pages). The ASV reads only ‘every one shall be salted with fire’, the NIV ‘everyone will be salted with fire’, and the NWT 1984 ‘everyone must be salted with fire’ — the shorter form this translation follows. However the text is read, the image binds fire — the very fire just named in the Gehenna warning — to salt, a preservative, in a single clause the chapter never unpacks.

The chapter that opened on an argument over who was greatest closes on an instruction to keep peace with one another (v50) — “have salt in yourselves” answering, without saying so directly, the rivalry that started the house scene at Capernaum. Salt that has gone flat cannot be re-salted; a disciple who has lost whatever kept the group at peace has lost something this chapter treats as just as irrecoverable.