Gospel of St. Mark by Rudolf Steiner

The Gospel of St. Mark
A Cycle of Ten Lectures Given by Rudolf Steiner
The ten lectures presented here were given in Basel, Switzerland from the 15th to the 24th of September, 1912. In the Collected Edition of Rudolf Steiner's works, the volume containing the German texts is entitled Das Markus-Evangelium (Vol. 139 in the Bibliographic Survey, 1961). They were translated from the German by Conrad Mainzer and edited by Stewart C. Easton.

Gospel of Mark: Introduction
In the non-anthroposophical world the Gospel of St. Mark is usually accorded relatively little attention. It is of course widely recognized as the earliest of the canonical Gospels, as it is also the shortest. Its historical importance is therefore not denied, especially as the source of much that is included in the more widely read Gospel of Matthew, the longest of the four. But its distinctive features are nowhere given as much importance as by Rudolf Steiner, who indeed devoted many lectures to various aspects of it (Background to the Gospel of St. Mark) before he embarked on the remarkable ten lectures given in Basel in September 1912 now being published in a third English edition. In the last of these lectures he tells us that he had now brought to a completion the program he had set himself many years earlier when he began his work on the Gospels with his many lectures in different cities on the ever popular Gospel of St. John. And this cycle was indeed to be the last he was to give on any of the four Gospels, the so-called Fifth Gospel of 1913 being of an entirely different nature.