Announcing: Peter’s Last Sermon: Identity and Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark

Publication Date 2010. Mercer University Press.

What Christian would not want to hear Mark’s gospel as the first believers heard it? Peter’s Last Sermon makes significant progress toward that task. Using all the tools of modern scholarship, the study takes seriously Mark’s audience. The community would have heard rather than read the gospel. It would have encountered the story as a whole instead of piecemeal in short texts for sermons. Missing would have been the static of Matthew, Luke, and John. And there is much more. As for the speaker? While most modern scholars table the question of authorship, the post-apostolic writers of the second and third centuries claim with one voice that (though penned by Mark) the gospel actually went back to Peter. So to hear the gospel as did those early Christians was to hear it as if coming from him. Does it make a difference to our understanding of Mark’s message if from Peter? Yes. And the result is surprising. Peter’s Last Sermon takes us on a journey through Roman and Jewish texts to meet not the Jesus of the modern Church but of Peter’s proclamation in Rome. Nero’s persecution had left the community in crisis. What was Peter’s message for his time? Christ was different than expected, he said. But how? That is the content of Peter’s Last Sermon.