The way of imagination

       To fully understand Mark’s “sequel” to the Scriptures of Israel, we need to look at 7 previous “episodes”, 7 OT characters who shed light on what Mark is saying about John the Baptist and Jesus in chapter 1.   The seventh character from the “original story” is Isaiah .      In our reflections on Jeremiah and Daniel, we have seen the importance of the exile in Babylon for our understanding of the New Testament Gospels.   Though the Babylonian exile had occurred during the 6 th -century B.C., there seems to have still been a lingering sense of a situation of “exile” even among those Jews living in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus.   Yes, they were back in the Land and there was a Temple in Jerusalem; however, their situation was fraught with ambiguity.   Take the Temple – the second National Shrine had originally paled in comparison with the one built by Solomon (cf. Ezra 3.12-13) and Herod the Great, the first-century Roman-backed Idumean warlord who styled himself the “King

     To fully understand Mark’s “sequel” to the Scriptures of Israel, we need to look at 7 previous “episodes”, 7 OT characters who shed light on what Mark is saying about John the Baptist and Jesus in chapter 1.   The sixth character from the “original story” is Daniel .      As the story is told in the book that bears his name, Daniel was a member of the Jerusalem aristocracy and was part of the first wave of Babylonian deportations in 605 B.C., the fourth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah (cf. Dn. 1.1-6); further deportations would follow in 598 and finally in 587, when Jerusalem was sacked and the exile would begin for the majority of the Jerusalemite population.   As we saw last time, the prophet Jeremiah had foretold the disaster of 587 for 40 years and had declared that the subjects of the Kingdom of Judah would remain in exile for 70 years (cf. Jer. 25.11-12; 29.10).   In 539 B.C., the Babylonian empire fell to the Persians, and Cyrus the Great issued an edict allo