As I’ve mentioned here these past few days, listening to Jordan Peterson’s lectures on the Bible has helped me to see old, familiar texts in new ways. Here’s something that accomplishes that same thing in a more unusual way.

The Memoirs of St. Peter is a new translation of the Gospel of Mark by the Catholic scholar Michael Pakaluk. Why the title? Pakaluk makes a case that the real author of the Gospel of Mark is St. Peter, in this sense: Mark wrote down what Peter told him. I had never heard that, but apparently this is the tradition of some early Church fathers, including Clement of Alexandria, Jerome, and Justin Martyr, who first referred to Mark’s Gospel as Peter’s memoir. Pakaluk’s case seems quite plausible to me, but that’s not the main thrust of the book.

Pakaluk writes that the “immediacy” of the Gospels can be startling. Well, I guess, but growing up in a Christian culture has a way of muting that immediacy. Pakaluk restores it with his translation of the oldest Gospel, which he attempts to make more faithful to the unpolished original Greek than we are accustomed to (the same strategy was followed by David Bentley Hart in his recent translation of the New Testament). The effect is jolting. It makes the Gospel read like a long letter from a faraway friend telling about incredible events he just saw in his town. Here is Mark 1:21-28:

So they make their way into Capernaum. And right away he began teaching in the synagogue there, on the Sabbath. Well, they were overwhelmed by his teaching, because he taught them as someone who had authority, and not as the scribes.

And right then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit. He cried out saying, “What business do you have with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are the Holy One of God.” So Jesus admonished him saying, “Be silent and come out of him.” Well, the unclean spirit convulsed him and, producing a tremendous sound, came out of him. And the people there were all so deeply affected that they began to say to one another, “What is this? A new teaching. With authority. He tells even  unclean spirits what to do, and the obey him.” And so this report about him traveled straightway throughout the entire region of Galilee.

The whole thing is like that. Pakaluk quotes C.S. Lewis saying that there is nothing like the Gospels in the literature of the time. Either they were a bizarre fantasy invention, or they were the accounts of men who were telling an extraordinary true story, one worth living and dying for. Aside from its stylistic vigor and freshness, what is particularly thrilling about reading Pakaluk’s translation is the thought that this is Peter’s secretary writing down the version of Jesus’s life exactly as the old man, the chief of the Apostles, wanted.

The author gives generous footnotes at the end of each chapter to explain particular concepts. As an amateur reader, I found this helpful. But this is not a Gospel that this reader especially wanted to study; instead, I wanted to rest in the power of the narrative itself. I’ve never seen a Gospel like this. The words are so simple — indeed, many of us have heard these stories and sayings all our life, but in this translation, the authority of the man at their center, Jesus Christ, bursts through with an effect that is, at times, breathtaking. I mean this in a respectful way: Jesus of Nazareth was a very strange man. I believe he was, and is, the Son of God, and Pakaluk has done him the honor of making Jesus strange again.

Mark’s account of the calling of the disciples is as plain as can be. Here’s Mark 1: 16-19:

And as he was walking along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon, and Andrew, the brother of Simon, in the sea casting. (They were fishermen, after all.) So Jesus said to them: “Come, follow me, and I will turn you into fishers of men.” And so they, dropping their nets, followed him.

So continuing on his way a little bit more, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother. They were mending their nets in a boat. So he called them right then and there. And so they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired hands, and, taking a place behind him, they walked away.

Just like that. What kind of wizard has that authority? As you read Pakaluk’s version of this gospel, the same Jesus with the power to cause fishermen to drop their nets and follow him manifests himself over and over. There is something about the directness of Mark’s prose, revealed in this translation, that has the effect of shaking the dust off these over-familiar texts, and allowing us to encounter them anew.

I know a priest, now retired, who read the Gospel of Mark as a young unbeliever, and who was converted to Christianity by its uncanny authority. The Jesus Christ he met in its pages spoke to him with life-changing authority. And so he believed, and not only believed, but went on to spend his life serving that Christ as a priest. I always thought that was a great story, but I didn’t understand how reading Mark could do that to a man. Now, thanks to Pakaluk, I get it.