Welcome, everyone. So excited to be in this Bible study on the Gospel of Mark with you

in our Alexio series. And so it is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I've had a great

opportunity to study with two different renowned scholars in Scripture who both did major works on the Gospel of Mark.

And so that was something that's been part of my graduate studies when I was at Duke University,

at the Divinity School there studying Scripture.

I studied with a wonderful Protestant scholar Richard Hayes.

And at that time, I did my thesis for my T my THM thesis on the Gospel of Mark. And it was

on Jesus's entry into the temple and his teaching in the temple. And so that really got me a chance

to dive in with Richard Hayes. And Richard Hayes was world-renowned for his work on St. Paul

and using Paul's use of the Old Testament. And so I started to take those kind of methods and principles and apply them to the Gospel of Mark.

And it was a real joy. It was really exciting to have such a great mentor who was so enthusiastic about my work there.

Well, then I went on to do my doctor at work at Catholic University of America with another great world-renowned scholar, Francis Maloney.

Father Frank Maloney from Australia was a phenomenal scholar

at literary readings of the New Testament.

And I was working with him on a seminar

that he was working with us graduate students

before he was to publish his commentary on the Gospel of Mark.

So both these scholars have done major works. So Richard Hayes has a shorter

book that he later did called Reading Backwards. In other words, looking at the four Gospels

in light of the Old Testament. And so it's kind of like looking backwards as you're looking

forwards into the Gospels. We're going to do that a fair bit as we go through the Gospel of Mark.

I'm going to show you the Old Testament background that really helps make sense of that.

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