One of the most distinctive features of this Gospel is the decisive clearness with which it shows how Jesus trained and educated His disciples. The simplicity with which St. Mark describes the faults of the friends of our Lord is as remarkable as the vigour with which the gestures and feelings of our Lord are portrayed. St. Mark relates how that early in the ministry of Jesus, His friends (iii. 21) said that He was mad, and that "His {57} mother and His brethren" (iii. 31) sought to bring Him back. The discipline and education of the disciples are recorded with a plain revelation of their mistakes and their spiritual dulness. When they had settled in Capernaum Christ shows them that He must find a wider sphere of work (i. 38); He meets with a significant silence their obtrusive remonstrance when the woman with the issue of blood caused Him to ask, "Who touched My clothes?" (v. 30, 31); He tells them with affectionate care "to rest a while," when they had been too busy even to eat (vi. 31); He rebukes them gravely when they put a childish interpretation upon His command to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, the formalists and the Erastian (viii. 17); they are unintelligent and uninquiring when He prophesies His death and resurrection (ix. 32), and after this prophecy they actually dispute about their own precedence (ix. 34); when Christ goes boldly forward to Jerusalem, they follow with fear and hesitation (x. 32); He rebukes the niggardly criticism of those who were indignant with the "waste" of the perfume poured upon His head (xiv. 6); and in Gethsemane "they all left Him and fled" (xiv. 50). Among these disciples, St. Peter is prominent, and though his confession of the Messiahship of Jesus is recorded, a confession which is necessarily central in the Gospel (viii. 29), St. Mark neither records that our Lord designed him as the rock, nor his commission to feed the Lord's lambs and sheep. On the other hand, St. Mark inserts things which were often of a nature to humble St. Peter. He records the crushing reprimand which he received when he criticized the Lord's mission (viii. 33); it was Peter's fanciful plan to erect three tabernacles on the scene of the Transfiguration (ix. 5), it was Peter who informed the Lord that the fig tree had withered after His curse (xi. 21), it was Peter whom Christ awoke in Gethsemane by uttering his name "Simon" (xiv. 37); and Peter's denial appears doubly guilty in this Gospel, inasmuch as he did not repent until the cock crew _twice_ (xiv. 68, 72). At the {58} beginning (iii. 16) and at the end (xvi. 7) Peter occupies a special position. But the conduct of Peter is narrated in a fashion which renders the notion of fiction quite impossible. The Gospel cannot have been written by a hero-worshipper wishing to glorify a saint of old, but must surely have been written by "the interpreter of Peter."