Jesus went into the synagogue again, and a man was there with a shriveled hand. 2 Some of them were watching Jesus closely to see if he would heal the man on the Sabbath, so they could bring charges against him. 3 He said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up here in front of everyone.”
4 Then he said to them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent.
5 He looked around at them with anger, upset at the hardness of their hearts, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and right away began plotting with the Herodians against him — how they might destroy him.[1]
7 Jesus withdrew with his disciples toward the sea, and a huge crowd from Galilee followed. Also from Judea, 8 Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon — a huge crowd came to him when they heard about everything he was doing.[2] 9 He told his disciples to have a small boat ready for him because of the crowd, so they wouldn’t crush him. 10 He had healed many, so that all who had diseases were pressing in on him just to touch him. 11 And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God!” 12 But he warned them sharply not to make him known.
13 He went up on the mountain and called to him those he wanted, and they came to him. 14 He appointed twelve — so they could be with him, and so he could send them out to preach 15 and to have authority to drive out demons. 16 He appointed the Twelve: Simon (he gave him the name Peter), 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (he gave them the name Boanerges, which means “Sons of Thunder”),[3] 18 Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot,[4] 19 and Judas Iscariot, who later handed him over.
20 Then he went into a house, and the crowd gathered again, so that they couldn’t even eat a meal. 21 When his family heard about this, they went out to seize him, because they were saying, “He’s out of his mind.”
22 The scribes who had come down from Jerusalem were saying, “He has Beelzebul,” and, “He drives out demons by the ruler of the demons.”[5]
23 So he called them over and spoke to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a household is divided against itself, that household cannot stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand — he’s finished. 27 No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.
28 “Amen, I tell you, people will be forgiven all their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter. 29 But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” 30 He said this because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”
31 Then his mother and his brothers arrived. They stood outside and sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.”
33 He answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 He looked around at those sitting in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. 35 Whoever does the will of God — that person is my brother and sister and mother.”
Notes
Note 1. The Herodians weren’t a religious sect but a political faction loyal to the interests of Herod’s ruling family, which meant accommodating Roman power. The Pharisees, who resented such compromise, were normally at odds with them. ↩
Note 2. Idumea was the old territory of Edom, bordering Judea to the south. By Jesus’ time its population was largely Jewish, the result of forced conversions under the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus in the late second century BC — the same background that made Herod the Great, an Idumean, suspect in the eyes of many Jews. ↩
Note 3. Mark gives the nickname in Aramaic and then translates it, as he does elsewhere. But the underlying Aramaic is genuinely puzzling: scholars can’t fully reconstruct a phrase that yields both the spelling “Boanerges” and the sense “sons of thunder.” One proposal traces it to words meaning “sons of rage” or commotion — so the traditional “thunder” may capture the temperament more than the literal roots. ↩
Note 4. The Greek here actually reads “the Cananaean,” from an Aramaic word for “zealous one,” which is why translators render it “the Zealot.” That likely describes his fervor rather than party membership: the organized revolutionary faction Josephus calls the Zealots doesn’t appear until the Jewish revolt of 66–70 AD, decades after Jesus’ ministry. ↩
Note 5. The scribes’ charge names “Beelzebul,” a term the Gospels treat as “the ruler of the demons.” The name echoes an old Philistine deity, Baal-zebub (“lord of the flies”), worshipped at Ekron in the books of Kings — a mocking distortion of a title that may have originally meant something like “lord of the exalted dwelling.” ↩