What’s in a name?

Kaì euthùs (καὶ εὐθὺς) can be translated as ‘and immediately…’, ‘and just then…’, ‘and straight away…’, and its rather breathless repetition punctuates Mark’s Gospel as his narrative tumbles from one incident to another. This seemed appropriate for a blog, somehow: ‘and now here’s another thing…’: a rapid update; a tumble of new thoughts and incidents. This blog will be no calm and ordered commentary, no overview: I will be chasing after Mark as he points to first this and then, immediately, that. Racing to catch up, and to make some kind of sense of the course he’s running.

The image in the background behind the title [of an earlier version of this blog] is of a page from the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, covering the first chapter of Mark. If you look carefully, you can see the ‘kaì euthùs’ from Mark 1:12 at the beginning of a line about half way up the visible portion of the second column. The earlier ‘kaì euthùs’ from 1:10 is lost in the blur above – but you can see a faint image of it (with its three final letters crammed in to fit the column) between each post in the blog.

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