Mark 3:5

And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thy hand. And he stretched it forth; and his hand was restored.

Looked ... on them with anger ... This is one of the places in which it is asserted that "Matthew corrected" Mark! It is alleged that this was considered by Matthew to have been too harsh a statement of the Lord's emotion, "anger" for some undisclosed reason being considered by critics as "unbecoming" to Jesus. Regardless of the scholarship of those advocating such a view, it is founded, apparently, in ignorance of the fact that Matthew was just as precise in his assignment of this emotion to Jesus as was Mark. The vituperative passages of Matthew 23 are a far more impressive account of Jesus' anger than Mark's casual reference to it here. Furthermore, Jesus was quoted by Matthew as saying, "The King was wroth; and he sent his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned their city!" (Matthew 22:7), the king, of course, standing for God himself, making it impossible for Matthew to have considered Mark's attribution of anger to Jesus as anything inappropriate. Therefore, the conceit that Matthew corrected Mark in this particular is rejected.

And his hand was restored ... Barclay is at great pains to show that Jesus actually violated God's sabbath by this miracle, He said, "On the sabbath day all work was forbidden, and to heal was to work."[1] But as Dummelow accurately observed, "Only malice could call healing by a word, without labor or medicine, a breach of the sabbath."[2] It is nothing short of outrageous how "Christian" scholars are so determined to make Jesus a sabbath breaker. Not even the Pharisees, in the last analysis, used that charge as the basis of demanding Christ's crucifixion (John 19:7). However, the liberal scholars have an axe to grind by their inaccurate portrayal of Jesus as a sabbath-breaker. Barclay explained his conclusions on this as follows:

To the Pharisees religion was ritual; it meant obeying certain rules and laws and regulations. Jesus broke these regulations and they were genuinely convinced that he was a bad man. It is like the man who believes that religion consists in going to church, reading the Bible, saying grace at meals, even having family worship, and carrying on all the external acts which are looked upon as religious, and who yet never put himself out to do anything for anyone in his life, who has no sense of sympathy, no desire to sacrifice, who is serene in his rigid orthodoxy, and deaf to the call of need and blind to the tears of the world.[3]

Barclay's slander of equating his caricature of the church-going Christian with the murderous Pharisees of Jesus' day is criminal. It may be a fact that such unfeeling Christians exist; but it is the conviction of this author that such a phenomenon is rare, atypical, and extraordinary. The great hindrance to true Christianity does not come from Christians like those of Barclay's caricature, there being an insufficient number of them to make any difference at all. The great hindrance comes from insinuations, like this, which imply that Bible study, church attendance and family worship are "secondary" to "helping people" and are in no sense part of Jesus' true religion. He even went so far as to say, "To Jesus, religion was SERVICE."[4] Jesus' religion INCLUDED service, but mere humanism is as far from true Christianity as Shintoism. Christ's testimony regarding the law of Moses that he did not come to destroy but to fulfill would be violated by any view that he deliberately broke God's sabbath law. Of course, the Pharisaical additions and improvisations regarding the sacred law were no part of God's true law and were righteously flouted by Christ, but break God's sabbath he did not.

Therefore, let Christians beware of all interpretations that would make a sinner out of the Saviour himself.

[1] William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1956), p. 62.

[2] J. R. Dummelow, Commentary on the Holy Bible (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), p. 667.

[3] William Barclay, op. cit., p. 64.

[4] Ibid.