While reading the Gospel of Mark (in the ESV) the other day I was struck by how many verses begin with the word “And”. What made this stand out to me all the more was a section in Mark 8 where “And” began nine sentences in a row in just five verses (8:6-10). That got me thinking about the way in which Mark wrote his gospel.
Nearly everyone who picks up and reads the Gospel of Mark can sense the pace of his story. This is even more clear when it’s compared with the other gospels writers—Matthew, Luke, and John. Matthew’s gospel seems to me to be episodic. There are large chunks of episodes (five for sure) that Matthew uses to tell his story. Luke’s gospel seems to me to be investigative. Luke writes his gospel to explain what has been going on and he goes into great detail. John’s gospel seems to me to be reflective. The story John lays out begs the reader to sit back and meditate again and again as they read. With Mark’s gospel, there’s just something about it that pushes the reader along through the story.
I think one of the reasons for this is Mark’s frequent use of the Greek word kai, which is (I think) almost always translated as and.
Now, to be fair to the rest of the gospel authors, and (kai) is used a lot. It’s not only one of the favorite words for the gospel writers; it’s one of the favorite words for the rest of the New Testament authors. And yet, Mark stands out when we go by the numbers.
What I’ve broken down below are three sections of numbers related to how the gospel writers use the word and.
“And” in the Gospels (ESV)
Mark: 1,160
Matthew: 1,395
Luke: 1,600
John: 718
Now, here you might be wondering why I focused on Mark’s gospel when Luke is the clear winner. Well, appearances can be deceiving. When we compare the number of times a gospel writer uses “and” with the total number of words, a different story emerges.
Total Words in the Gospels (NA27)
Mark: 11,304
Matthew: 18,346
Luke: 19,482
John: 15,635
Here we can see how Luke runs away with the total word count and Mark comes in last. This can also be easily seen just by looking at the total number of chapters for each gospel (Mt. 28; Mk. 16; Lk. 24; Jn. 21). Finally, let’s compare the usage of and with total number of words to see truly how often each gospel writer uses that word.
Percent Usage of “And”
Mark: 10.26%
Matthew: 7.60%
Luke: 8.21%
John: 4.59%
What we see here is quite interesting. Luke is the longest gospel and Luke uses the word “and” more than any other gospel; however, when compared to the total number of words Luke comes in third. Mark, as we can see, wins by almost 3%. He has the shortest gospel, comes in third with the number of times “and” is used, but he uses “and” more often than all the other gospel writers.