Unlocking the Puzzle

"Nobody doubts that Mark's Gospel is a puzzle, and nobody unlocks it better than David Smith. His key is called a 'chiasmus,' a literary form, sometimes called inverted parallelism, that pervades many books of the Bible. Using his fantastic chiastic skills, David unearths Mark's original Gospel, as well as several plausible theories involving both St. Paul and Josephus. This is a must-read for anyone interested in finding the historical Jesus."

--Bill Cummings, author of The Checkered Church and Oh My God



"In Unlocking the Puzzle, Smith analyzes the Gospel of Mark as a huge chiastic (AB-B'A') structure, made of longer and shorter chiasms (pericopes and groups of them displaying the same structure). . . . The end product is a hypothetical reconstruction of the Gospel as Mark originally wrote it. It is staggering to imagine this eagle-eyed scholar's fantastic grasp of this ancient text! Mark himself would learn a thing or two from Unlocking the Puzzle!"

--Robert M. Price, host of The Bible Geek podcast; author of The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and The Amazing Colossal Apostle



"Unlocking the Puzzle is significant for people interested in learning what Mark wrote in the original version of his Gospel, who may have modified it, and why. Smith applies literary forensic methods to Mark's writings to determine what was redacted from the original, changed, and rearranged, things ancient authors apparently feared. By the analysis, Smith solves a perplexing problem about the Gospel of Mark that has intrigued scholars for decades."

--C. J. Ransom, Plasma Physics