A Quaker Reading of Mark’s Gospel: To See the Invisible
Reviewed by Barbara Birch
February 1, 2026
By Patricia Dallmann. Resource Publications, 2025. 144 pages. $35/hardcover; $20/paperback or eBook.
Patricia Dallmann is an accomplished Quaker author with a YouTube channel called Early Quaker Study Group and a blog called Abiding Quaker (at patradallmann.com). She worships with Conservative Friends in Ohio Yearly Meeting. To her, the Bible and the writings of early Friends are spiritual resources that offer more than historical information about the events that may have happened at a certain time and place. Early Friends found the Bible vital to “their experiential discovery of Christ Within, a discovery they knew to have universal significance, beyond information that is intellectually gathered, dispersed, and received.” Dallmann’s latest book, A Quaker Reading of Mark’s Gospel, aims to help modern Quakers discover the King James translation of Mark’s gospel in personal terms, that is, experientially.
Mark’s gospel, written around 70 CE, was the earliest of the gospels, and scholars believe that Matthew and Luke both drew on it as a source. Dallmann’s book follows the gospel chapter by chapter, focusing on the chronology of Jesus’s travels, healings, and ministry. I especially enjoyed the quotes from early Friends like George Fox, Isaac Penington, and Margaret Fell interspersed within the text. Dallmann also includes occasional snippets from her own life to reinforce her contention that modern Quakers should still read the Bible and early Friends for the “inward realities” that can be gained. Dallmann’s Jesus differs from the “little Lord Jesus” conventionally seen in many mainstream Christian denominations today. To her, Jesus is more than the source of “omnipresent love from on high to all sinners below.” Her interpretation of Jesus challenges readers to wake up to clarity and insight and live a more truthful existence.
Mark’s gospel is full of parables that many modern readers find hard to understand, especially in the King James language. Dallmann’s interpretations are insightful and illuminating. For instance, the story of Jesus and the fig tree has always seemed uncharitable and even weird to me. In this parable a hangry Jesus went looking for a fig to eat but found a tree with only leaves because figs were not in season. Since Jesus couldn’t find a fig to eat, he cursed the tree saying, “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.” Then Mark added, for emphasis perhaps, “And his disciples heard it.” Dallmann explains that “more, too, is expected of us than that which our nature can produce.” This explanation makes sense to me: Jesus was telling his disciples that he expected them to get out of their comfort zones. This lesson might strike a chord with modern Friends too.
Dallmann made sense of another story that long puzzled me by suggesting that Jesus was a work in progress like we are. Like us, he was learning humility and compassion through difficult interactions with others. When a woman from another region asked Jesus to cleanse her daughter of an unclean spirit, he brushed her off, “Let the children first be filled: for it is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it unto the dogs.” In other words, he called the woman and her people dogs and refused to help. Nevertheless, she persisted, saying, “Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” In this teachable moment, Jesus came to his senses and sent the woman home with the faith that the unclean spirit had left her child.
Dallmann points out that the parables were meant to reach and teach people who can’t imagine a different way of thinking or being. She contrasts the use of parables with Jesus’s more direct ministry to the disciples in Mark 4:33–35. Mark ends the verses with the statement: “And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side.” I always took that sentence to mean that Jesus and his disciples simply went somewhere else. Dallmann instead suggests that Jesus was directing his followers to “new territory in which the literal mind of the multitude and the disciples’ intellectual grasp of analogy are both transcended.” She explains the verse “foreshadows a coming into a new kind of understanding that is neither literal nor intellectual but is gained through inward experience and accompanies being itself.”
A Quaker Reading of Mark’s Gospel: To See the Invisible would be an excellent choice for a Bible study class or book group in any kind of Quaker meeting, especially if participants looked at other Bible translations besides the King James. I think the book might provoke discussions that would add clarity and insight to our understanding of the message of Jesus in the gospel of Mark.
Barbara Birch is a member of Strawberry Creek Meeting in Emeryville, Calif., and a board member at Ben Lomond Quaker Center. She facilitates workshops at Friends General Conference and Woodbrooke. She is the author of Lectio Divina: Revelation and Prophecy in the Quaker Quicks series.
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As a Friend who spent nearly 40 years studying the Bible as a student, pastor, and teacher, I am astonished that anyone is still using the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible (KJV) as a primary source. It is not only difficult understand because of its archaic (though admittedly poetic) language, it is also inaccurate in its translations. Generations of scholars from many Christian traditions have set aside this version of scripture in favor of more accessible and reliable ones — and there are many. Barbara Birch barely mentions KJV translation problems or other options, and that does not serve the community of Friends who still want to read, understand, and apply the Bible.
There’s a better way of reading Scriptures, which the early Friends found that is a hallmark of our faith: reading them in the Spirit in which they were written. The King James Version speaks from this Spirit in a way that no other version does and so lends itself to the reader’s accurate understanding of their content. From the first essay in this book comes a paragraph that distinguishes the Quaker way of reading Scriptures from that of the scholar: “As in much of Scripture, the text here brings types and figures of spiritual conditions and processes into view, so we can more easily recognize and name inward truths that otherwise might remain hidden and obscure. The text does provide historical and geographical information, but such objective facts lack spiritual significance if not related to inward realities. The Bible and early Friends writings are texts about humanity’s spiritual malaise and its return to vigor; to view these spiritual resources primarily as fields in which scholars harvest ideas to increase our store of knowledge is to disregard the value and purpose of the writings. Since the 1990s, spiritual expositon of biblical and Friends writings has been largely co-opted by a scholarly focus upon the context provided by historical events, philosophies, and languages, which has kept pace with our society’s veering toward the materialism of technology. Should Friends return to gospel order, the present time, in hindsight, likely will be seen as a period in which scholarly pursuit stood in place of prophetic faith, and information pinch-hit for wisdom. Friends knew “that being bred at Oxford and Cambridge was not enough to fit and qualify men to be ministers of Christ.” Yet in their time and ours, the loss of the gospel allows scholarly information to step into the void.”