Up close and personal …

… The Immediacy of Mark: Pakaluk’s “Memoirs of St. Peter” - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, dave Lull.)

Yes, what Mark describes happened THEN, but in Pakaluk’s translation you feel it happening NOW. It reads almost like a novel, which is exactly right. There is that “suspension of disbelief” that in a novel is critical to the reader’s immersion and enjoyment, and which here means you are caught up in, again, that immediacy of action to which Pakaluk refers in the very first sentence of his introduction: “The immediacy of the Gospels, their closeness in time and place to the events they narrate, can be a shocking discovery.”