Bible Quiz: Gospel of Mark
The shortest Gospel and the fastest — sixteen chapters where almost everything happens “straightway.” A roof dug open over Jesus’ head, a pillow in the back of a boat in a storm, a man whose name is Legion, two words in Aramaic spoken over a dead girl, a blind man who first sees people walking around like trees, a beggar who throws his coat away before he can even see, a young man who runs off into the night with nothing on, and a Roman officer at the cross who says the one thing nobody else does. You get fifteen questions drawn from a bank of sixty-eight, and every answer shows the verse behind it, so a miss sends you straight back to the text.
That round moved through the Gospel of Mark — hired servants left in a boat, sons of thunder, two thousand swine, green grass in ranks of fifty, a Syrophenician mother who would not be put off, “Ephphatha,” a fig tree out of season, two mites, a cock that crows twice, and a young man in white sitting on the right side of an empty tomb.
Mark’s whole book is one long “follow me.” This is where that starts.
Mark barely stops to explain anything. Jesus calls, and people get up and go — nets left in the boat, a booth left at the tax table, a coat left in the road. This free 3-day sample is built for exactly that step: short daily readings on what Jesus said and did, and what following him actually looks like in an ordinary week. Nothing to fall behind on.
Start the free 3-day sample →More games at the Free Games Hub →
Common Questions About the Gospel of Mark
What is the Gospel of Mark actually about?
Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels and the one that moves fastest. There is no Christmas story, no genealogy, no long opening speech — it starts with a man in camel’s hair by a river and is at the first miracle inside twenty verses. The word most people notice is “straightway”: Jesus heals, and straightway moves on; he teaches, and straightway a crowd forms. Roughly the last third of the book slows right down and stays in the final week in Jerusalem, which tells you where Mark thought the weight of the story sat. Most scholars think it was written first, around AD 65–70, most likely in Rome for readers who were not Jewish — which is why Mark keeps stopping to explain Aramaic words and Jewish customs the other Gospels assume you already know.
Which details appear only in Mark and nowhere else?
More than you would expect from the shortest Gospel. Mark alone gives James and John the nickname “Boanerges, the sons of thunder.” Only Mark says Jesus was asleep on a pillow in the back of the boat during the storm, that the crowd of five thousand sat on green grass in ranks of hundreds and fifties, and that there were about two thousand swine. Only Mark names blind Bartimaeus, and names Simon of Cyrene as “the father of Alexander and Rufus” — which reads like a note for people who knew those two men personally. Only Mark records the two-stage healing where a blind man first sees “men as trees, walking,” keeps the Aramaic “Talitha cumi” and “Ephphatha,” says the cock crows twice, and tells you about the young man who runs off into the night leaving his linen cloth behind. Those unique details are where a Mark-specific quiz gets genuinely hard.
Why does Mark tell some stories differently from Matthew and Luke?
Not contradictions so much as different camera angles, and a quiz on one book is a good way to notice them. In Mark, James and John ask for the best seats themselves; in Matthew their mother asks for them. Mark calls Jesus “the carpenter”; Matthew calls him “the carpenter’s son.” Mark records the cry from the cross as “Eloi, Eloi”; Matthew writes it “Eli, Eli.” Mark says the drink offered to Jesus was wine mingled with myrrh; Matthew says vinegar mingled with gall. Mark lets the disciples take a staff on the road; Matthew does not. If you are practising for a quiz on Mark specifically, this is the trap: half-remembering the version from another Gospel. Answering “from Mark” rather than “from the Bible in general” is most of the skill.
How do Bible quiz teams practise a single book?
Programmes like Junior Bible Quiz and the various youth quizzing leagues assign one book or a small set of books for a season, and teams drill that text until the wording itself is familiar. The method is repetition with the reference attached: you do not just learn that a man was lowered through a roof, you learn that it is Mark 2, and that Mark says the roof was broken up rather than tiled. Short, frequent rounds beat long cramming sessions, and mixing the question order matters — it is easy to memorise a sequence of answers without knowing the material. Answering out loud, or against a timer, also helps, because recall under a little pressure is a different skill from recognition on a page. Quizzing on a specific book is also just a good way to read one straight through.
How many questions are in this Gospel of Mark quiz, and can I play more than once?
There are sixty-eight questions written specifically for Mark sitting in the bank, and each round draws fifteen of them at random and shuffles the answer order, so no two rounds look the same. Every question shows the exact chapter and verse behind the answer, along with a one-line note on what is actually going on in the passage — so a miss is not a dead end, it is a pointer back to the text. It is free, there is no sign-up, nothing is saved or scored against you, and you can hit Play Again as many times as you like. If you are drilling for a quiz team, running several rounds in a row is the fastest way to find the chapters you are thin on. Start a round on the Gospel of Mark quiz above.