John Dart

John Dart spent 30 years reporting on religion for the "Los Angeles Times," but he says his new book breaks the story of a lifetime. In "Decoding Mark" (Trinity Press International), Dart uses investigative journalism techniques to confirm scholarly theories that the Gospel of Luke drew on an original edition of Mark--the oldest
gospel--while Matthew worked from a later, edited version.

Dart also verifies that, as Columbia University's Morton Smith wrote in 1973 in "Clement of Alexandria and the Secret Gospel of Mark" (Harvard Univ. Press), Mark originally had included an episode--later excised--about a young man who was raised from the dead
and initiated in a secret ritual. "I feel it's the best news story that I've ever done," said Dart. He previously considered his biggest scoop being the first reporter to write about the Jesus Seminar. "I've always liked stories that had to do with research."

Dart also loves word puzzles. He describes his book as taking "to extremes a long-neglected literary puzzle technique" called chiasms, which, he said, is used more commonly in the Bible than is usually realized. The chiasms, which he calls "palindromes in prose," were memorization tools. "But these are so intricate that they have to be done for the pleasure of readers, too," Dart said.

He hopes [‘Decoding Mark’] will appeal in particular to "people who like a book that says it can solve some mysteries--biblically literate fans who like 'The Da Vinci Code.' I write it as a first-person narrative and I take them along with me on this detective work. It even has a surprise ending." --Juli Cragg Hilliard

Excerpted from Religion BookLine, Publishers Weekly, 11/18/03)

John Dart, author of several books, was a religion news reporter at the Los Angeles Times for three decades and is now news editor for the biweekly Christian Century, the leading magazine for mainline Protestants and others with a progressive approach to faith. Still a Los Angeles resident, Dart makes 10 trips a year to the magazine’s Chicago office.

His most recent book is Decoding Mark (Trinity Press International, 2003) described elsewhere. Dart has had professional fellowships at Stanford and Vanderbilt. He did initial research at Stanford for his first book, The Laughing Savior (Harper), the first U.S. popular book about the major discovery of early Christian manuscripts at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. An updated edition in 1988 was titled, The Jesus of Heresy and History. He also co-authored a book on Nag Hammadi’s most famous find, The Gospel of Thomas: Unearthing the Lost Words of Jesus (Ulysses, 2000). Though a journalist by training, he was a board member of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Pacific Coast region 1990-1995 and recently joined the SBL’s national advisory board for its website forum of articles for non-specialists.

An ex-president of the Religion Newswriters Assn. (RNA) 1990-92, Dart co-authored Bridging the Gap: Religion and the News Media (First Amendment Center, Nashville, 1993, 2000) while at Vanderbilt University. Dart’s popular primer Deities & Deadlines was also published by the Center (1995, 1998).

Dart was L.A. chapter president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 1976, and was part of the L.A. Times staff that won spot news Pulitzer Prizes in 1992 and 1994. His religion writing awards include the top RNA prize in 1980 for reporting. He and his wife Gloria, parents of four adult children, live in the Porter Ranch section of Los Angeles.

Laurie Goodstein, religion reporter at the New York Times, and John Dart, news editor at the Christian Century, took home the top 2004 newswriting prizes from the American Academy of Religion. Goodstein won in the category for news outlets with circulation above 100,000 and Dart took first for publications under 100,000. The AAR, the world's largest association of religion scholars, awards prizes for that show "well-researched newswriting that enhances the public understanding of religion."

"What a very nice book! Reads like a thriller."
-- Rodney Stark, author of "The Rise of Christianity," president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

“There is a secret at the heart of Mark which is not a theology and perhaps not really even a secret.”
--Sir Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), the eminent London literary critic who co-edited The Literary Guide to the Bible with Robert Alter.

Kermode suggested in The Genesis of Secrecy that solving enigmas in the Gospel of Mark -- such as a unnamed young man who pops up mysteriously and a suddenly perplexing ending – would come by finding an organizing principle involving diagrams, catchwords or a giant form of “intercalation.” That technical term (also called sandwiching) refers to the well-known device in Mark of starting one story, then telling another before finishing the first one. Intercalation is the simplest form of chiasms, or palindromes in prose, that according to Decoding Mark occur in previously undetected frequency and intricacy in the gospel.

Asked to comment on Dart's solutions, Kermode emailed his congratulations:
“It was interesting that my innocent guess about "intercalation" was still worth attention; now I see that the entire gospel was composed in a sort of intercalatory frenzy. Impossible not to admire the care with which you applied yourself to all the detail.”