You can start with this The Barnabas bible (ISBN: 0060641282) .. there is quite a huge literary work accompanying it started by one of the brothers who founded Al-Ahram news paper in 1875 the two Lebanese-Christian brothers, Salim and Bisharah Taqla. had absolutely nothing to gain from proving the current versions of the bible wrong as he in fact died a Christian, but did quite an expose on the heresy of the church.
here is quite a bit on "Mark"-- admittedly not my work, but worth a thought nonetheless-- Do I personally dismiss the whole Gospel?.. .. I'll say this, it doesn't affect my beliefs one way or another. I find it rather, hypocritical the current state, where everything is interpreted at whim.. Jesus was sent but to the Jews, seems negligible, to say his stance on homosexuality which is apparently lost to us in translation.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/mmmark.html
The Gospel of Mark:
"Although there is no direct internal evidence of authorship, it was the unanimous testimony of the early church that this Gospel was written by John Mark. (From the NIV Bible Commentary, page 1488)"
So, in reality, we don't really know whether Mark was the sole author of this Gospel or not. And since The New Testament wasn't even documented on paper until 150-300 years (depending on what Christian you talk to) after Jesus, then how are we to know for sure that the current "Gospel of Mark" wasn't written by some pro of Mark?
I hope you see the real danger in making these assumptions when you are willing to DIE for the fact that such Gospel is the actual True Word of GOD Almighty!
Further regarding this Gospel, we read the following commentary about Mark 16-20:
"Serious doubts exists as to whether these verses belong to the Gospel of Mark. They are absent from important early manuscripts and display certain peculiarities of vocabulary, style and theological content that are unlike the rest of Mark. His Gospel probably ended at 16:8, or its original ending has been lost. (From the NIV Bible Foot Notes, page 1528)"
This quote raises a very serious issue here. First of all, as we've seen above in the first quote, we have no evidence that proves that John Mark was the sole author of this so called "Gospel". Second of all, we see that this Gospel has some serious problems/suspicions in it. The issue of Mark 16-20 is a scary one, because many Christian cults today use poisonous snakes in their worship and end up dying.
Removing Mark 16-20 is quite appreciated by me personally (to be quite honest with you), because it prevents people from dying from snake bites. But however, the serious issue of man's corruption of the Bible remains.
We can be absolutely certain now that the above quotes prove without a doubt that the Bible is doubtful. The quote "or its original ending has been lost" proves that what we call today "Gospels" were not written by their original authors such as Mark, John, Matthew, etc... It proves that the Gospel had been tampered with by man. Let alone considering it as the True Living Words of GOD Almighty.
If John Mark wasn't the one who wrote Mark 16-20, then who did? And how can you prove the ownership of the other person? Let alone proving that it was GOD Almighty's Revelation. And as we saw in the first quote above, we don't even know that John Mark was indeed the one who wrote the so called "Gospel of Mark".
To say the least in our case here, we now have enough evidence to discard the entire Gospel of Mark from the Bible, because you can't take bits and pieces of it and say some of it belongs to him and some of it doesn't! Let alone considering the entire corrupted Gospel as the True Living Word of GOD Almighty, which is a complete blasphemy
I hope that keeps your inquiring mind busy while I have my dinner... what amazes me about you, are the extremes you are willing to go through to prove a point-- you water it down and dance around, until you are not sure from whence you started... I am not happy crying anything... I couldn't careless, what you do with your life or what butter statue you worship.. don't delude yourself into thinking engaging you holds some remote worth in my life. If I were really interested in such topics as the intensity you display, I'd most likely make birds fly around your head. That level of dedication and research wouldn't belong on a forum, but in a book, and I have no interest in writing one on LI
peace!