⚡WEB · Mark 9:10
What does Mark 9:10 mean?
"They kept this saying to themselves, questioning what the “rising from the dead” meant."
— Mark 9:10 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
A cloud came, overshadowing them, and a voice came out of the cloud, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”
Suddenly looking around, they saw no one with them any more, except Jesus only.
As they were coming down from the mountain, he commanded them that they should tell no one what things they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
They kept this saying to themselves, questioning what the “rising from the dead” meant.
They asked him, saying, “Why do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”
He said to them, “Elijah indeed comes first, and restores all things. How is it written about the Son of Man, that he should suffer many things and be despised?
But I tell you that Elijah has come, and they have also done to him whatever they wanted to, even as it is written about him.”
Explanation
Mark 9:10 comes immediately after one of the most dramatic moments in Jesus' ministry—the Transfiguration. Peter, James, and John had just witnessed Jesus transformed before them, his clothes becoming dazzling white, and had heard the voice of God the Father declare, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him." As the four came down the mountain, Jesus instructed the three disciples to tell no one what they had seen until "the Son of Man had risen from the dead" (Mark 9:9). Verse 10 simply tells us their response: they obeyed his instruction to keep silent, but privately they were puzzled, wondering among themselves what this "rising from the dead" could actually mean.
Mark's Gospel was likely written for a Roman Christian audience, probably drawing on Peter's own eyewitness testimony, and it consistently portrays the disciples as slow to grasp who Jesus truly is and what his mission entails. This verse fits that pattern perfectly. The disciples were faithful Jews who believed in a future, general resurrection of all the dead at the end of the age—a hope rooted in passages like Daniel 12:2. What confused them was not the concept
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