anger

The Bible describes the anger or wrath of God as being his abiding reaction to human sin and an expression of his justice; it is not a sudden or passionate upsurge of emotion. He is ‘slow to anger’ (Ps. 103:8). God's anger or wrath is directed against sin and wickedness (Rom. 1:18) and this seems to be the meaning of Mark 1:41, where a leper is reported to beg Jesus to heal him. REB reads that Jesus was ‘moved to anger’, following Codex Bezae (D). On the principle that a more difficult reading is probably the original Greek (since it is unlikely that a scribe would deliberately alter a comfortable expression into a mysterious one), it would seem that scribes who were reluctant to accept that anger could be true of Jesus, changed ‘anger’ to ‘pity’. This then became the more established word. Jesus was angry—not with the leper but with the diabolical power of evil manifested in the disease.