Beginning of the good message of Jesus Christ, Son of God, as written in Isaiah the prophet: See, I send my messenger before your face, who will build your road, proclaimer's voice in the wilderness; ready the Lord's road, make level his rutted path.
There came John the baptizer in the wilderness, while proclaiming repentant immersion for release of sins, and there were going out to him all of the region of Judea and Jerusalem, and all were being immersed by him in the Jordan River, acknowledging their sins. And John was clothed in camel's hairs, with leather belt around the waist, while eating locusts and wild honey. And he was heralding, saying, The mightier-than-I comes after me, of whom I am not competent, having bent down, to loose the tie of his sandals. I immersed you in water, but he will immerse you in the Holy Spirit.
And it happened in those days, that Jesus came from Galilean Nazareth and was immersed in the Jordan by John. And at once ascending from the water, he gazed at the heavens splitting and the Spirit as dove descending on him. And a voice came from the skies: You are My Son, the Loved, in you I am pleased. And at once the Spirit casts him into the wilderness.
And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tested by the Adversary. And he was with the beasts and the messengers were attending to him.
[Mark 1:1-13, my very, very rough translation. Mark famously shifts back and forth between past tense and present tense; some of the more complicated syntax is my crude attempt to accommodate this in a readable form. He also uses the conjunction kai for almost everything, and in most of his sentences; I've translated it variously as 'and', 'while', and 'with'. He also famously has the quirk of using euthys (straightway, immediately, at once) a lot; he doesn't always seem to mean it chronologically, so perhaps we should take it as his figurative way of indicating that two events are closely tied together in some way or other -- perhaps less like 'at once' and more like 'Connected with this,...'.
The passage has several -angel- words, although interestingly they all do slightly different duty: euangeliou (of the good tiding, i.e., the gospel), ton angelon (the messenger, i.e., the prophet), hoi angeloi (the messengers, i.e., the angels).
The fact that the comment at the beginning is attributed to Isaiah and not to the textually closer Malachi is sometimes dismissed by commentators as an error of memory, but when we go back and look at how these texts are reflected in this next several paragraphs, the textual interrelations seem to me to be far too complex to make this plausible; the author is not slipping but doing it deliberately. That is, the comment attributed to Isaiah is not a straight quotation but an interpretation, which seems (probably correctly even as a purely textual matter) to recognize Isaiah 40:3 as an allusion to Exodus 23:20ff. and as extended and interpreted by Malachi 3:1. All three passages seem to have some influence on the paragraphs to follow, which is not at all what you would expect from a simple error in memory. And it's a little odd that commentators never remember that the way people, across multiple cultures, read prophecy is by interpreting it in light of other prophecy. It's also worth reflecting that conjoining of multiple prophecies fits exactly with Mark's overall narrative style, with kai and euthys perpetually linking things together into unities of all different kinds.]
