Mark the Evangelist

John Mark of Jerusalem and the house of his mother Mary

The New Testament introduces him not by his own achievement but by his mother's house. When the angel had led Peter out of Herod's prison, the apostle "came to the house of Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark, where many were gathered together praying" (Acts 12:12) — a house that Peter evidently knew, large enough for the assembly, with an outer gate and a servant-girl to keep it. Everything about the notice suggests a family of substance in the Jerusalem church, and the ancient tradition has always read that house as the cradle of the Church herself: the hyperōon, the upper room of the Mystical Supper and of the appearances of the risen Lord, the room in which the Eleven with the Mother of God awaited the Spirit and where Pentecost came upon them (Acts 1:13–14; 2:1–4). If that identification is right — the Church of Sion venerated one site for all of it — then the first Christian church building in the world was the house of Mark's mother, and the boy who grew up in it saw the whole beginning.

He bore two names, as many Hellenized Jews of the diaspora and of cosmopolitan Jerusalem did: the Hebrew John (Yohanan) and the Latin Marcus, the second in time becoming the only one the Church used. The Alexandrian tradition, transmitted in the Coptic Life, makes his family Jewish colonists of the Pentapolis of Cyrenaica in North Africa, driven to Palestine by raids — which, if received, would make Mark by origin an African Jew of the very region to which he later carried the Gospel, and would set him among such Cyrenean names as the Simon of the Cross and the men of Cyprus and Cyrene who first preached to Greeks at Antioch (Mark 15:21; Acts 11:20).

He was, second, kinsman of Barnabas: Paul calls him plainly "Mark, the anepsios of Barnabas" (Colossians 4:10) — the Greek means cousin, though the older English versions and the Slavonic-derived Lives render it "nephew." Barnabas was a Levite of Cyprus who had sold his field and laid the money at the apostles' feet (Acts 4:36–37), and it is through this generous kinsman that Mark enters the apostolic mission. Barnabas's own entry is filed at his feast of June 11, and it records that it was Mark who recovered his body at Salamis and buried it with the Gospel of Matthew upon his breast.

The Gospels themselves are silent about him — with two possible exceptions that the tradition has long cherished. At the arrest in Gethsemane, Mark's own Gospel alone records that "a certain young man followed him, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and they laid hold on him, and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked" (Mark 14:51–52): a detail so gratuitous, so useless to the narrative, that readers from antiquity onward have taken it for the evangelist's veiled signature — the more so as the house of his mother, by the tradition, adjoined the garden. On the same reasoning the unnamed "man bearing a pitcher of water" who leads the disciples to the upper room (Mark 14:13) has been thought to be Mark himself or his father. The identifications cannot be proved and the Church has never required them; they are, as the Fathers would say, said reverently and not defined.

Antioch, Cyprus, and the parting of Paul and Barnabas

Mark's public history begins at Antioch. When Barnabas and Saul had discharged the famine-relief the Antiochene Christians sent up to Judea, they "returned from Jerusalem, having fulfilled their ministry, and took with them John, whose surname was Mark" (Acts 12:25). He is thus enrolled in the church of Antioch — the church where the disciples were first called Christians, and the base from which the whole Gentile mission was launched — and when the Holy Spirit said "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them" (Acts 13:2), Mark went with them from Seleucia as their hypēretēs, their attendant or assistant (Acts 13:5). The word is the same the evangelist Luke uses for the "ministers of the word" (Luke 1:2) and, in the papyri, for a subordinate who serves a superior's work; the Fathers understood it of one who baptized, catechized, carried the books, and served the apostles' daily needs.

So Mark saw Cyprus — Barnabas's own island — from Salamis to Paphos, and stood by when the sorcerer Bar-Jesus Elymas was struck blind and the proconsul Sergius Paulus believed (Acts 13:6–12). Then, when the party sailed north to Perga in Pamphylia, "John departing from them returned to Jerusalem" (Acts 13:13). Luke gives no reason, and the guesses of interpreters — the hardships of the Taurus roads, homesickness, alarm at the turn to the Gentiles and at the leadership passing from his kinsman Barnabas to Paul — remain guesses. What is certain is that Paul held it against him. When, some years later, the two apostles planned to revisit the churches, "Barnabas determined to take with them John, whose surname was Mark. But Paul thought not good to take him with them, who departed from them from Pamphylia... And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus" (Acts 15:37–39).

This quarrel — the sharpest recorded between two saints in the New Testament, and it happened at Antioch — the Fathers treated with a delicate honesty that later ages have sometimes lacked. John Chrysostom, preaching on Acts in that same city, refuses to make either apostle a villain: the disagreement was over a man, not over the faith; each acted from a genuine good, Paul from strictness for the work and Barnabas from mercy toward his kinsman; and the providence of God turned one mission into two, so that the churches gained by the separation what they might have lost by the concord. That Mark was the occasion of it, and afterwards the friend of both, is part of what the Church loves in him. Nothing in Scripture is said of his years in Cyprus with Barnabas; the Cypriot tradition keeps his memory with his kinsman's, and the account of Barnabas's martyrdom at Salamis has Mark bury him secretly with a copy of the Gospel of Matthew upon his breast and then flee to Egypt.

Reconciled: with Paul and with Peter at Rome

The last notices of Mark in the New Testament are luminous with a reconciliation. From his Roman captivity Paul writes to the Colossians: "Aristarchus my fellow-prisoner saluteth you, and Mark, the cousin of Barnabas, touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him" (Colossians 4:10) — the apostle who once would not travel with him now commends him to a church with his own authority. Philemon receives the same greeting (Philemon 24). And in the last letter of all, awaiting execution and abandoned by others, Paul asks Timothy: "Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry" (2 Timothy 4:11) — the man rejected in Acts 15 has become useful, the one Paul now sends for. The Church has read these verses for two thousand years as the vindication of the young deserter and the proof that a beginning badly made is not a life.

At Rome he is also, and above all, Peter's. The first epistle of Peter closes: "The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son" (1 Peter 5:13) — Babylon read since Papias and Eusebius as Rome, and "my son" as the language of spiritual fatherhood, whether or not Peter had baptized him in his mother's house years before. The two great apostles, in their last days in the capital, both had Mark beside them.

Peter's interpreter and the writing of the Second Gospel

The oldest tradition about any Gospel is the tradition about Mark's, and it is remarkably early. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, writing about A.D. 110–130, reported what he had learned from "the Elder" — John the presbyter of the apostolic generation — and Eusebius preserved his words: Mark, having become the interpreter (ἑρμηνευτής) of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, all that he remembered of the things said and done by the Lord; for he had neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterwards followed Peter, who taught according to the need of the moment and not as one composing an ordered account of the Lord's sayings. Mark therefore did no wrong in writing down single points as he remembered them, for his one care was to omit nothing that he had heard and to state nothing falsely. Every element of the later tradition is already there: Mark not an eyewitness, Mark the interpreter, Mark's material Peter's preaching, Mark's order not chronological, Mark's honesty absolute.

Irenaeus (c. 180) adds the setting: "After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself handed down to us in writing the things preached by Peter." Clement of Alexandria, whose testimony matters especially since he taught in Mark's own city, tells how it happened: Peter having preached publicly at Rome, his hearers — many of them, in one form of the story, knights of the imperial household — begged Mark, who had long followed him, to leave them a written memorial of the teaching; and when it was done and Peter learned of it, he "neither actively hindered nor encouraged" the work, while another Alexandrian line of the tradition has him ratify it outright for reading in the churches. Jerome repeats the whole: Mark, disciple and interpreter of Peter, wrote a short Gospel at the request of the brethren at Rome, "and Peter, hearing it, approved and authorised it to be read in the churches." The anti-Marcionite prologue to the Gospel and the Muratorian fragment agree in substance, and no ancient voice dissents.

That Peter's own memory stands behind the book is something a reader can still test. The Second Gospel opens the story of the ministry in Peter's house at Capernaum, is frankest of all four about Peter's failures — the rebuke "Get thee behind me, Satan," the sleep in Gethsemane, the threefold denial told at length and unsoftened — and records with an eyewitness's superfluity what only a man in the room would keep: that the Lord slept "on a pillow" in the stern, that he "looked round about on them with anger," that he took the children "in his arms," that the grass at the feeding was green, that the crowds sat down "in ranks like garden-beds," and the Aramaic words themselves as they were spoken — Talitha koum, Ephphatha, Abba, Boanerges, Korban, Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani — each carefully translated for readers who had no Aramaic. To an Antiochene eye there is something fitting in this: the two greatest sees of the East both trace their founding to Peter, Antioch by his own presence and Alexandria through his interpreter Mark, and it was of these three thrones — Antioch, Alexandria and Rome — that Gregory the Great could write that they are in truth "the one see of Peter."

The Gospel according to Mark

The book Mark left is the shortest of the four, sixteen chapters of headlong Greek in which nearly everything happens "immediately" (εὐθύς, more than forty times) and the narrative drives without preface or genealogy from the Jordan to the empty tomb. Its Greek is plain, Latinate in vocabulary and paratactic in syntax — the speech of the Roman street rather than the schools — and it explains Jewish customs and translates Aramaic for readers who need it, which is the internal evidence of its Roman and Gentile destination. It opens with a title rather than a story: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" — the words the lion of the icon holds open on his book — and it uses the word euangelion for a written account in the way that gave the four books their name. Its date the ancients set in the sixties: Irenaeus after the deaths of Peter and Paul, Clement in Peter's lifetime, and the Lives which the Slavic and Russian synaxaria transmit about the year 62 or 63. Its two halves turn on Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi; its Christology is a secret disclosed by stages, from the demons who know him, through the disciples who do not, to the centurion at the Cross who says at last, "Truly this man was the Son of God" — and the Fathers observed that the Gospel which begins in the wilderness with the voice of a herald ends with the confession of a Roman soldier.

Since antiquity the Church has read the Second Gospel liturgically through much of the year, and its resurrection endings stand among the eleven Gospels of Sunday Matins. Augustine's judgement that Mark was Matthew's abbreviator (breviator) held the West for a millennium; nearly all modern scholarship reverses it, taking Mark for the earliest of the Gospels and a source of the other two. Neither view touches what the Church confesses about the book, and both are recorded below.

The founding of the Church of Alexandria

"They say," writes Eusebius, "that this Mark was the first to be sent to Egypt to preach the Gospel which he had also composed in writing, and the first to establish churches in Alexandria itself." The notice — repeated by Jerome, by the whole Byzantine synaxarion tradition, and by the Copts as the foundation charter of their Church — is the beginning of Christianity in Africa. Eusebius adds a second notice that fixes the chronology as antiquity understood it: "In the eighth year of the reign of Nero, Annianus was the first after Mark the evangelist to receive the ministry of the churches of Alexandria" — that is, about the year 62.

The Alexandrian Acts of Mark tell the story that the Coptic and Byzantine Lives alike transmit. Coming into the great city by the eastern gate, the apostle's sandal-strap broke, and he gave it to a cobbler to mend; the awl pierced the man's hand, and he cried out in his pain, "Heis Theos! — God is one!" Mark took the words as the sign he had been sent for: he made clay with his spittle, anointed the wound and healed it, and then preached to the astonished craftsman the one God who had come in the flesh. The cobbler Anianus brought him home, believed with all his household, and became the first fruits of Egypt and, when Mark ordained him, the second bishop of Alexandria. Around that first house-church the apostle gathered a multitude "of every rank," and the Acts record that he consecrated for the city a bishop, three presbyters and seven deacons — a hierarchy complete in the apostolic pattern — before going west for some two years to the Pentapolis of Cyrenaica, and returning to find the church grown so numerous that it had built itself a place of assembly by the sea at the Boukolia, the cattle-pastures east of the city.

From that seed came what the Church of Alexandria became: the catechetical school whose masters were Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, Dionysius and Didymus, the greatest theological institution of the ancient world; the Egyptian monasticism of Antony and Pachomius; the throne of Athanasius and Cyril, and their fathers' definitions of the Trinity and the Incarnation; the ascetic community whose austerity Philo had described and which Eusebius, reading him, believed to be Mark's own converts. The apostle is credited too with the Liturgy of Saint Mark, the ancient eucharistic rite of Egypt, which survives in Greek in medieval rolls and, in its Coptic recension, as the Liturgy of Saint Cyril; the extant text is manifestly of later centuries in its developed form, but the Alexandrian Church has always held that the shape of its worship came from its founder. And the see itself keeps his name in its titles: both the Coptic Pope of Alexandria and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa are styled successors of the throne of the holy Evangelist Mark.

Martyrdom in the streets of Boukolia

The Alexandrian passion is circumstantial and terrible. The growth of the Church had enraged the servants of the city's own god Serapis, and they sought the apostle, calling him a magician. In the year of his death the great festival of Serapis fell on the same days as the Christian Pascha, and while Mark was serving the Liturgy in the church at the Boukolia the pagan crowd broke in, seized him, and put a rope about his neck. Crying to one another, "Drag the ox to the ox-stalls!" — the mockery of a sacrificial beast led to slaughter — they hauled him through the stony streets of the city so that his flesh was torn away and the stones were wet with his blood, and at evening threw him into prison.

There, the Acts relate, an angel appeared to strengthen him, and then the Lord himself stood by him and said, "Peace be to thee, Mark, mine evangelist" — words that the Church of Venice would one day take for her own motto, Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus. In the morning the mob returned and dragged him again through the same streets, until, giving thanks and praying for the Church he had founded, he yielded up his spirit with the words of the Lord upon the Cross: "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit." The synaxarion of Constantinople sets his death in a distich of two lines that says the whole of it: Dragging Mark along the ground, the murderers knew not that they were sending him to heaven.

The pagans built a fire in a place called the Angels to burn the body, but a sudden darkness came on, with hail and thunder and — the Acts say — an earthquake, and they fled crying that Serapis was avenging his own. The Christians took up the relics unburnt, wrapped and anointed them, and buried them in a tomb hewn in the rock beneath the sanctuary of the church at the Boukolia, and there kept the memory of their father year by year. Of the year the traditions differ, as they do of nearly every apostolic date: Eusebius's succession-notice implies a departure by about 62, the Slavic and Russian Lives print 63, and the Coptic reckoning gives 68, on the strength of which the Copts kept the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom in 1968. The OCA's notice adds a further oddity, dating the burial to "April 4, 63" — a day the calendars do not keep for Mark, and evidently a variant carried in the Slavic Lives rather than a rival feast. All the traditions agree on the day — the twenty-fifth of April in the Julian calendar, the thirtieth of Baramoudah in the Coptic — and on the manner: the first bishop of Africa dragged to death behind a rope.

Relics, translations, and the lion of Venice

The tomb at the Boukolia became the mother-shrine of Egyptian Christianity. A church was raised over it — the tradition dates the rebuilding to about 310 — and it survived the Persian and the Arab conquests, the relics being venerated there for nearly eight centuries.

In the year 828, under Muslim rule and with the shrine reportedly threatened by the stripping of its marbles for a mosque, two Venetian merchants — Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello — with the connivance of the Greek monk Staurakios and the priest Theodore who kept the church, took the body, left another in its place, and smuggled it aboard their ship, concealing it (so the Venetian translatio delights to tell) beneath layers of pork and cabbage leaves, at which the Muslim inspectors recoiled crying "kanzir, pig!" The relics reached Venice on 31 January 828 and were received by the doge Giustiniano Participazio, who willed the building of a church beside his palace to hold them; the great basilica of San Marco grew up over them, and the evangelist displaced the Greek St Theodore as the patron of the Republic. When the relics were lost during the rebuilding after the fire of 976 and rediscovered — so the Venetians say — in a pillar in 1094 at the consecration of the new church, that apparitio was added to the city's feasts (25 June). The winged lion of the evangelist, with the book open at Pax tibi Marce evangelista meus, became the ensign of Venice and of her empire, and remains the emblem of the city, of the Veneto, and of her old possessions from Dalmatia to the Aegean.

Alexandria never ceased to claim her founder. In June 1968, at the consecration of the new patriarchal cathedral of Saint Mark at Abbasiya in Cairo — and in what the Copts reckoned the nineteen-hundredth year since the martyrdom — Pope Paul VI of Rome gave a portion of the relics to a delegation of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and they were received in Egypt by Pope Cyril VI amid immense rejoicing and enshrined in the new cathedral of the see that Mark founded. The head of the apostle is said by Alexandrian tradition to have remained in Egypt through all the centuries of the Venetian possession.