Who wrote the Gospel of Mark?

A book without a byline

Mark opens with no author and no “I”: “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). The heading “According to Mark” was added as copies circulated. Every manuscript that carries a title gives that name, so the real question is who first said Mark, and whether he can be trusted.

Papias and the elder

The earliest witness is Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, in today’s western Turkey, writing around AD 120. His five books are lost, but the church historian Eusebius copied a few lines in the fourth century. Papias passes on what “the elder” used to say. Mark had been Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately, though not in order, what he remembered of the Lord’s words and deeds. He had never heard Jesus himself. He had followed Peter, who taught as the need arose, without arranging the sayings into a connected account.

Later writers build on this. Irenaeus, around 180, says Mark put Peter’s preaching in writing after the deaths of Peter and Paul. Clement of Alexandria, around 200, says Mark wrote in Rome while Peter was still alive. The witnesses agree on Mark and Peter, and disagree on when.

Which Mark?

Marcus was one of the commonest Roman names, but the New Testament knows one Mark who keeps turning up beside Peter and Paul. Acts calls him “John who was called Mark” and puts his mother’s house in Jerusalem, where believers were praying the night Peter escaped from prison (Acts 12:12). He set out with Barnabas and Paul, went home halfway, and caused their split (13:13; 15:37–39). Years later Paul calls him a fellow worker and Barnabas’s cousin (Philemon 24; Colossians 4:10). And a letter in Peter’s name sends his greetings from Rome, in code.

She who is in Babylon, chosen together with you, greets you. So does Mark, my son.

Papias never says John Mark. Most ancient writers assumed one man, and many scholars still do; others think tradition merged two or three Marks.

Clues inside the Gospel

• Aramaic, translated. “Talitha cumi!” Mark explains, means “Girl, I tell you, get up!” (5:41).
• Customs explained. He stops to tell readers how Pharisees wash hands, cups and pitchers (7:3–4), as if they had never seen it.
• Latin words. The widow’s two coins make “a quadrans” (12:42), and the officer at the cross is a kentyrion, Latin centurio, where Matthew and Luke use a Greek word (15:39).
• Peter at both ends. Peter is the first disciple called (1:16) and the last one named: “tell his disciples and Peter” (16:7).

These fit Greek-speaking, mostly Gentile readers, perhaps in Rome, though Latin words turned up all over the empire. Then there is the oddest moment in any Gospel, at Jesus’s arrest.

A certain young man followed him, having a linen cloth thrown around himself over his naked body. The young men grabbed him, but he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked.

Only Mark has it, and readers have long guessed that the author was signing his work. Nothing proves it.

When, and how sure?

Jesus foretells that not one stone of the Temple will be left on another (13:2), and most scholars date Mark between about 65 and 75, around the Jewish revolt and the Temple’s fall in AD 70. Most also think it was the first Gospel written, the subject of Which Gospel was written first? On Papias, opinion divides. Skeptics see a second-century church tying an anonymous book to an apostle. Others, Richard Bauckham among them, hear real memory from people who knew the eyewitnesses. Alexandria later honored Mark as its first bishop, and Venice, which took his relics in 828, still flies his winged lion.