Short and sweet
by Mike Oettle
YOU could hardly
forget Mark, since he is the author of the oldest of the four Gospels –
although placed second in the traditional arrangement of the New Testament. He
is also the briefest of the Evangelists, or Gospel writers – his writing has
been compared with that of a journalist, giving the facts only.
If it is accepted that the Evangelist was the same person as John Mark,[1] mentioned several times in the Gospels, we know quite a bit about this man. But like all of Christ’s followers during His ministry, his legend has grown. The Coptic or Egyptian Church claims him as its founding father, its first bishop, and he is also associated with the city of Venice and its powerful republican empire. His symbol as an Evangelist is a winged lion, often seen in Venetian art.
John Mark’s mother was an influential member of the band of Christ’s followers in
Jerusalem, and it is said that the upper room – where the Last Supper was held,
where Jesus appeared to His disciples and where the Holy Spirit appeared like
flame on the day of Pentecost – was in their home. It is also thought that
John Mark was the young man mentioned in Mark 14:51,52 who followed Christ
after His arrest:
“And a certain young man was following Him, wearing nothing but a linen sheet over his naked body, and they seized him. But he left the linen sheet behind, and
escaped naked.”[2]
He later travelled with both Paul and Peter. His cousin Barnabas took him along with Paul on his first missionary journey, but at Perga[3] he turned back to Jerusalem. Paul was unhappy over this and quarrelled with
Barnabas, and the upshot was that Mark and Barnabas went preaching together in
Cyprus. (Acts 13 and 15) Mark later joined Paul in Rome, where Paul was a prisoner, and helped him. (Colossians 4:10)
Peter
refers to Mark affectionately as his “son”. (1 Peter 5:13) This matches
with the tradition that Mark’s Gospel is a collection of Peter’s recollections
of the life of Jesus. Mark probably wrote his Gospel in Rome or some other
place in Italy.
The
Gospel, written for Greek-speaking Gentile Christians, says little of confrontations between Jesus and the Jewish religious authorities, nor does it quote much from the Old Testament. Matthew and Luke both seem to have used it as an outline and added more material in writing their Gospels. There is argument over whether Mark ended his work at the discovery of the empty tomb (Mark 16:1-8) or added the closing verses of chapter 16 up to verse 20, but without these verses the story is incomplete and has an unnatural ending.
Where Mark ended his days is not recorded in the New Testament, but there is a persistent tradition that he settled in Alexandria, the great Greek city on the Nile delta, became its first bishop, and was martyred there under Nero or Trajan.
His remains (or relics) were kept in Alexandria until
early in the 9th century, when they were taken to Venice – some say they were
stolen by Venetian merchants. A church was built in his honour that burned down
in 976, after which a new basilica arose containing not only Mark’s relics but
a magnificent series of mosaics on Mark’s life, his death and the removal
(“translation”) of his remains to Venice. It is no accident that the famous
explorer Polo who reached China in the 1270s bore the Christian name of Marco.
