Saint Mark

Mark the Evangelist was an earlier embodiment of Mark L. Prophet.

Mark was the son of one called Mary of Jerusalem. He was the companion and the scribe of the early missionaries. He is listed as the probable author of the Gospel of Deeds, whence comes the symbol of Mark the Evangelist as a winged lion—the second “living creature” beheld by Ezekiel in his vision of the glory.

John was his Jewish name; Mark, or Marcus, was his Roman name, in keeping with the custom of Hellenistic Jews of this time. John means “God is gracious,” i.e., “Upon this place, upon this servant, the grace or the light of Yahweh descends”; Marcus is from the Latin, “a large hammer.”

The Biblical account

When we first meet Mark in the Bible, he is living at Jerusalem, apparently in the home of his mother, Mary. She appears to have been a widow of some means, inasmuch as she is described in Acts as the owner of a house spacious enough to accommodate a large Christian gathering and as having the services of a maid. It has been suggested that the Last Supper was held in her home and that John as a boy may have witnessed some of the final events of Jesus’ life.

There has been conjecture that the young man who fled away naked in the Garden of Gethsemane was John Mark, that he was serving as caretaker of the family garden, and that at the time of the arrest of Jesus he had been sleeping there in the watchtower. When the guard attempted to arrest him, he ran off leaving only his garment, a linen cloth, in the soldier’s hands.

Mary seems to have been intimately acquainted with Saint Peter, as it was to her house that he repaired after his deliverance from prison. This fact could account for Mark’s intimate acquaintance with Peter.

In Peter’s first epistle, Mark is referred to as Peter’s “son”—evidence of close attachment between Peter and Mark.

In the Acts of the Apostles

The Acts of the Apostles records that John Mark was taken by Barnabas and Paul on their first missionary journey as an assistant. Barnabas and Paul arrived at Jerusalem to bring alms from the Christians in Antioch to the Christians in Judea during the famine of A.D. 45. They needed an assistant, and it is likely that it was Barnabas who chose his young cousin or nephew Mark.

We read the occasion when Paul is represented as instructing Timothy to bring him Mark “for he is very useful in serving me.” John Mark acted as a teacher as well as a travel secretary. At Perga in Pamphylia, when they were about to enter upon the more arduous part of their mission, Mark left the apostles, and for some unexplained reason, returned to Jerusalem—to his mother and his home.

In A.D. 51, Barnabas and Paul resolved to set out on a second missionary journey. On this occasion, Paul resolutely declined to associate himself again with one who “departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work.” The issue was a “sharp contention” which resulted in the separation of Paul from his old friend Barnabas who, taking Mark with him, returned to Cyprus while Paul proceeded through Syria and Cilicia.

Whatever the cause of Mark’s apparent vacillation, it did not lead to a final separation between him and Paul. Less than ten years later, Mark shared Paul’s imprisonment in Rome, A.D. 61–63, and he is acknowledged by Paul as one of his few “fellow labourers unto the kingdom of God” who had been a comfort to him “during the weary hours of his imprisonment.”

Later life

Ecclesiastical tradition affirms that Saint Mark visited Egypt, founded the church at Alexandria, and became its first bishop.

The Lives of the Saints records:

The heathens [in Alexandria] called him a magician, on account of his miracles, and resolved upon his death.... At last, on the pagan feast of the idol Serapis, some that were employed to discover the holy man found him offering to God the prayer of the oblation, or the mass. Overjoyed to find him in their power, they seized him, tied his feet with cords, and dragged him about the streets, crying out, that the ox must be led to Bucoles, a place near the sea, full of rocks and precipices, where probably oxen were fed. This happened on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of April, 68, of Nero, the fourteenth, about three years after the death of SS Peter and Paul.

The saint was thus dragged the whole day, staining the stones with his blood, and leaving the ground strewed with pieces of his flesh; all the while he ceased not to praise and thank God for his sufferings. At night he was thrown into prison, in which God comforted him by two visions.... The next day the infidels dragged him, as before, till he happily expired on the twenty-fifth of April. The Christians gathered up the remains of his mangled body, and buried them at Bucoles, where they afterward usually assembled for prayer.

The Gospel of Mark

Everywhere in the Book of Mark we find that the servant character of the incarnate Son is manifest. The key verse is Mark 10:45: “For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” The characteristic word of this gospel is “straightway,” a servant’s word.

There is no genealogy in the Book of Mark tracing back the ancestors of Jesus Christ, for who would give the genealogy of a servant? In other words, Mark does not consider that the human lineage and descent of Jesus Christ is important. He is not trying to prove that he is Almighty God incarnate, and if he is trying to prove it, he has sense enough to know that you don’t prove it by human genealogy. The Book of Mark, contrasting the Book of Matthew, begins with the going before the face of Jesus of John the Baptist, then the baptism of Jesus. And before you are through the first chapter, you are with Jesus in the wilderness being tempted of the Devil. Mark begins with the mission. He leaves to others to account for his birth in Bethlehem and his early years.

The earliest statement about the Gospel that is in existence concerning Mark comes from Papias around 140 A.D:

Mark, who became Peter’s interpreter wrote 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 been one of his followers, but afterward, as I said, he had followed Peter who used to compose his discourses with a view to the needs [of his hearers], but not as if he were composing a systematic account of the Lord’s sayings. So Mark did nothing blameworthy in thus writing some things just as he remembered them; for he was careful of this one thing, to omit none of the things he had heard and to state no untruth therein.

The Gospel according to Saint Mark was, for many centuries, thought to be merely an abridgment of Matthew—and so tended to be the least valued and least read. It is now widely recognized as the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels. The arguments upon which this conclusion is based include the fact that:

1. The substance of over ninety per cent of Mark’s verses is contained in Matthew, the substance of over fifty per cent in Luke.
2. Where the same matter is contained in all three Synoptic Gospels, usually more than half Mark’s actual words are to be found either in both Matthew and Luke or in one of them.
3. The order in which the material is arranged in Mark is usually followed by both Matthew and Luke.
4. Often where Matthew or Luke differ with Mark in language, the language of the other evangelists is either grammatically or stylistically smoother and more correct than that of Mark. On other occasions, something in Mark which could perplex or offend is either absent from, or appears in a less sharp form, in Matthew or Luke. The statement that Jesus “began to be greatly distressed and troubled” (Mark 14:33) is softer in Matthew 26:37 and omitted altogether in Luke; the picture of the three disciples’ failure to watch with Jesus in Gethsemane is considerably softened by the addition of the words “for sorrow” Luke 22:45; in Mark 14:71 Peter is said to have begun “to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, ‘I do not know this man...,’” but Luke has the much less offensive “Man, I do not know what you are saying.”
5. In Mark the disciples’ pre-Resurrection mode of addressing Jesus as “Teacher” and “Rabbi” is faithfully reflected, whereas Matthew and Luke often represent him as addressed by the title “Lord,” thus reflecting the post-Resurrection usage of the church.

If Mark, then, is the earliest of the Gospels, its special importance as our primary source of information about the ministry of Jesus is obvious.

Sources

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, June 17, 1981.