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MARK, GOSPEL OF

The shortest of the canonical Gospels. Mark gained prominence in late 19th- and 20th-century scholarship partly because of the consensus that it was the first written Gospel. Before the 19th century Mark suffered from benign neglect because almost all of its stories are contained in Matthew and/or Luke, who have a great deal of other useful material besides; the reigning view, first formulated by Augustine, was that Mark was an abbreviation of one or both of the other Synoptics. In the second half of the 19th century, however, Markan priority became the critical orthodoxy, a position it has retained to the present day, despite occasional challenges.

Convinced that Mark was the first Gospel, late 19th-century scholarship seized on it as the starting-point for reconstruction of the historical Jesus, but this approach suffered two severe blows at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1901 William Wrede argued strongly that the so-called “messianic secret motif,” according to which the Markan Jesus hides his identity by silencing demons, disciples, and people whom he has healed (e.g., Mark 1:25, 34, 44; 3:12; 5:43; 8:30; 9:9), was not primarily a reflection of the practice of the historical Jesus but a creation of the early Church, which was trying to explain why Jesus’ messiahship was unknown in his own day. Although this particular solution to the “messianic secret” problem has been challenged in recent scholarship, most critics would agree that the motif does to a considerable extent express the theology of the Church rather than a custom of Jesus. In 1919 Karl Ludwig Schmidt further undermined the historicity of Mark by his contention that the links between the individual Markan passages are largely the invention of the Evangelist himself, who strung together individual oral traditions; Mark is not, therefore, a reliable guide to the chronology of Jesus’ ministry. This claim, too, has been widely accepted.

These challenges to Markan historicity, however, did not diminish interest in the Gospel, especially after World War II and the advent of redaction criticism, which emphasized the theological concerns of the Evangelists. These concerns were analyzed by seeing how each Evangelist edited his sources, an analysis which is more difficult in Mark’s case than in those of Matthew and Luke, since the sources have to be reconstructed entirely from the Gospel itself. Recent years have seen increasing frustration with the speculativeness of this source reconstruction and the wide variance in the results, including even disagreement about the basic question of whether the Markan editing was extensive and creative or minimal and mechanical. Most, however, would agree that Mark took a crucial step by tying the traditions about Jesus together in a connected story, although he may have had a partial precedent in a narrative about Jesus’ suffering and death that he incorporated into his Gospel.

But who was Mark, who took the fateful step of writing a Gospel? Papias, a bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor in the first part of the 2nd century who is quoted by Eusebius (HE 3.39.15), identifies Mark as “Peter’s interpreter”; according to Papias, Mark was not himself an eyewitness of Jesus but a later Christian who made an arrangement of the Lord’s oracles on the basis of Peter’s preaching, presumably in Rome after Peter’s death. It is logical to assume that Papias thinks this “Mark” is the only person of that name known from the NT, the “John Mark” alluded to in Acts (12:12, 25; 15:36-41) and the Pauline correspondence (Phlm. 24; Col. 4:10; 2 Tim. 4:11), a cousin of Barnabas and companion of Barnabas and Paul on their missionary journeys.

Many scholars, however, are skeptical about Papias’ testimony. Its main point, the connection of Mark with Peter, has come under critical attack, since there does not seem to be anything particularly Petrine about Mark; if any Gospel concentrates especially on Peter it is Matthew rather than Mark (cf. Matt. 16:17-19; 17:24-27), and the Petrine connection could be an attempt to reconcile two wings of the Church by linking with Peter a known associate of Paul. Whether or not the author was the John Mark of Acts is also disputed. On the one hand, some 2nd-century Church leaders were interested in linking the canonical Gospels with known NT figures such as John Mark in order to refute the claims of the Gnostics for their own gospels, and Papias’ testimony reveals this sort of apologetic bias, which might cast doubt on its reliability. There are in the Gospel, moreover, apparent mistakes about Palestinian geography (e.g., 7:31) and Jewish customs (e.g., v. 3) which some think disqualify the author from being John Mark, a Jewish native of Jerusalem. On the other hand, John Mark does not cut a particularly creditable figure in Acts (cf. esp. Acts 13:13; 15:36-41); if a totally fictional link were being created with an early Church figure, one might think that a more suitable candidate could have been found. Geographical ignorance, moreover, even about one’s own country, was even more common in antiquity than it is today, so that Mark’s apparent mistakes do not necessarily mean that he is a foreigner; and it is also possible that 7:31 is intentionally describing a geographically unrealistic but theologically significant tour of gentile regions. The exaggerated statement in 7:3 that not just the Pharisees but “all the Jews” wash their hands before eating is paralleled in Ep. Arist. 305, which is unquestionably by a Jewish author. The most reasonable verdict on the theory that the author of the Gospel is John Mark, then, is “not proven” — but not disproved either.

Papias’ implication that the Gospel was written in Rome has won a more sympathetic hearing. The Markan Jesus lays great stress on the necessity of suffering for the sake of the good news, and he prophesies that his followers will undergo unparalleled persecution (e.g., 8:34; 10:30; 13:9-13, 19-20). Most scholars believe that to some extent these warnings and the Gospel’s concentration on Jesus’ suffering and death reflect the situation of Mark and of the community for which he writes. For some, this situation lies in the best-known 1st-century persecution of Christians, that instigated by the Emperor Nero against Roman followers of Jesus in 64 c.e. Others, however, relate the persecution envisaged to that which, it is claimed, engulfed Christians as a result of the war of Palestinian Jews against the Romans in 66-73. There is no direct evidence for such a persecution, but Mark seems to know of or to foresee the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 c.e. (13:1-2), and the references to “wars and rumors of war,” “false messiahs and false prophets,” and the “desolating sacrilege” (13:7, 14, 22) can all be related to occurrences during the revolt. Some of those who emphasize the background in the Jewish War place Mark close to Palestine, either in Galilee or, more frequently, in Syria; such a location, however, is not absolutely necessary, since the war was well known throughout the empire. There is no consensus on the issue of provenance, but most would locate the composition of the Gospel in temporal proximity to the Jewish War.

What is clearer is that the Gospel is addressed to a group that is predominantly non-Jewish (7:3), going through intense suffering (13:9-23), and needing to be strengthened in its faith. The frequent obtuseness of the Markan disciples, which is a striking feature of the Gospel (e.g., 4:13; 6:52; 7:18; 8:14-21), may point to misunderstandings of the faith that were widespread within Mark’s community. In the 1960s and 1970s some scholars theorized that these misunderstandings were related to the view that Jesus was a “divine man,” a type of Hellenistic miracle worker with whom believers were supposed to be united in glory. Mark, according to this theory, opposed the theology of glory, which he associated with Peter, the Twelve, and the Jerusalem church, by means of his own theology of the Cross. He did this by discrediting the disciples and their miracle-based faith, emphasizing crucifixion over resurrection, and relativizing the messianic title of exaltation, “Son of God,” in favor of a title associated with suffering, “Son of Man” (e.g., 14:61-62). This interpretation, however, has been attacked from a number of sides. There seems to have been no fixed concept of “the divine man” in antiquity. It would, moreover, be odd that Mark presents Jesus’ miracles in such numbers and detail in the first half of the Gospel, or that he places the acclamation of Jesus as “Son of God” at key points in the narrative (1:11; 9:7; 15:39), if he thought that miracles and the “Son of God” title were basically misleading.

Rather than chasing chimerical “divine men,” it is probably more illuminating to compare Mark with ancient Jewish apocalyptic works such as Daniel or some of the Qumran scrolls. Such apocalyptic works often arose out of situations of persecution and suffering similar to that which Mark and his community seem to be experiencing. Apocalypticists believed that they were living in the end time, and that the very intensity of the suffering all around them was a sign that God was about to intervene decisively on the side of the righteous (cf. Dan. 12:1). These beliefs are strongly paralleled in Mark 13 and elsewhere in the Gospel (e.g., 9:1), although some exegetes have attempted to evade this conclusion by taking out of context Jesus’ statement that, when the apocalyptic woes begin, the end will not yet have come (13:7). Like Mark, apocalyptic thinkers believed that God had revealed to the elect community “the mystery of the kingdom of God” which he had concealed from outsiders (e.g., CD 2:12-13; cf. Mark 4:10-12). In the short time of trial remaining before the end, however, Satan could blind even the elect (cf. 1QS 3:22-23), as seems to happen at various points to the Markan disciples; but apocalypticists also shared Mark’s belief that those who endured to the end would be saved (cf. Dan. 12:12). The Markan twist is to portray a Messiah who himself seems to fall under the power of apocalyptic darkness and death, yet to insist that God has won the decisive eschatological battle against the forces of evil and inaugurated the new age of light by means of this very eclipse of messianic power (Mark 15:33-39).

Despite the general disfavor of the “divine man” approach, nearly all exegetes would agree with its partisans that the Cross is central to the Evangelist’s theology and that Martin Kähler’s description of the Gospels as “passion narratives with extended introductions” applies especially to Mark. This is particularly obvious if Mark deliberately ends his Gospel after the empty tomb narrative in 16:8, without describing resurrection appearances — a view that is defensible, since the conclusions that follow 16:8 in many present-day Bibles are clearly secondary, and biblical narratives often have open endings. It cannot be proven, however, since the original ending may have been lost. To be sure, even if the Gospel does end at 16:8, Mark seems to be aware of resurrection appearances, which are implied in 14:28 and 16:7; but he holds back from describing them, perhaps in order to put more emphasis on the Crucifixion as the apocalyptic turning point between the old age of evil and the new age of God’s dominion (but cf. 9:9).

An ending at 16:8 would also be compatible with other enigmatic features of the Gospel, such as Jesus’ seemingly arbitrary exclusion of outsiders from reflection (4:10-12), his apparently excessive anger at his disciples (8:14-21), and the strange tale about the young man who ran away naked (14:51-52) — features that Matthew and Luke regularly emend or eliminate, and that have led the literary critic Frank Kermode to compare Mark’s riddling narratives to those of Kafka. These enigmas also help to explain the fascination that Mark holds for some modern theologians, who find in the Gospel’s very gaps, incongruities, and paradoxes a mirror of the difficulty of speaking about a transcendent God in a broken world.

See Synoptic Gospels; Passion Narrative.

Bibliography. S. P. Kealy, Mark’s Gospel (New York, 1982); F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); J. D. Kingsbury, The Christology of Mark’s Gospel (Philadelphia, 1983); J. Marcus, “The Jewish War and the Sitz im Leben of Mark,” JBL 111 (1992): 441-62; W. R. Telford, ed., The Interpretation of Mark, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1995); C. M. Tuckett, ed., The Messianic Secret (Philadelphia, 1983).

Joel Marcus