Around 130 CE, Papias, a bishop in Hierapolis in Asia Minor, wrote that Mark had been Peter’s interpreter and wrote down accurately, though not in order, everything he remembered of what Peter said about the Lord. Fifty years later Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, repeated it and added a detail: Mark handed down Peter’s preaching in writing after Peter’s death. Clement of Alexandria, who ran the catechetical school in Alexandria, filled in the setting, telling readers that the congregation in Rome pressed Mark for a written copy of what they’d been hearing from Peter in person.
By the fourth century, all of this had hardened into the version that still shows up in the footnotes of a study Bible. John Mark, the young man in Acts whose mother owned a house in Jerusalem, the one who traveled with Paul and Barnabas and then quit on them in Pamphylia, grew up, moved to Rome, became Peter’s secretary, and took down the first gospel from the mouth of a man who’d watched the whole thing happen. Every problem with the earliest gospel gets solved by that story, because it puts an eyewitness one step behind the page.
The Gospel Doesn’t Name Its Author
In the earliest gospel, there’s no name, no “I,” no dedication, no claim to have been there or to have talked to anyone who was. Luke at least opens by addressing a patron and claiming to have looked into things carefully.
The words “According to Mark” sit above the text in our manuscripts, and those titles show up in copies from the late second century onward, decades after Papias had put his claim into circulation. Titles get added when a community owns more than one of something. If you have a single gospel you call it the gospel, and if you have four sitting in the same cabinet you need a way to tell the copyist which one you want.
Papias Is the Entire Case
Everything the church says about Mark’s authorship traces back to that one paragraph. Papias’s own books are lost, and the paragraph survives because Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, quoted it in his Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius then took the trouble to tell his readers that Papias was a man of very limited intelligence who’d misunderstood the accounts he was collecting. Papias also passed on a story in which Judas swelled up wider than a wagon could pass and burst in a field, so Eusebius had reasons.
Read the paragraph and notice what it’s doing. It insists that Mark made no mistake and left nothing out, which is the kind of thing you write when people have been saying he made mistakes and left things out. It concedes that the material isn’t in order, then explains the disorder away. That’s a defense brief filed on behalf of a book somebody was attacking, and the thing being defended, a set of sayings and deeds written down as they came to mind, may not even be the gospel sitting in your Bible.
The Author Doesn’t Know the Geography of Palestine
Chapter 7 sends Jesus from Tyre through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee, in the middle of the region of the Decapolis. Sidon is north of Tyre, the lake is well to the southeast, and the Decapolis is on the far side of it. Following those directions means walking twenty miles in the wrong direction, then looping back around the lake and arriving from the other shore, which nobody who’d made the trip would describe that way. Chapter 5 puts the drowning pigs at Gerasa, a city more than thirty miles from the nearest water a herd could stampede into. Chapter 8 sends the boat to Dalmanutha, a place no archaeologist or ancient geographer has ever located.
The law and the customs go the same way. In chapter 10, Jesus condemns a woman who divorces her husband and marries someone else, which is a live legal scenario for a Roman woman and an impossible one for a Jewish woman in Palestine, where wives couldn’t initiate a divorce. The author also pauses to explain to his readers that Jews wash their hands before they eat, and translates the Aramaic as it comes up (talitha koum, ephphatha, Abba, Golgotha) because the audience doesn’t speak it. Those are the habits of a Greek writer explaining a foreign culture to other Greek speakers, working at a distance from the country he’s describing.
The Crucifixion Scene Is Built Out of the Psalms
Set Mark 15 next to Psalm 22 and Psalm 69 and watch the details line up. The bystanders shake their heads and mock, the soldiers divide the clothing by casting lots, someone offers sour wine, and the dying man cries out with the opening line of Psalm 22 quoted word for word. Isaiah 53 supplies the silence before the accusers, and Zechariah supplies the struck shepherd and the scattered sheep. Somebody assembled that scene by searching the scriptures for what the death of God’s anointed had to look like, and then writing it that way. A man who’d stood in the courtyard during the arrest wouldn’t need the Psalter to tell him what happened next.
Peter’s own portrait makes the tradition even harder to hold. In Mark, he misreads nearly every situation, gets called Satan to his face, falls asleep in Gethsemane, and denies knowing Jesus three times before running off into the dark, and the book ends with the women running away too, saying nothing to anyone. Matthew and Luke both worked from Mark and both smoothed those scenes down, because they could see how the founding apostle came off. A memoir taken down from Peter’s own dictation would be the last place you’d expect to find that portrait.
The Book Is Younger Than Peter
Chapter 13 has Jesus walking out of the temple, predicting that not one stone will be left on another, and warning about a desolating sacrilege standing where it shouldn’t, with a stage whisper to the reader to understand what’s being described. The Roman army burned the temple in 70 CE. Peter died in Rome under Nero, around 64 or 65 by the church’s own reckoning. Even counting with the tradition’s numbers, the gospel arrives after its supposed source is dead, written by a man in a Greek-speaking city, quoting the Greek Old Testament rather than the Hebrew.
The manuscripts show later hands on it too. Our oldest copies end at 16:8, with the women fleeing an empty tomb and telling nobody, on a Greek sentence that stops mid-breath. The twelve verses that follow in most Bibles, with the snake handling and the poison drinking, were composed by someone else and attached later, and other scribes wrote a shorter alternative ending because they couldn’t stand the one they’d been given either.
How a Nobody Got the Credit
The strongest thing the tradition has going for it is the choice of name. If you’re inventing an author for your gospel you pick an apostle, and Marcus was one of the most common names in the empire, worn here by a minor figure who walked out on Paul in the middle of a mission trip.
What happened instead is that the four books were already circulating and already known when the naming became necessary, and two of them had apostolic claims attached. The other two got the next best thing, which is apostolic proximity: one book routed through Peter, one through Paul. The name also had to match what people were already saying about the book, and what people were already saying came from a bishop in Hierapolis defending its disordered contents against critics.
The man who wrote the earliest gospel was an educated Greek speaker in a city outside Palestine, writing around the Jewish war of 66 to 70, working from stories that had been circulating orally for a generation and from a Greek Bible he knew intimately. He built the first narrative account of Jesus that anyone had ever attempted, and every gospel written afterward starts by copying him.
Paid subscribers get the rest below the line: the four endings that survive in the manuscripts, the blank column a fourth-century scribe left in Codex Vaticanus at the spot where the ending should be, the paragraph a copyist dropped into the middle of the resurrection appearances that no Bible on your shelf prints, and the note an Armenian scribe wrote above verse 9 crediting the ending to a man who wasn’t Mark.
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Sources and Further Reading
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book 3, ch. 39 (the Papias fragment on Mark)
Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 3, ch. 1
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted and The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (on Mark 16:9-20)
Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8, Anchor Yale Bible
Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia
Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels
Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, for the case in favor of the traditional authorship
I understand that many biblical scholars believe the gospels had a source unknown to us, and it's named Q, which is an abreviation of a German word.
I wonder if I could get a comment on this, as it's an issue that further clouds the matter. We used Ehrman in my Gospels class, and he mentions in a sidebar that the reason for the goofy continuity around John 8 is that the story of the woman taken in adultery wasn't added till the 9th century. Is this an oddity or were emendations of this sort being made for centuries after the canon was "set" around 387 CE? The construction and selection of what we consider canon today is fascinating, and I've settled a lot of this in my mind by deciding that, no matter who wrote what, it constitutes sacred history, much like the early books of the Hebrew Bible.