Holy Apostle and Evangelist Mark

Era

First century

Region

Jerusalem, Cyprus, Rome, and Alexandria

Category

Evangelist, founder of the Church of Alexandria, and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

April 25

About 5 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to A House in Jerusalem The One Who Went Home Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

A House in Jerusalem

When Peter came out of prison in the night, he went to a particular house: the house of Mary, the mother of John whose surname was Mark, where many were gathered praying. So Mark’s family were part of the Jerusalem church from the beginning, and their house was one the apostles knew to go to.

Barnabas was his cousin. When Barnabas and Saul went back from Jerusalem to Antioch, they took Mark with them, and he went with them to Cyprus as their assistant.

The One Who Went Home

At Perga in Pamphylia, Acts says simply that John left them and returned to Jerusalem. It gives no reason. Whatever the reason was, Paul did not accept it.

When the second journey was planned, Barnabas wanted to take Mark again. Paul refused. Acts is unusually frank about what followed: the contention was so sharp between them that they parted from one another. Barnabas took Mark and sailed to Cyprus; Paul took Silas and went overland. It is the only open rupture between apostolic colleagues that the New Testament records, and a young man’s failure of nerve is at the centre of it.

The letters, written later, tell the rest. Colossians instructs the church to receive him if he comes. Philemon greets him among Paul’s fellow workers. And in the last letter Paul is recorded as writing, from prison, near the end: Take Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me for the ministry.

First Peter adds a different connection: greetings from Babylon — almost certainly Rome — and from Mark my son.

Where the Record Comes From

What Scripture says. Acts 12:12 and 12:25; 13:5 and 13:13; 15:36–41. Colossians 4:10; Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11; 1 Peter 5:13. That is all of it.

The young man who fled naked. Mark’s Gospel alone records that at the arrest in Gethsemane a young man, wearing only a linen cloth, was seized and escaped by leaving the cloth behind. There is a long-standing habit of identifying him with the evangelist — an authorial cameo. It should be said plainly: no ancient source makes this identification. It is a modern conjecture resting on the oddity that only this Gospel keeps the detail. It may be true. Nothing attests it.

The earliest statement about the writing of any Gospel is about Mark. Papias again, preserved by Eusebius, and attributing it in turn to the Elder: Mark, having become Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatever he remembered of the things said and done by Christ — because he had not himself heard the Lord, but followed Peter, who taught as the occasion required rather than giving an ordered account. Papias insists that Mark made no mistake in writing what he remembered, but that the order was not his to give.

Irenaeus says the same thing more briefly: Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, handed down in writing what Peter had preached. Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius, adds that Peter’s hearers at Rome asked Mark to write down what they had heard.

Alexandria. The Coptic Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria both trace themselves to Mark, and the tradition is old and deeply held. Its earliest surviving attestation, however, is a single brief line in Eusebius: that this Mark went to Egypt and was the first to found churches at Alexandria. Eusebius wrote in the early fourth century — roughly two hundred and sixty years after the event he is reporting, a far wider gap than the sixty or eighty years between Papias and the writing of the Gospel. That does not make it false. It does mean the two claims about Mark are attested very differently, and a reader should know which is which.

Coptic tradition fills in what Eusebius does not: an arrival around AD 61, the cobbler Anianus whose hand Mark healed while mending his sandal and who became the first bishop after him, and a martyrdom at Alexandria in AD 68, dragged through the streets with a rope about his neck during a pagan festival.

The relics. In 828 two Venetian merchants removed the body from Alexandria — hidden, the story goes, in a basket of pork to deter the customs inspectors — and carried it to Venice, where St Mark’s Basilica and the city’s winged lion were built around it. In 1968, nineteen centuries after the martyrdom, Pope Paul VI returned a portion to the Coptic Orthodox Church; a Coptic delegation received the relics at Rome in June and Pope Cyril VI received them at the new St Mark’s Cathedral in Cairo. That second event is documented modern history, whatever one makes of the first.

The lion. Jerome’s assignment, late fourth century, connecting the lion’s roar to the voice crying in the wilderness that opens Mark’s Gospel. Irenaeus, two centuries earlier, had given Mark the eagle. The scheme took time to settle.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Partly for the Gospel — the shortest, the fastest, the one that keeps saying immediately, and the one the ancient Church believed carried Peter’s own voice.

But there is a second reason, and it is the one worth keeping. Mark is the New Testament’s great instance of a second chance that was not offered cheaply. Paul did not wave the desertion away. He refused to take him, and dug in hard enough to lose Barnabas over it. Barnabas did not agree, and took the boy anyway, and lost Paul over it. Both men paid something for the position they held.

And then, years on, a letter from a prison cell: bring Mark, he is useful to me. Nobody is recorded apologising. Something simply got repaired, over time, out of sight, while a discredited young man went on working.

What His Life Asks of Us

That failing early is not the end, and that being the one who takes a chance on someone is a real and costly job. Barnabas is the pattern there — his name means son of encouragement, and he spent his own standing twice, once on Saul when the church in Jerusalem was afraid of him, and once on his cousin when Paul had written him off.

And it asks patience about restoration. Mark is not restored in the next chapter. There are years between the split and the request, and Acts does not narrate them. Most repair looks like that.

Holy Apostle and Evangelist Mark, pray to Christ our God for those who have quit and are ashamed, and for those who must decide whether to take them back.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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