- Chapters
- 16
- Verses
- 0
- Where it sits
- The Gospels
What it is
No genealogy, no infancy, no long discourses. It opens with John in the wilderness and it moves — the word immediately keeps recurring, as though the writer cannot get to the next thing fast enough. Almost everything in Mark turns up again in Matthew or Luke, so it is rarely read for what is unique to it. That is a shame, because its pace is the point.
It also has the strangest feature in the four Gospels: Jesus repeatedly telling people to say nothing about who He is.
Where it came from
Papias again, through Eusebius, and this is the oldest statement about the writing of any Gospel: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. Papias attributes it to someone earlier still, whom he calls the Elder. Irenaeus says the same more briefly.
Most scholars hold that Mark was written first and used as a source by Matthew and Luke, and date it to the 60s or 70s. The tradition’s link to Peter’s preaching is respected even by scholars who think the final text is Mark’s own composition rather than a transcript.
When the Church reads it
Mark has no season of its own. It supplies the weekday Gospels in the later part of the Lukan cycle, and the Gospels for the Saturdays and Sundays of Great Lent.
Before you start
- The ending. The two oldest surviving manuscripts stop at 16:8, with the women running from the tomb, afraid. The longer ending — verses 9 to 20 — is in the great majority of Greek manuscripts, in the Old Latin and Syriac, and is quoted as Mark’s by Irenaeus in the late second century. The Byzantine text, which is the text printed here, includes it. That is the actual situation: overwhelming majority attestation and early patristic citation on one side, the two oldest copies and some stylistic oddities on the other. Now you know what you are reading and why some Bibles bracket it.
- Read it straight through. It takes about ninety minutes and it was almost certainly meant to be heard that way.
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