Saint Mark may not have written the gospel that carries his name
Tradition names Mark as the author of the shortest gospel, founder of the church of Alexandria and first bishop of Christian Africa. Most modern scholars, however, treat his gospel as anonymous, and even ancient writers disagreed over whether John Mark, Mark the Evangelist and the cousin of Barnabas were one man or three.
The traditional story is vivid. Eusebius of Caesarea wrote that Peter, after escaping Herod Agrippa I's prison, met Mark on the road and took him on as travel companion and interpreter, arriving in Rome in AD 42. Mark supposedly wrote down Peter's sermons, producing his gospel, before heading to Egypt. Tradition places the founding of the Alexandrian church in AD 49, and the Coptic Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and Coptic Catholic churches all claim descent from that community.
Coptic tradition adds considerably more. It holds that Mark was born in Cyrene, in what is now Libya, that the disciples met in his house after the crucifixion, that the Holy Spirit descended there at Pentecost, and that he was a servant pouring water at the wedding at Cana. According to this account, pagans in Alexandria angered by his preaching killed him in AD 68. Eusebius, by contrast, simply records that Anianus succeeded him as bishop in 62 or 63.
Critical scholarship is far less certain. The earliest link between Mark and the gospel comes from Papias, whose words modern scholars find hard to interpret. Some argue the author knew little of Palestinian geography, while Heidi Roskam and Michael Kok defend his accuracy. Several scholars, among them Francis Moloney, suggest the writer may indeed have been called Mark, just not any Mark from the New Testament. Hippolytus of Rome had already split the figure into three separate members of the Seventy Disciples.
Whatever the history, the saint's image is fixed. He is symbolised by a winged lion, sometimes explained by an old belief that lions slept with open eyes, recalling Christ in the tomb. Catholic and Orthodox churches keep his feast on April 25, which for churches still following the Julian calendar falls on May 8 of the modern calendar until 2099.
Source: Mark the Evangelist
