The Gospel According to Mark: background and overview

The Gospel According to Mark is the second in canonical order of the Gospels and is both the earliest gospel that survived and the shortest. Probably contemporaneous with Q, it has no direct connection with it. The Passion narrative comprises 40 percent of Mark, and, from chapter 8, verse 27, onward, there is heavy reference forward to the Passion.

Though the author of Mark is probably unknown, authority is traditionally derived from a supposed connection with the Apostle Peter, who had transmitted the traditions before his martyr death under Nero’s persecution (c. 64–65). Papias, a 2nd-century bishop in Asia Minor, is quoted as saying that Mark had been Peter’s amanuensis (secretary) who wrote as he remembered (after Peter’s death), though not in the right order. Because Papias was from the East, perhaps the Johannine order would have priority, as is the case in the structure of the Syrian scholar Tatian’s Diatesseron (harmony of the Gospels).

Attempts have been made to identify Mark as the John Mark mentioned in Acts 12 or as the disciple who fled naked in the garden (Mark 14). A reference to “my son, Mark,” in I Peter is part of the same tradition by which Mark was related to Peter; thus the Evangelist’s apostolic guarantor was Peter.

The setting is a Gentile church. There is no special interest in problems with Jews and little precision in stating Jewish views, arguments, or terminology. Full validity is given the worship of the Gentiles. In further support of a Gentile setting and Roman provenance is the argument that Mark uses a high percentage of so-called Latinisms—i.e., Latin loanwords in Greek for military officers, money, and other such terms. Similar translations and transliterations, however, have been found in the Jerusalem Talmud, a compendium of Jewish law, lore, and commentary, which certainly was not of Roman provenance. The argument from Latinisms must be weighed against the fact that Latin could be used anywhere in the widespread Roman Empire. In addition, for the first three centuries the language of the church of Rome was Greek—so the Gentile addressees might just as well have been Syrian as Roman. The Latinisms—as well as the Aramaisms—are rather an indication of the vernacular style of Mark, which was “improved” by the other Evangelists.

Mark is written in rather crude and plain Greek, with great realism. Jesus’ healing of a blind man is done in two stages: first the blind man sees men, but they look like trees walking, and only after further healing activity on Jesus’ part is he restored to see everything clearly. This concrete element was lost in the rest of the tradition. It is also perhaps possible that this two-stage healing is a good analogy for understanding Mark theologically: first, through enigmatic miracles and parables in secret, and only later, after recognition of Jesus as the Christ, is there a gradual clarification leading to the empty tomb. In chapter 3, verse 21, those closest to Jesus call him insane (“he is beside himself”), a statement without parallel in the other Gospels.

In Mark, some Aramaic is retained, transliterated into Greek, and then translated—e.g., in the raising of Jairus’ daughter (5:41) and in the healing of the deaf man with an impediment in his speech (7:34). The well-known abba, Father, is retained in Mark’s account of Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane. In the two miracle stories, the Aramaic may have been retained to enhance the miracle by the technique of preserving Jesus’ actual words. And a cry of Jesus on the Cross is given in Aramaized Hebrew.

The stories in Mark are woven together with simple stereotyped connectives, such as the use of kai euthus (“and immediately,” “straightway”), which may be thought of as a Semitic style (as a typical simple connective in the Old Testament narrative style). More likely, however, this abruptness indicated that the compiler-redactor of Mark has used geography and people simply as props or scenes to be used as needed to connect the events in the service of the narrative.

Except for the Passion narrative, there is little chronological information. References in chapters 13 and 14 appear to presuppose that the Jerusalem Temple (destroyed in 70 ce) still stood (in Matthew and Luke this is no longer the case); but the context of chapter 13, the “Little Apocalypse,” is so interwoven with eschatological traditions of both the Jewish and Christian expectations in the 1st century that it cannot serve with certainty as a historical reference. To some extent, however, chapter 13 does help to date Mark—the priority of which has already been established from literary criticism—because it is in good agreement with the traditions that Mark was written after the martyrdom of Peter. Mark may thus be dated somewhere after 64 and before 70, when the Jewish war ended.