Mark the Evangelist

Two separate pieces of evidence, one ancient and one modern, are the whole case for what little can actually be established about who wrote the earliest gospel. The gospel itself names no author anywhere in its text, and the detail some early and later commentators have read as a hidden signature is a single strange verse: at Jesus's arrest, an unnamed young man following him flees naked, leaving his linen garment behind, an episode with no narrative purpose except, on the traditional reading, as the author's own quiet, unclaimed appearance in his own account. The external evidence is a single early testimony: Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, as later quoted by the church historian Eusebius, states that Mark, having been Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately what he remembered of Peter's teaching, though not in order. Modern biblical scholarship treats Papias's testimony as one live possibility rather than settled fact, since it survives only at second hand through Eusebius and reflects that later writer's own interests. What is far more secure, and entirely a modern finding, is Markan priority: nineteenth and twentieth century source-critical scholarship established, from close comparison of shared wording and sequence, that Mark was very likely the earliest gospel written and a direct source for Matthew and Luke, reversing the older assumption that Mark simply abridged Matthew.

Mark's institutional legacy runs through two cities on opposite ends of the Mediterranean, joined by an act Venice remembers as a triumph. Tradition holds Mark the founder of the church of Alexandria, whose Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate still traces its episcopal line to him, and his body was venerated there for centuries. In 828, Venetian merchants removed Mark's relics from Alexandria and carried them to Venice, reportedly concealing the body beneath a layer of pork to deter Muslim customs inspectors from searching the cargo closely. Venice built a church to house the relics, consecrated by the 830s and rebuilt on a grander scale beginning in 1063 as the Basilica di San Marco, and adopted Mark in place of its earlier patron, Saint Theodore, as the city's own protector, with his symbol, the winged lion drawn from the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, becoming Venice's civic emblem as much as the church's. The theft itself acquired its own devotional status in Venetian memory as the Translation of Saint Mark, still marked on the church calendar, and the relationship was partly repaired in 1968, when the Vatican returned a portion of the relics to the church in Alexandria to mark nineteen centuries since Mark's traditional martyrdom there.