Mark: The First, and the Shortest

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Nobody signed it. Early in the 100s, a bishop named Papias reported that Mark had been Peter’s interpreter and wrote down what Peter remembered, “though not in order.” Some scholars give that report weight. Many doubt it.

When: Around the year 70, close to the time Rome destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple, and about forty years after I died. It is the oldest gospel.

Written for: Followers of mine far from my country, most of them not Jews, during or just after Rome’s war on Jerusalem. It shows them why I had to suffer, and what following me would cost.

What it remembers of me: A short, busy time in Galilee, told at a run, and my last week in Jerusalem, told slowly. It has no birth story, and in the oldest copies, no one sees me after I die.

How close it stays to me: Very close, above all on serving instead of ruling.

If you only read three chapters: Mark 1, Mark 8 and Mark 15.

Words to Know

Immediately — Mark’s favorite word. He uses it about forty times.

Son of Man — the title Mark has me use for myself. In Aramaic it can simply mean a human being. In the book of Daniel it is a figure who comes with the clouds.

The messianic secret — scholars’ name for the way Mark keeps having me tell people not to say who I am.

Legion — a Roman army unit of about five thousand soldiers. In Mark it is also the name of a demon.

The Book in Brief

Mark has no birth story. It begins at the river Jordan, where John is baptizing. I come to be baptized. The Spirit comes down on me like a dove, and a voice from heaven calls me his beloved Son. The Spirit drives me into the wilderness, where Satan tempts me. After John is arrested, I go into Galilee announcing that God’s Kingdom is at hand.

Chapters 1 to 8 move fast. I call four fishermen and a tax collector, and choose twelve. I heal the sick and drive out demons, and crowds press in. Religious teachers object when I forgive sins, eat with sinners and heal on the Sabbath. Those close to me say I am out of my mind. I teach in parables, calm a storm, and send the demons called Legion into a herd of pigs. King Herod has John beheaded. I feed five thousand men, and later four thousand people. Again and again I tell people to keep quiet about me.

Chapter 8 is the turning point. Peter says I am the Christ, and I begin to tell my friends that I will be killed and rise again. On a high mountain, three of them see me changed. Twice more I warn them, and they still do not understand. Whoever wants to be first, I tell them, must be the servant of all.

In chapter 11 I ride into Jerusalem on a young donkey and drive the buyers and sellers out of the Temple. The leaders come to argue with me, and I praise a poor widow who gives all she has. In chapter 13 I warn my friends that the Temple will be torn down and terrible days are coming.

In chapters 14 and 15, a woman pours perfume on my head, and Judas agrees to hand me over. I share the Passover with the twelve, pray in Gethsemane, and am arrested, and all my friends run away. The council condemns me, Peter denies me three times, and Pilate hands me over to be crucified. On the cross I cry out to God, and die. The centurion who watches me die says I was the Son of God. Women from Galilee watch from a distance, and Joseph of Arimathea buries me.

In chapter 16, three women come to the tomb at sunrise and find the stone rolled back. A young man in white tells them I have risen and am going ahead to Galilee. They run from the tomb and say nothing to anyone, because they are afraid. The oldest copies of Mark end there, and the verses printed after it in most Bibles were added later by other hands.

That is how Mark ends, in the oldest copies. Not with me appearing to anyone. Not with a commission or a farewell. With fear, and silence, and a sentence that stops short.

Hold on to that. We will come back to it.

The first one

Mark is the shortest of the four gospels, and it was written first. Matthew and Luke both had it in front of them, and they copied most of it. When you read Matthew or Luke, you are often reading Mark, edited.

Here is why most scholars think it came first. When the three tell the same story, Matthew and Luke tend to agree with Mark’s wording. When they disagree with Mark, they rarely agree with each other. And Mark’s Greek is rough, plain and fast. Matthew and Luke clean it up, never the other way around.¹

Most of all, Mark leaves in things that later writers found embarrassing, and you can watch them disappear.

Go deeperThe gospel the early church overlooked

For most of Christian history, Mark was the gospel nobody needed.

If nearly all of Mark is inside Matthew, why read Mark? Around the year 400, Augustine of Hippo, the most influential teacher of the Western church, gave the usual answer. Mark, he wrote, follows him closely, and looks like his attendant and epitomizer. By him he meant Matthew. Mark was Matthew’s follower and abridger.²

So Mark was seldom explained. John Chrysostom, the great preacher of Antioch and Constantinople, left ninety sermons on Matthew and eighty-eight on John, and none on Mark. When a writer named Victor of Antioch set out to explain Mark, probably in the 400s or 500s, he found no earlier commentary on it, and he had to piece his own together from what others had written on the other gospels.³

The tables turned in the 1800s, when German scholars began laying the gospels side by side, line by line. In 1835 Karl Lachmann, an expert on ancient texts, showed that wherever Matthew or Luke leaves Mark’s order of events, the other one keeps it. In 1838 two scholars, Christian Gottlob Wilke and Christian Hermann Weisse, working separately, concluded that Mark was not an abridgment at all. It was the source the other two had used. By the end of the century most scholars agreed.⁴

Then the overlooked gospel became the one historians turned to first. Historians who wanted to know what I was really like started with Mark, because it was the oldest. And the rough edges that earlier readers had passed over became evidence.

The rough edges

Read Mark slowly and you will find a version of me that the other gospels quietly softened.

My own people thought I had lost my mind. When his friends heard it, they went out to seize him; for they said, “He is insane” (Mark 3:21). The Greek means those close to me, my own household. A few verses later my mother and brothers are standing outside, asking for me. Matthew and Luke both leave out that line.

I could not do much in my hometown. He could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people, and healed them (Mark 6:5). Matthew changed could do no to didn’t do many.

Not every healing worked the first time. When I put my hands on a blind man’s eyes, he looked up and said, I see men; for I see them like trees walking (Mark 8:24). I had to lay my hands on him again. Neither Matthew nor Luke tells that story at all.

I refused to be called good. A man ran up and called me Good Teacher. I said, Why do you call me good? No one is good except one—God (Mark 10:18). In the oldest copies of Matthew, my answer has been rewritten to “Why do you ask me about what is good?” Later copyists changed Matthew back to match Mark, and that later wording is the one the World English Bible and the King James print (Matthew 19:17).⁵

I did not know the day. But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Mark 13:32).

And I got a name wrong. In an argument about the Sabbath, I reminded the Pharisees how David once ate the holy bread at the time of Abiathar the high priest (Mark 2:26). In the story in 1 Samuel, the priest was Ahimelech, Abiathar’s father (1 Samuel 21:1). Matthew and Luke both tell this scene. Both of them dropped the name.⁶

These are the reasons most historians think Mark is older than Matthew and Luke. Later writers smoothed the edges. Nobody adds an edge.

Immediately

Mark writes in a hurry. The word immediately runs all through the book. Immediately the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness (Mark 1:12). Immediately they left their nets. Immediately the fever left her.

There is no birth story, no childhood, no family tree. The book opens with a grown man coming to the Jordan to be baptized by John. By the end of the first chapter I have called four fishermen, cast out a demon, healed a fever, touched a leper and become too famous to enter a town openly.

Then, about two-thirds of the way through, the book slows down. The last week of my life, from my ride into Jerusalem to the empty tomb, takes up six of Mark’s sixteen chapters. One scholar more than a century ago called the gospels passion narratives with extended introductions.⁷ It fits Mark best of all.

Tell no one

Over and over in Mark, I tell people to keep quiet. I heal a leper and say, See you say nothing to anybody (Mark 1:44). I silence demons who know my name. When Peter finally says You are the Christ, I command my friends that they should tell no one about him (Mark 8:29–30).

Why? In 1901 a German scholar named William Wrede argued that the secrecy was Mark’s own device. In his view, my followers came to call me the Messiah only after my death, and Mark had to explain why nobody had said so during my life.⁸ Many scholars still find some version of that persuasive. Others think I really was careful with the word, because in my country Messiah meant a king, and a king meant a war with Rome.

Either way, Mark tells the story so that the people closest to me never quite understand. My disciples are slow, frightened and confused from start to finish. At the end, they all run.

The hinge

The whole book turns at Caesarea Philippi, a town near the source of the Jordan, in chapter 8.

I ask my friends, But who do you say that I am? and Peter answers, You are the Christ (Mark 8:29). For the first time someone has said it.

Then I start telling them that I am going to suffer and be killed. Peter takes me aside to argue, and I say, Get behind me, Satan! For you have in mind not the things of God, but the things of men (Mark 8:33).

Then I turn to the crowd: Whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Mark 8:34).

In my world, the cross was no mere figure of speech. It was what Rome did to slaves and rebels, along the roads, where everyone could see. Mark’s first readers knew exactly what it meant.

Three times in all, I tell my friends what is coming (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34). Each time they get it wrong. Twice they answer by arguing about who will be greatest. The third time, I tell them, You know that they who are recognized as rulers over the nations lord it over them … But it shall not be so among you, but whoever wants to become great among you shall be your servant (Mark 10:42–43).

That saying is in Mark, and so is my answer to the scribe who asked which commandment came first: love God with all you have, and You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31). Short and rough as it is, this book keeps the heart of what I taught.

A demon named Legion

In the country of the Gerasenes, east of the lake, I meet a man who lives among the tombs, chained and screaming. I ask the spirit in him its name. My name is Legion, for we are many (Mark 5:9). I send the spirits into a herd of pigs, and The herd of about two thousand rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and they were drowned (Mark 5:13).

A legion was a Roman army unit. One of the legions that fought my people in the great war carried a wild boar among its emblems.⁹ Now picture a village crowd in my country hearing that the demon’s name was Legion, and watching it run into the sea in the form of pigs.

I will not tell you Mark meant it as a political joke. I will tell you that many readers have heard one, and that Mark’s first readers had just lived through a war with Roman legions.

Written in a war

Mark wrote during, or just after, the war that destroyed Jerusalem. You can hear it in chapter 13.

My friends admire the great stones of the Temple, and I tell them, There will not be left here one stone on another, which will not be thrown down (Mark 13:2). Then I warn them about the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not.

And right in the middle of my speech, Mark breaks in with a note of his own: (let the reader understand) (Mark 13:14).

Let the reader. Not the listener in front of me. The reader holding Mark’s book, forty years later. The writer stepped out from behind my words to speak to you directly, because what I was describing was happening, or had just happened, in his own time.

Go deeperThe abomination of desolation

The strange phrase comes from the book of Daniel, which speaks of the abomination that makes desolate being set up in the Temple (Daniel 11:31; 12:11). Daniel was written during a real crisis. In 167 BC the Greek king Antiochus IV put a pagan altar in the Temple in Jerusalem and dedicated the Temple to Zeus. The first book of Maccabees calls what he did by Daniel’s name.¹⁰

So when Mark’s readers heard the phrase, they would think of a foreign power defiling God’s house. But which one did Mark mean? There is a small oddity in his Greek. The word for abomination is neuter, but the word for standing is masculine, as if the abomination were a man.¹¹

Scholars have suggested three events.

In the year 40, the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, ordered a statue of himself set up in the Temple. The governor of Syria stalled, and Gaius was murdered before it could be done. Some scholars think the warnings in chapter 13 first took shape in that crisis.¹²

In the winter of 67 to 68, during the war, rebels called Zealots seized the Temple, made it their fortress and chose a high priest by lot. Some scholars think this is what Mark meant, because there was still time then to flee to the mountains (Mark 13:14), as the warning says.¹³

In 70, after the Temple burned, Roman soldiers carried their standards into its courts and offered sacrifices to them there.¹⁴ If Mark meant that, he was writing after the Temple fell.

Matthew, copying Mark, makes the place plainer: the abomination stands in the holy place (Matthew 24:15). Luke drops the riddle entirely: when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation is at hand (Luke 21:20).

For readers far away

Mark explains Jewish customs as if his readers did not know them. For the Pharisees and all the Jews don’t eat unless they wash their hands and forearms, holding to the tradition of the elders (Mark 7:3). He translates my Aramaic words into Greek. He explains the value of a poor widow’s two tiny coins by converting them into a Roman one, a quadrans (Mark 12:42).

So his first readers were mostly not Jews from my country. Early tradition said Mark wrote in Rome. Some scholars think Syria or Galilee more likely. The Latin words scattered through his Greek, like legion, centurion and quadrans, fit Rome but would fit any town with a Roman garrison.¹⁵

One small detail suggests he wrote for people who knew someone. A man named Simon of Cyrene was forced to carry my cross, and Mark calls him the father of Alexander and Rufus (Mark 15:21). Matthew and Luke drop the sons’ names. Mark probably mentions them because his readers knew who they were.

And there is a detail so strange that it is probably true. When I was arrested and everyone ran, A certain young man followed him, having a linen cloth thrown around himself over his naked body. The guards grabbed him, but he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked (Mark 14:51–52). Nobody knows who he was. Some have guessed he was Mark himself. It is hard to see why anyone would invent it.

Go deeperWho was Mark?

The gospel never names its writer. The name comes from the report Papias passed on, that the writer was Mark, Peter’s interpreter.¹⁶ But which Mark?

Marcus was one of the most common names in the Roman world, and your New Testament mentions a Mark in several places. Later Christians usually treated these as one man, though some ancient lists kept them apart.¹⁷

Acts tells of a John who was called Mark (Acts 12:12), whose mother Mary had a house in Jerusalem where my followers met to pray. Peter went there when he escaped from prison. This John Mark set out with Paul and Barnabas on their first journey, then left them and went home, and later Paul refused to take him again. The quarrel split Paul from Barnabas (Acts 13:13; 15:37–39). Letters that carry Paul’s name mention a Mark among his fellow workers, and one calls him the cousin of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10; Philemon 24). And the first letter of Peter, sent from Babylon, which most scholars take as a code name for Rome, passes on greetings from Mark, my son (1 Peter 5:13).

Are these the same man, and did he write this gospel? Some scholars think the link to Peter is real, and that this gospel preserves Peter’s memories.¹⁸ Others doubt it. The gospel itself never names Peter as its source, and the claim is first heard decades after it was written.

Later tradition gave Mark a story of his own. Eusebius reports that Mark was the first to preach in Egypt, and that he founded the churches of Alexandria.¹⁹ According to the Venetian story, in 828 two merchants from Venice smuggled what they believed were his bones out of Alexandria, hidden under pork so that the Muslim customs officers would not search them. Mark became the patron saint of Venice, and his winged lion is still the city’s emblem.²⁰

Who said I was the Son of God

The very first line of Mark calls me the Son of God (Mark 1:1).²¹

After that, through the whole book, no human being calls me that. Demons do. A voice from heaven does. Not one of my friends.

The first person in Mark to say it is the Roman officer in charge of my execution. When the centurion, who stood by opposite him, saw that he cried out like this and breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).

In Mark, I have only one sentence on the cross, and Mark keeps it in my own Aramaic: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34). No word of forgiveness. No promise of paradise. Those come from Luke. Mark gives you a man dying in anguish, quoting the first line of a psalm. And the man who killed me is the one who sees.

My disciples were nowhere. They all left him, and fled (Mark 14:50). The ones who stayed were women, watching from afar, women who had followed me in Galilee and served me there (Mark 15:40–41).

The ending, and the endings

Now back to the tomb.

Early on the first day of the week, three women come with spices. The stone is rolled away. A young man in a white robe tells them, He has risen. He is not here. He tells them to go and tell my disciples and Peter that I am going ahead of them to Galilee (Mark 16:6–7).

And then: They went out, and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them. They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid (Mark 16:8).

That is the last verse of Mark in the two oldest nearly complete Bibles that survive, both from the 300s. Two scholars of the early church, Eusebius and Jerome, said the most accurate copies they knew ended there too.²²

People could not leave it that way. So other people wrote endings for it.

There is a short ending, a sentence or two saying the women told Peter after all. There is a long ending, the twelve verses printed in most Bibles as Mark 16:9–20, with appearances drawn from the other gospels. And there are copies that have both, one after the other.²³ If an ending by Mark had come down to us, there would be only one.

Your World English Bible prints the long ending, and most modern Bibles put it in brackets or with a note. Read it, and you will find this: they will take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it will in no way hurt them (Mark 16:18).

In the early 1900s, a preacher in Tennessee named George Went Hensley began handling rattlesnakes in church on the strength of that verse. A small movement of snake-handling churches grew up in the Appalachian mountains, and it still exists. Hensley died of a snakebite in 1955. In 2014 a well-known snake-handling pastor in Kentucky, Jamie Coots, died the same way.²⁴

Those men died obeying a verse that a later hand added to Mark.

Go deeperWhat the oldest Bibles show at Mark 16:8

The two oldest nearly complete Bibles, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, both end Mark at verse 8. But look closely at the pages, and both copyists seem to have known that something more was out there.

Vaticanus is written in three columns to a page. Mark ends partway down the second column, and the copyist left the whole third column empty before starting Luke. It is the only blank column in the New Testament part of the book. Many scholars think he knew of a longer ending and left room for it.²⁵

In Sinaiticus, the pages that hold the end of Mark are not in the main copyist’s hand. They were rewritten by another scribe, probably the one who checked the work, and near the end of Mark he spread his letters out, which may have been meant to avoid leaving an empty column.²⁶

The long ending itself gives clues. It introduces Mary Magdalene as if for the first time, from whom he had cast out seven demons (Mark 16:9), though Mark has already named her three times. Its words and style are not Mark’s.²⁷

And there is the last word. In Greek, Mark 16:8 ends ephobounto gar, they were afraid, for. Short sentences ending in gar, “for,” do occur in Greek, but a whole book ending with it is very rare. For a long time that was taken as a sign that the real ending had been lost. In 1972 a Dutch scholar, Pieter van der Horst, pointed out that one of the treatises of the philosopher Plotinus ends with the same word.²⁸ Some scholars still argue that Mark’s last page was lost.²⁹

Why end in fear?

Scholars have argued for a long time about whether Mark meant to stop at verse 8, or whether his real ending was lost. Most now think he meant it.

Look at what the young man says. He goes before you into Galilee. There you will see him (Mark 16:7). Galilee is where the book began. Mark leaves the women running, and the disciples somewhere else, and the reader holding a message nobody has delivered yet.

Mark ends where an honest witness would have to end. With an empty place, a message, and fear. He does not show you what happened next. He hands it to you, and sends you back to Galilee, to the beginning of the book, to read it again.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 6:5 and Matthew 13:58, then Mark 2:26 and Matthew 12:3–4.

You will find: the same scenes, with the awkward words softened or dropped in Matthew.

Then find Mark 16:8 in your own Bible, and read the note printed after it.

The Short Version

• Mark is the first gospel, written around 70, and Matthew and Luke copied most of it.
• It keeps the rough edges: my family thinking I was mad, a healing in two tries, a name I got wrong.
• I keep telling people to tell no one, and my disciples never quite understand.
• The first human in Mark to call me the Son of God is the centurion who watched me die.
• The oldest copies end at 16:8, with the women afraid. The snake-handling verses come from an ending someone else added.