Mark

(first century)

   Disciple and Historian.

   Mark is identified with the author of the Second Gospel. He may have been the same person as John Mark, whose mother’s house was a centre for the early Jerusalem Church and who accompanied paul and barnabas on the first missionary journey and, later, Barnabas on a preaching tour of Cyprus. Another (or maybe the same) Mark is mentioned in the Epistles to the Colossians, philemon and timothy as a useful companion to St Paul. Also a Mark is with peter in ‘Babylon’ in Peter’s First Epistle. According to papias, Mark in his Gospel was the ‘interpreter of Peter’ and eusebius of caesarea recorded that he became the first Bishop of Alexandria. The Gospel is generally believed to have been the earliest of the four to be written and to have been known by both matthew and luke. It has been suggested that the young man present at Jesus’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane who ran away naked (an incident recorded only in the Second Gospel) was Mark himself.

   R.P. Martin, Mark: Evangelist and Theologian (1972);

   B.M. Metzger and M.D. Coogan, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993).