Mark the Evangelist

Life and Ministry

John Mark was the son of Mary of Jerusalem, in whose house the early church gathered (Acts 12:12). He is the cousin of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10), the companion of Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey until he turned back at Perga (Acts 13:13), the point of contention between Paul and Barnabas at the start of the second journey (Acts 15:37-39), and finally a fellow worker of Paul again by the writing of Colossians, Philemon, and the second letter to Timothy. Peter calls him my son in 1 Peter 5:13, and the earliest tradition, preserved by Papias on the authority of John the Elder, identifies him as Peter's interpreter and the writer of the second Gospel — composing his account from Peter's preaching in Rome and circulating it especially for the Roman church. Eusebius adds that after Peter's death Mark traveled to Egypt and founded the church at Alexandria, becoming its first bishop.

Circumstances of Death

The Coptic tradition, preserved in the seventh-century Synaxarion and in older Alexandrian sources, places Mark's martyrdom around AD 68 during the Easter celebrations, which fell that year on the same day as the festival of Serapis. A mob enraged by Mark's preaching against the cult seized him at the church of Baucalis on the eastern shore of Alexandria, tied a rope around his neck, and dragged him through the streets and over the stones until his body was broken; the next day the dragging was renewed and Mark died. His body was recovered by the Christians and buried at Boukolou. In AD 828 Venetian merchants stole the relics from Alexandria and brought them to Venice, where they rest beneath the Basilica of Saint Mark.

Legacy

Mark's Gospel — the shortest, the most urgent, the first written — is the framework on which Matthew and Luke built. As founder of the Coptic Orthodox Church, his line of succession is the oldest unbroken episcopal line in Christianity. His witness is that the young man who once ran away from danger at Gethsemane and again at Perga ran toward danger in Alexandria, until his blood watered the soil of the first African church. The deserter became the martyr; the apprentice became the evangelist; the runaway became the rope-dragged saint of Egypt.