A marginal evangelist: Mark and the mythological origins of the Gospels

By the beginning of the 2nd century two anonymous Gospels had established themselves throughout the Empire as early authoritative biographies of Jesus: The Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark. The task set before the 3rd and 4th generation leaders of the church was thus to determine the origin of these texts—the source of their apparent authority—and in so doing direct their interpretation toward proto-orthodox ends. In other words, a mythology of Gospel compilation was beginning to take shape just as the Apostolic age was drifting out of view.

Of these two Gospels, Mark and Matthew, Matthew’s account was prioritized and primitivized for obvious reasons. Mark’s bare-bones Gospel, lacking, as it were, in nativity stories, Resurrection appearances, and a large swath of ethical teaching and parables (e.g. the Q and M sources), could not have blossomed into Matthew’s theologically-mature text later on—as if the traditions about Jesus were developed and re-worked over time. Instead, Matthew’s more complete narrative had been first, deriving from the testimony of the Apostle Matthew himself. Indeed, this Gospel was so ancient, its pedigree so secure, that it had been originally composed in the Apostle’s native tongue, Aramaic or Hebrew, and was only later translated into Greek, the lingua franca. So say the early church fathers.

Mark’s Gospel, on the other hand, was good but not as good. The church father Papias (80-130AD) cites “the Elder” in stating that Mark had been Peter’s interpreter who “wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory… he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard [from Peter] or to falsify anything” (Fragment of Papias, Exegeses of the Lord’s Sayings).¹ Yet while Mark faithfully preserved the teachings (i.e. sayings) and deeds (i.e. pericopes) passed on by Peter, Papias, or rather the Elder, says he did not arrange them in any particular order. Mark’s Gospel was perfectly sound in as much as it was read as a collection of discrete logia and episodes but not when it was read as a well-ordered stand-alone narrative. Matthew, according to Papias, on the other hand, did set about to “arrange” (συντάσσω) the Lord’s sayings and, by implication, deeds, in their proper order—having been, of course, an eyewitness.

An incoherent mythology

To be sure, these two founding myths in the emerging pantheon of New Testament mythology—that the Apostle Matthew wrote his Gospel first in an accurate order, and that Peter’s interpreter Mark wrote his Gospel second in a less than accurate order—are hopelessly confused.

For one, Papias’ allegation that Mark wrote out of order (in comparison to Matthew?) is nothing short of perplexing. The Gospel of Mark possesses a highly deliberate narrative architecture that Matthew and Luke follow closely. Mark is the narrative skeleton upon which the other Synoptic Gospels hang their flesh and sinews (i.e. Q, M, L). While it can be said that Matthew rearranges some Markan sayings into his (artificial) five discourse structure,² Matthew does not alter Mark’s ordering of events in any meaningful way. Luke’s claim to have written in a “well-ordered” (καθεξῆς) fashion “having investigated everything carefully” (Luke 1:1-3) further devastates Papias’ dismissal of Mark’s chronology and composition. Luke truncates Jesus’ greatest sermon (Luke 6:17-49, cf. Matthew 5-7) and scatters much of the material throughout his Gospel. Put another way, whereas Matthew collates Q material into larger discourse units, Luke more freely disperses the shared content. Given this state of affairs among the Synoptic Gospels—Matthew and Luke each building a calculated and distinctive textual framework over top of Mark—to say Mark lacks order is to make a baseless (and rather polemical) claim.

Secondly, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark share an unmistakable literary relationship. There is significant word-for-word cross-over between the two as nearly the entirety of Mark’s Gospel is contained in Matthew’s Gospel, usually in a lightly edited form, often in the same narrative order. Besides some important additions (e.g. the dream of Pilate’s wife, the resurrection of the Jerusalemite saints, the positioning of the guard at the tomb) Matthew’s passion narrative just is Mark’s passion narrative. The wealth of material they share cannot thus derive from independent oral accounts. One of them redacted the other’s text.

From the vantage of textual criticism it thus becomes difficult to see how the Gospel of Mark could be both Petrine and derivative of Matthew. Why would Peter’s interpreter compose a stripped-down version of Matthew’s Gospel? How can Mark’s primary source be both the oral testimony of Peter and the written text of the Gospel of Matthew? Did Mark really leave out nothing of what he heard from Peter? Where is this material? The irony mounts as one recognizes that it is Matthew, not Mark, who preserves more Petrine content. In the Gospel of Matthew, not in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus answers a number of Peter’s questions (e.g. Temple tax, forgiving the repentant brother), Peter steps out upon the water with Christ (Matthew 14:28-31), and, most famously, Peter receives the keys to the kingdom of heaven (16:17-20). Luke and John also overshadow Mark when it comes to data relating to the Apostle Peter, particularly at the resurrection of Jesus: “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?… Feed my lambs!” (John 21:15).

Furthermore, Mark offers a decidedly negative portrayal of Peter and the other Disciples as impious and ignorant when compared to the other Gospels: “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be with you? How much longer must I put up with you?” (Mark 9:19). Even still, according to Papias and the consensus of the early church fathers, the Gospel of Mark was Peter’s Gospel,² not Matthew or Luke or John.

A dangerous Gospel

Why then did the Gospel mytho-history crafted by Papias and others take the form that it did? All signs point to this: Proto-orthodox church fathers attempted to hem in what they considered to be a dangerous but critical text (i.e. the Gospel of Mark) and in so doing codify their abiding ambivalence toward it.

The Gospel of Mark, in negative terms, served as a perpetual reminder of a time when the essentials of Christian doctrine were defined differently: no Virgin Birth, no Resurrection appearances, no supremacy of Peter, no body of ethical teachings—a time when Jesus was subordinate to God’s spirit and reluctant to reveal himself (or his objectives) openly (cf. Mark 4:10-12). As the orthodox faith began to take shape among like-minded church fathers it became essential that the flock read the Gospel of Mark through the Gospel of Matthew rather than the other way around. Mark was not the primitive Gospel it may have seemed to be, the first telling of the whole story of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark was not a narrative at all.⁴ Instead, Mark was a collection of discrete apostolic memories that other Evangelists put to better use. The Gospel of Mark belonged to the church as Peter’s legacy but the other Gospels were superior. Why read Mark when Matthew preserves the same stories in their proper context?

Matthew thus became the definitive account of Jesus’ final year, and John, for its part, not at all an alternative version of the same story and tradition, became the definitive account of Jesus’ first years of ministry (Fragment of Origen, Commentary on John). Likewise, Luke’s Gospel, although ostensibly the product of Mark, Q, and L, became the written witness to Paul’s preaching about Jesus (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1)—a connection that hangs by a thread. Paul attests to very few of Jesus’ words and deeds in his letters (and in his speeches in Acts) so the idea that he is the source for the Lukan birth narrative, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the healing of Malchus’ ear, let alone the entirety of Luke’s account, remains groundless. Needless to say, such myths regarding what the Gospels were and where they came from were constructed chiefly in order to justify their historical legitimacy.

In positive but equally-troubling terms—returning now to the Gospel of Mark—it could not be denied that Mark’s Gospel was popular, early, and more or less stylistically, theologically, and materially aligned with favored Gospels (i.e. Matthew and Luke). As such it proved impossible to discard the Gospel of Mark on the grounds that it was heretical or spurious. Such a dismissal would have called into question the validity of Matthew and Luke as well, Evangelists who appreciated Mark’s testimony enough to appropriate it. Like the churchmen after them, the Matthean and Lukan evangelists hemmed in Mark’s material, providing Mark with improved hermeneutical confines. As was the case in the 1st century then, so it was in the 2nd—one could not simply pull up the weeds (i.e. Mark) without pulling up the wheat also (i.e. Matthew and Luke). It thus seemed best to keep Mark around, albeit in a diminished and contained state.

With this mythology of Gospel composition secured, Mark was successfully marginalized in favor of the Apostolic Gospels, Matthew and John, and, to a lesser extent, in favor of Luke. Few would continue to read and quote the Gospel of Mark, the Matthean version of Markan (and Lukan) material becoming ingrained upon the mind of the church: “Blessed are the poor [in spirit], for theirs is the kingdom [of heaven].” The confounding apocalyptic prophet and exorcist of the Gospel of Mark was set aside in favor of the θεῖος ἀνήρ who possessed the moral and theological insight necessary to overwhelm the Greek world and hypostasize its Platonic λόγος. Only Matthew—read by the light of John’s heightened christology and realized eschatology⁵—could beget this divine son, this master of the true, the good, and the beautiful. In a paradoxical turn of history it was this heavenly teacher of monotheistic piety who captured the Roman imagination and thus achieved, in one sense or another, the long-forgotten eschatological aims of the earliest Christians, aims preserved in the Gospel of Mark, the Synoptic traditions, the letters of Paul, and the Apocalypse of John.⁶

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1—Justin Martyr seemingly identifies the Gospel of Mark as “Peter’s memoirs” (Dialogue with Trypho 106). Clement of Alexandria claims that Mark wrote “a record of the teaching passed on to [him] orally.”

2—Sermon on the Mount (chs 5-7), Missionary Discourse (ch 10), Parable Discourse (ch 13), Community Discourse (chs 17-18), The Apocalyptic Discourse (chs 24-25). 

3—Consequently, the pseudonymous Gospel of Peter, is not Peter’s Gospel. Papias and others may have been trying to salvage Peter’s legacy from the grips of their theological opponents represented in popular 2nd century works like the Gospel of Peter and the Revelation of Peter.

4—Papias treats the Gospel of Mark as something akin to the Q Source or Didache, not as an autonomous biography of Christ.

5—Another important myth of Gospel composition was that the Synoptic Gospels lacked the theological gravity of the Gospel of John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke were body, John was spirit (Fragment of Origen, Commentary on John). John’s Gospel preserved the Christian message in its highest and purest form.

6—The myth that the Johannine Evangelist (or someone close to him) wrote the book of Revelation was effective at blunting millenarian hopes, thus prioritizing the philosophical aspects of the New Testament that intrigued Greeks.