Scholarly consensus
Mark is the shortest of the four gospels and, on the view held by most scholars since the nineteenth century, the first to be written. It runs to sixteen chapters and about eleven thousand Greek words. It has no birth story, no genealogy, no Sermon on the Mount and no Lord’s Prayer, and in the oldest manuscripts it has no appearance of the risen Jesus. It begins with John the Baptist at the Jordan and ends with three women running from an empty tomb, saying nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
Who wrote it
The text names no author. The title “According to Mark” was attached in the second century, when the churches needed to tell the gospels apart. The earliest claim about authorship is from Papias of Hierapolis, writing around 110 to 130 CE and quoted by Eusebius two centuries later: Mark, “the interpreter of Peter”, wrote down accurately but not in order what he remembered of Peter’s preaching (Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15). Papias did not know the author and was himself repeating what he had been told by “the elder”. Scholars treat the tradition with caution. The gospel shows no special knowledge of Peter, presents him unflatteringly, and depends on earlier oral units that had already taken fixed shape. What can be said is that the author wrote in Greek for an audience that did not know Aramaic (he translates it: 5:41; 7:34; 15:34) or Jewish custom (he explains it: 7:3-4), and that he used Latin loanwords (legion, denarius, praetorium, centurion), which has suggested Rome, though Syria is also argued.
When
Most scholars place Mark between 65 and 75 CE. The anchor is chapter 13, where Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple and the reader is told to understand (13:14). The Temple fell to Titus in August 70 CE. Whether the gospel was written in the shadow of that event or just after it is debated; that it was written within a few years of it is widely agreed. On this dating the author wrote some forty years after the events, in a different language from the one Jesus spoke, in a city far from Galilee, for people who had never been there.
What kind of book it is
Mark moves fast. “Immediately” (euthys) occurs more than forty times. The Greek is plain, sometimes rough, and later writers smoothed it: where Mark has Jesus unable to do a mighty work in Nazareth (6:5), Matthew has him choose not to (13:58); where Mark’s Jesus is asked “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (10:18), Matthew rewrites the question so the problem disappears (19:17). Mark’s Jesus commands silence about his identity (1:34; 3:12; 8:30), a feature William Wrede named the messianic secret in 1901 and which scholars still debate. His disciples misunderstand him throughout, and at the end all of them flee (14:50).
Where it ends
The two oldest complete Greek Bibles, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both of the fourth century, end the gospel at 16:8. So do the earliest Syriac and Latin witnesses, and Eusebius and Jerome both say the accurate copies ended there. Verses 16:9-20, in which the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, to two travellers and to the eleven, are found in later manuscripts. Their vocabulary and style differ from the rest of the gospel, they do not follow smoothly from verse 8, and one manuscript (Codex Washingtonianus) adds a further paragraph inside them. A different “shorter ending” also circulated. Modern critical editions print 16:9-20 in brackets, and most modern translations mark the passage as a later addition. The earliest gospel, as it has come down to us, contains no account of anyone seeing Jesus after his death.
Mark and the law
In 7:19 the narrator adds, after a saying about what defiles a person, the words “thus he declared all foods clean”. The comment is the author’s, not Jesus’s, and Matthew, who copies the passage, leaves it out (15:17). The Jerusalem community under James went on keeping the food laws (Galatians 2:12; Acts 21:20), which they would not have done had Jesus declared them void. The verse is an early sign of how the gospel writers’ own positions shaped what they recorded.
Why it matters here
Matthew and Luke both rework Mark, each reproducing most of it. Because the source survives, the changes they made can be seen, sentence by sentence, and they show how freely the tradition was handled within one generation of its first written form. Anything a reader wants to know about the earliest recoverable account of Jesus must begin with this book, and this book is anonymous, late, Greek, and ends without a risen Jesus. See the synoptic problem and the discrepancy tables.
Sources
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39, for Papias.
- Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., notes on Mark 16:9-20.
- Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, chapter on Mark.
- Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary, Hermeneia.
- William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (1901; English translation 1971).