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Lectio Mark: Saint Mark the Evangelist
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Just who is St. Mark, the author of this short but action-packed Gospel? Using outside sources, other books of the Bible, and the Gospel itself, Dr. Gray takes a closeup look at St. Mark, and his connection with St. Peter and the Christians of Rome.
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Welcome everyone. So excited to be in this Bible study on the Gospel of Mark with you in our Lectio series. And so it is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. I've had a great opportunity to study with two different renowned scholars in Scripture who both did major works on the Gospel of Mark. And so that was something that's been part of my graduate studies. When I was at Duke University at the Divinity School there studying Scripture, I studied with a wonderful Protestant scholar, Richard Hayes. And at that time I did my thesis for my THM thesis on the Gospel of Mark. And it was on Jesus entry into the temple and his teaching in the temple. And so that really got me a chance to dive in with Richard Hayes. And Richard Hayes was world renowned for his work on St. Paul and using Paul's use of the Old Testament. And so I started to take those kind of methods and principles and apply them to the Gospel of Mark. And it was a real joy and it was really exciting to have such a great mentor who is so enthusiastic about my work there. Well then I went on to do my doctorate work at Catholic University of America with another great world renowned scholar, Francis Maloney. Father Frank Maloney from Australia was a phenomenal scholar at Literary Readings of the New Testament. And I was working with him on a seminar that he was working with us graduate students before he was to publish his commentary on the Gospel of Mark. So both these scholars have done major works. So Richard Hayes has a shorter book that he later did called Reading Backwards. In other words, Looking at the four Gospels in light of the Old Testament. And so it's kind of like looking backwards as you're looking forwards into the Gospels. We're going to do that a fair bit as we go through the Gospel of Mark. I'm going to show you the Old Testament background that really helps make sense of that. That's his popular version. And then he has another larger version of that called Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. So if you want some light reading, you can dive into that. And then the joy. I was working with Francis Maloney. He did a wonderful commentary, the Gospel of Mark, that he did with Henrik's publishers. This is a great commentary that came out of our seminar that we had with him on the Gospel of Mark. So two great scholars that formed me during my graduate studies. And since then the Gospel of Mark has been a real passion of mine, something that I've wanted to deeply study and really work on. And, and that led to what I mentioned before, my own dissertation which was under Frank Maloney, that was on the Temple in the Gospel of Mark. And so that work I did with Richard Hayes on Mark 11 and 12, I then extended into Mark, chapter 13 and 14 and Jesus relationship to the Temple and the large focus that Mark's Gospel has of the Temple. So that was my own dissertation. So since my dissertation I've been very focused on the Gospel of Mark. And it's been a real passion of mine to get an opportunity to teach on the Gospel of Mark because Mark's Gospel is a fabulous gospel and it's kind of been shorted in a lot of people's minds. In fact, St. Augustine, who I love, and of course we named the Augustine Institute after St. Augustine. And I rarely ever disagree with St. Augustine, but Augustine made this, St. Augustine made this observation once. He said, you know, Mark's Gospel, it's kind of the abbreviated version of Matthew's Gospel. Everything you get in Mark is in Matthew. And so Augustine never really focused on Mark much. And I think part of that is because Augustine was trained as a rhetorician. He loved rhetoric, he loved grand narrative and detail. And Mark is the simplest writer of all the four gospel writers. And so in his simplicity, Mark's Greek is clumsy. He's thinking as a Hebrew and he uses Hebrew grammar to write his Greek prose. And so his Greek prose is clumsy and cluttered. And you know, he'll use a word like immediately and he'll use that word dozens and dozens and dozens of times. And for someone like Augustine who's, you know, just a great scholar, he's like, ah, that's so unrefined. And he would rather have Matthew who gives discourses about the lilies of the field and, and is very ordered and just great in terms of his writing prose, or Luke who's a master storyteller, or John who's a deep contemplative. You can see how Mark kind of gets crowded out with the competition. Right. Mark isn't as contemplative as John and he's not a great storyteller and he doesn't have the mastery of the Greek language that Luke has. But Mark brings something special, something that oftentimes gets overlooked, that I really want us to focus on as we go through his story. We could think about it in a couple different ways, but the first way I want to talk about it is in the framework of how the Church gives us the Gospel Mark. In our liturgical readings, we have a three year cycle in the church for how we hear the Gospels. And so in cycle A, we have the Gospel of Matthew, and the church presents us the Gospel of Matthew throughout the year A. And then after Matthew's Gospel, we get cycle B, which is Mark's Gospel. Now, because Mark's Gospel is the shortest of all the gospels, we get a little bit of John during that year as well. And then in the third year of our readings in cycle C, we have the Gospel of Luke. Now, here's the interesting thing about that strategy the church has. Matthew's Gospel is the teaching gospel. In fact, the early Christians used Matthew's Gospel as the first catechism of the Church. In fact, there was more commentaries and more citations of Matthew's Gospel than any other gospel in the early church and even through the Middle Ages. Why? Because Matthew's Gospel gives us Jesus teaching. Matthew gives us the Sermon on the Mount, Right, Matthews, five, six, seven. So Matthew has given us all these great discourses of Jesus, all this teaching. And so it's the teaching gospel, and it's the catechism of the early Christians. Mark has the fewest commentaries written about it from the beginning of the church to the Middle Ages of all the four gospels. And it has the fewest citations in the early church fathers. And part of that is because when we have the church fathers, what they're doing is they're teaching the faith. Those early church fathers are catechizing and teaching. And so they go to the catechism gospel. Matthew, Mark's Gospel doesn't give us so much teaching. And here's the interesting thing. You might think, well, Matthew's Gospel, if it's the teaching gospel, where does Mark fit in? Mark doesn't give us the Sermon on the Mount. He doesn't give us long discourses of Jesus teaching. Mark's Gospel is what I would call the Hollywood Gospel. It's action, action, action. It's one narrative event after another narrative event. Things are happening immediately, quickly. And if you can think about it, Matthew begins his gospel with a long genealogy showing Jesus, human descent, his ancestors. Whereas John's Gospel begins in the heavens. In the beginning was the word and the idea of light and creation. And so we soar up. That's why John has the image of an eagle. We soar up with John into the heavens. So Matthew begins in a very earthly way to John, begins with a very upward, heavenly way. Mark and Luke both begin with John the Baptist. But Luke, who likes to order things, well, he begins with the nativity of John the Baptist. He tells us about John the Baptist's parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth Whereas Mark has no time for that. Mark has no time for genealogies, for ancestry. Mark plunges us into John the Baptist preaching. We have John the Baptist as an adult in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance. Boom. We start with action. Mark begins with action, and he will be action all the way through. That's why I refer to it as the Hollywood Gospel. It's like a script for an action adventure movie. And that's the kind of story that Mark tells. But there's also something else deeper in Mark. He's not simply just giving us action. He's also telling us that Jesus is a teacher. And he doesn't, however, give us the content of Jesus teaching very often. And if he does, it's only in short bits and pieces, because Mark's Gospel assumes that the audience has already been catechized. Matthew's Gospel doesn't assume that Matthew is a teacher. Who is assuming that he's got to teach his audience about who Jesus is and what Jesus teachings are. Mark, on the other hand, is assuming that you've already been catechized, that you've already heard the basic kerygma, or message of the gospel. But what Mark is doing is Mark, in a sense, is saying, now you've been taught the catechism, now you've got to live it. So Mark's Gospel is about walking the walk. If Matthew talks the talk, Mark walks the walk. And he challenges us. He challenges us. What Diedrich Bonhoeffer would refer to as the cost of discipleship, Mark is going to say, okay, you've been catechized. Now you need to pick up your cross and follow Jesus. And if Jesus is a crucified Lord, then discipleship has to become cruciform. And so the cost of discipleship, the challenge of discipleship, the suffering and the cross are going to loom large in Mark. And that's why a lot of commentators, a lot of modern commentators have noticed that, as one German scholar said, Mark's Gospel is kind of a Passion narrative with a little bit of Story of Galilee attached ahead of it. But it's almost dominantly about the Passion of Jesus. In fact, once you get to chapter 11 through 16, and there's only 16 chapters in Mark, chapters 11 through 16 is the passion story. It's the last week of Jesus. So you can see that it's disproportionate in terms of covering the life of Jesus. The Gospel of Mark tips and leans heavily towards the Passion. And there's a reason for that, that the Tradition, I think, suggests to us the tradition is that Mark's Gospel was written in. In Rome by John Mark, a disciple, an early disciple who worked closely with St. Peter. John Mark worked closely with St. Peter. And that's the tradition. In fact, we have that tradition in some of our earliest sources of our early Church writings. And one significant source who lives at the time of the end of the first century and the very beginning of the second century is Papias. And he writes that Mark was Peter's translator, his Hermeneutes in Greek, which means his interpreter in Rome. So when Peter goes to evangelize in Rome, Peter doesn't know Latin, Peter doesn't know Greek very well. And so Mark becomes his translator, his interpreter, and accompanies Peter. And in fact, Peter refers to this. He refers to mark in his first epistle. So in 1st Peter 5:13, Peter's writing from Rome, and he says to those he's writing to, she who is in Babylon greets you, which means the church is greeting you. And Babylon was a symbol and a metaphor and code for Rome. She who is in Babylon greets you, as does Mark, my son. So Peter refers to John Mark as his spiritual son. Now, how do we know that his name is John Mark? And that's from the Acts of the Apostles. In the Acts of the apostles, 12:12, we have one of the dramatic stories about Peter. And Peter is arrested and Herod Agrippa is going to execute him at Passover. And then, of course, the angel comes at night and tells Peter releases him from the chains and tells him to follow him. And the angel leads him outside of the prison. And then Peter wakes up and he thinks he's having a dream. He realizes, no, this is real. I'm not just dreaming that I'm escaping. I'm actually escaping. And so then where's the first place that Peter goes when he's freed from prison? He goes to where he knows the church is gathering. And he goes, as we're told in Acts chapter 12, verse 12, he goes to the house of Mary, the mother of John, also known as Mark. So we're told that Peter goes to the house of Mary, who's the mother of John, also known as Mark, and he's going to be referred to as Mark throughout the rest of the story because there's another John, the beloved disciple. And that can get confusing. And so he's going to go by his other name, Mark. So that's interesting. Now, here's the other interesting thing that a lot of the church fathers like St. Jerome would hypothesize and that was that. Well, the whole church is gathered there praying for Peter. And when Peter gets there, he gets to the gate and he knocks on the door and the serving girl. So we see that Mary, the mother of John, is wealthy. She has a large house that has a gate, she has servants. And then Peter's let in and the whole church is gathered there praying. And so what a lot of the early church fathers hypothesized. And it's just that we don't know for sure, but it's sure intriguing. Was Mary's home the place where Jesus had the Last Supper? Was Mary's home where the church was gathered praying in Acts 12? Was that the place where. Where the upper room was, where Jesus celebrated the Passover? That would be the first Mass. Is that the very same place? We don't know for sure, but it's sure intriguing because we know that that is a large home in Jerusalem. Now the other interesting thing we know about John Mark and his mother is that they were Levites, that he was from a priestly family. And that would make sense that Mark grew up in Jerusalem, that his mother had a very large house. She was a widower by then. So Mark's father has passed away. We don't know any of the details about that. But what we do know is that they were wealthy because the whole church could gather at their house and that there was a gate and servants. So John Mark grew up as a Levite in a very wealthy house. Now, how do we know he was a Levite? Because St. Paul tells us in Colossians 4:10 that he refers to Mark, who is the cousin of Barnabas. And we know in Acts 4 that Barnabas, who is one of St. Paul's early friends, he's the one who takes Paul and is not afraid of Paul, and he introduces him to Peter. So Barnabas knows Peter and he's in the church in Jerusalem and he's connected. And Barnabas was a Levite. And we're told that Barnabas is a Levite and that he sells a lot of his property in Cyprus and gives it to the church. So you have a Levite who's wealthy Barnabas, who is a cousin to John Mark and his mother, or not his mother, but his aunt Mary is using her house for Peter and she's the first house and place that Peter goes after he escapes from arrest in Jerusalem. Which I. The more I think about it, the more I'm almost convinced totally that Mary's house is the upper room, which is very intriguing with that possibility. And of course, why then would Mark in his Gospel focus on so much on the last week of Jesus? Well, because his mother is playing host and was one of the early disciples of Jesus, right? And possibly, you know, he's tied in with all these people, these early disciples in Jerusalem. So what we do know for a fact is that John Mark was from Jerusalem, he was a Levite priestly, he was wealthy. And this also makes a lot of sense about the tradition about John Mark in that he was Peter's translator in Rome. Because if he grew up in a priestly family that was very wealthy and affluent, he. That means that Mark got a first rate education. And since the Romans were occupying Jerusalem and the land, Mark would have gotten an education in Latin. And we know that he knows Greek. Even though his Greek is clumsy compared to somebody like Luke, who's a native Greek speaker, he still can write the Gospel in Greek. And so Mark has the kind of education and background that will be important for Peter. And Paul will even write about Mark. At the end of his first letter to Timothy, he tells Timothy to bring Mark with him because Mark is very useful in serving me. So Mark's education and his ability to write and translate is something very useful. And Mark served both the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter. So Mark is one of those interesting, seemingly minor characters in the story. And yet his mom's got big connections in Jerusalem. He was of a priestly family, so he knows the scriptures of Israel well and he's interconnected. And his mother was good friends with Peter. And so Peter will later refer to Mark as his own son, you know, adopted as a disciple. So what I want you to get is a sense of who Mark is and how he writes the story. But he's a fascinating figure because we know from Acts chapter 12 that when Paul is down in Jerusalem for famine relief, Mark goes back up to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas to serve in Antioch. So Mark then is connected with the church in Antioch. And then we're told in Acts chapter 13 that Mark goes with Paul and Barnabas on their first mission journey. So we have lots of connections with Mark. Mark accompanied the apostle Paul, and later in his life he's going to accompany the apostle Peter. So Mark's one of those accidental minor characters who ends up being at the right place at the right time over and over again. He kind of has his finger in all that's going on. And so he ends up at the end of his life as Peter's Translator in Rome. And then he. He writes down the preaching of Peter because Peter is a fisherman, he's not a scribe. Peter's not conversant in Greek. And so what happens is, according to the tradition that Papias and then Irenaeus and Justin Martyr all refer to and later on Jerome, many years later, is that Mark wrote down the preaching of Peter. And so the early church considered the Gospel of Mark to be Peter's Gospel because Mark was writing down the preaching of the apostle Peter. So Mark's Gospel, according to the tradition, has the authority of Peter as one of the apostles. Now, of course, we know that Matthew's Gospel, Matthew is one of the 12 apostles, right? So we know Matthew's Gospel is authoritative and has apostolic authority. And we know that John was the beloved disciple and he was one of the apostles. He's got apostolic authority. What about Luke? Well, Luke was a companion of Paul. And so the early church fathers saw that Luke's Gospel had the authority of Paul and that Mark's gospel had the authority of Peter. So it's an interesting combination of those two that you can think of in terms of the apostolic connection. Now, I just want to give a couple of examples of how this Mark's Gospel probably has Peter's feel to it. And, you know, so you could say, well, wait a minute, it's just the tradition that, you know, Mark's Gospel, it was written in Rome. But how do we really know? That's the early church tradition, but how do we know? And there's evidence within the text that scholars have seen for a Roman origin for Mark's Gospel. Now, one of those things is that Mark, when he gives the four watches and chapter 13, in the eschatological discourse, the four watches follow the Roman watches of evening, midnight, cock, crow, and morning. So in other words, Mark uses Roman terminology. In fact, Mark uses more Latin terms and more Latin terminology than any of the other gospels, even though it's the shortest. So he'll use key Roman military terms like centurion and other things. And so Mark will use more Latin than anybody else. But I also think there's something else that's very special about Mark's gospel that has that Roman province to it. And that's a character that Mark mentions in chapter 15 in the midst of the passion narrative, in verse 21, as Jesus is carrying the cross for his execution, he's weakened because he's been tortured so terribly. And you remember the Romans grab a passerby and they make that person help Jesus carry the cross and whenever we do the Stations of the Cross, we talk about this character. And it's of course, Simon of Cyrene. Now what's fascinating is that when Mark writes that, and here we get the sense in Mark's Gospel of eyewitness testimony. And that's what I love the flavor of, of Mark's writing. He's not writing about Jesus from some great distance. The accounts of the stories of Jesus in Mark's gospel have an eyewitness flavor. They have kind of the granule details of, and it was morning and then it was at cockroach. And he gives us specific times that things happened. Or he tells us, Mark will tell us, for example, when Jesus sits down for the multiplication of the loaves and the fish and. And he tells us that Jesus had them sit down. Mark tells us the grass was green. Mark gives us some vivid details. And I think that comes from Peter's memory, from Peter recounting these stories as an eyewitness, Peter adds these very poignant, small but vibrant details, the kind of details that you find in eyewitness testimony. Right. And one of those details that is very striking comes in chapter 15, verse 21. And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. Now that's an odd description of Simon of Cyrene. Didn't tell you about whether or not he had a beard, didn't tell you what he was wearing, but it told you that Simon of Cyrene, who came out from the country and he was coming back into the city, he gets compelled to do this work. But then it tells us that Simon of Cyrene is the father of Rufus and Alexander. Now that's a ridiculous detail to add to a short narrative about the savior of the world. Why would Mark include that detail that he's the father of Rufus and Alexander? Now the tradition of the Church and the early Christian tradition said that Rufus and Alexander were two key disciples who ended up doing great things in the Christian movement. But we have a reference in a first century document to one of them being in Rome, one of Simon of St. Being a key evangelist who had moved from Jerusalem to Rome, probably with Peter. Who is that? Well, he's mentioned in Romans chapter 16. So I want to take us to Romans chapter 16, verse 13. And in Romans chapter 16, verse 13, we get a very interesting allusion to one of the sons of Simon of Cyrene. So in chapter 16, verse 13, Paul is greeting those who are in Rome. And in this section he's greeting those who are Jewish, Jewish Christians who are in Rome. And in the midst of the greetings for the Jewish Christians in Rome, he says to them, as he's writing to the church in Rome, that Paul hasn't been to yet in Rome, but he's hoping to get there. And he says, greet Rufus. Remember, Simon of Cyrene was the father of Rufus and Alexander. Greet Rufus, eminent in the Lord and also his mother and mine. So Paul says, greet Rufus, who is eminent in the Lord and his mother, who is his mother and my mother. In other words, Paul knows Rufus, and he knows Rufus mother so well that he considers Rufus mother his own mother. Now, Paul had never been to Rome yet, so. And these Jewish Christians he's greeting, I believe, come from Jerusalem, where Paul grew up and studied at the feet of Gamaliel, as he says in Acts 22. And where did Paul stay? Well, maybe he stayed with Rufus and Alexander in the house of Simon of Cyrene. Or he knew them intimately. He knew them so intimately that he considered their mother his own mother, the way she would care for Paul. So why then would Mark tell us in the midst of the Passion narrative that there's a Simon of Cyrene? Oh, by the way, he's the father of Rufus and Alexander. Now, if you're the community in Rome and you've been discipled and you know Rufus, and you know Rufus mother, who came from Jerusalem and are spreading the gospel in the heart of the empire in Rome, well, that would be a reason why you would add that detail. It's a detail that the local community would know. And so for me, when I read that section at the end of Romans 16, to me, that was the. That's what cinched it for me, that this gospel was written in Rome and the community was the community in Rome of the early Christians. So that, I think is great evidence. And then the other thing I want to talk about as we get into the Gospel of Mark is that as we approach the Gospel of Mark, one of the things we're going to see is that idea of discipleship and suffering. And if Mark writes his gospel while the Christian community in Rome is being persecuted by Nero, because we know that in the year 64 A.D. rome burns on July 19, there's a tremendous fire in Rome. And 10 of the 14 districts of the city of are completely razed, are completely burned down. And so we know then that there's this great fire and persecution. So what if Mark writes this gospel to a community that's suffering to a community that's challenged. And that's why he's going to talk about Jesus suffering, because that community is suffering as well. And how we read that story now in light of the Cross will open up a lot of media and Mark's gospel that we're going to see over the next few episodes.