Evangelist Mark

Mark the Evangelist is the traditional author of the Gospel of Mark and is commonly identified with John Mark, a figure who appears in the Acts of the Apostles and in several New Testament epistles. Acts describes John, also called Mark, as the son of a woman named Mary whose house in Jerusalem served as a gathering place for the earliest Christian community. He accompanied Barnabas and Saul (Paul) from Jerusalem to Antioch and then on the first missionary journey, but he left the party at Perga in Pamphylia and returned to Jerusalem, an episode that later caused a sharp disagreement between Paul and Barnabas. Subsequent New Testament references present him as a valued co-worker: Paul mentions Mark in the letters to the Colossians, to Philemon, and in 2 Timothy, and 1 Peter refers to him as a spiritual son. The early second-century bishop Papias of Hierapolis, as quoted in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea, reported that Mark had been the interpreter of the Apostle Peter and that he wrote down carefully, though not in order, what he remembered of Peter's preaching about the words and deeds of Jesus. On this basis the Gospel that bears Mark's name was long regarded as reflecting Petrine testimony, composed for a largely Gentile audience, with Rome the setting most often proposed by ancient writers.

Ancient church tradition, transmitted principally through Eusebius, holds that Mark later went to Egypt and established the Christian church at Alexandria, becoming its first bishop. The Coptic Orthodox Church venerates him as the founder of Egyptian Christianity and as the first Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of Saint Mark, from whom later Coptic patriarchs claim apostolic succession. Coptic hagiography further relates that he was born in Cyrene in the Pentapolis of North Africa to a Jewish family that subsequently moved to Jerusalem, and that he was numbered among the Seventy Disciples. These details of birth and early life are not independently confirmed by first-century sources and remain matters of ecclesiastical tradition rather than of strictly verifiable biography. Western, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches nevertheless agree in ascribing to him a foundational role in the Alexandrian church.

Later martyrologies and the Coptic Synaxarium recount that Mark was killed in Alexandria by a pagan mob. According to these accounts he was seized during a festival, a rope was placed around his neck, and he was dragged through the streets until he died; some versions add that he was imprisoned overnight and killed the following day. The event is commemorated on 25 April. The year of death is given differently in later chronicles, sometimes as the eighth year of Nero (about 62) and sometimes toward the end of Nero's reign (about 68); neither figure can be confirmed from contemporary evidence. He was buried in Alexandria. In 828, according to Venetian tradition, merchants translated the greater part of his relics from Alexandria to Venice, where they became the principal treasure of the Basilica of Saint Mark; Coptic tradition maintains that the saint's head remained in Egypt. In Christian iconography Mark is represented by a winged lion, an image drawn from the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation and associated with the opening of his Gospel, which begins with a voice crying in the wilderness.

Saint Mark's principal feast day is 25 April in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican calendars; the Coptic Church also observes him on 30 Parmouti. He is invoked as patron of the city and former republic of Venice, of Egypt and Alexandria, of notaries, barristers and secretaries, of interpreters, of stained-glass workers and glaziers, of captives, and against sudden or untimely death. His cult is of great antiquity and belongs to the pre-congregation period of the Church; he was never the subject of a formal medieval or modern process of beatification or canonization.