Authorship

It is likely that Mark is anonymous and originally circulated without the title “According to Mark,” which may have been added by copyists in the second century. Martin Hengel and Richard Bauckham have recently argued that the title—which no manuscripts lack—is original to the Gospel, initially written on the outside of the scroll or on an attaching papyrus or parchment tag. In either case, about 60 percent of scholars believe that the Gospel was written by John Mark, the cousin of Barnabas described in Acts and several New Testament letters (Acts 12:12, 25; 13:13; Phlm 24; Col 4:10; 2 Tim 4:11; 1 Pet 5:13). It is possible that the Gospel of Mark is not merely technically but also literally anonymous—written by an unknown Christian who was not an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry and who belonged to a community undergoing persecution and experienced failure.

Both proposals are consistent with what can be detected about the author from the Gospel’s contents. In Mark, features of Aramaic syntax influence the form of the Greek. For instance, verbs are frequently found at the beginning of sentences, clauses are placed together without the use of conjunctions (i.e., asyndeton), and clauses are joined with the conjunction “and” (καί, kai) in imitation of the ו (w)-consecutive in Aramaic (i.e., parataxis). This influence accounts for the rough, ungrammatical Greek often found in the Gospel. In addition, the Gospel employs a simple and popular literary style, and it transliterates Latin words into Greek. This evidence suggests a native Aramaic-speaking, Jewish-Christian author who knew Greek as a second language and came to Rome from Palestine or Syria. Whether John Mark is taken seriously as the author depends on scholarly assessment of the historical credibility of Papias (writing around ad 101–108), the earliest witness to Markan authorship. In his Interpretation of the Oracles of the Lord, Papias relates an earlier oral tradition (formulated ca. ad 80s) that Mark, though not an eyewitness, was Peter’s interpreter in Rome and “wrote accurately, though not in order” what Peter preached concerning “the things said or done by the Lord.” If Papias’ tradition is accurate, then John Mark is the Gospel’s author; if the tradition is inaccurate, then the Gospel’s author cannot be specifically determined.