GOS-03 The Gospel According to Mark

of Mark’s gospel?

The text of the Gospel of Mark doesn’t tell us who its author is. So, we have to rely on other means to determine who wrote it. And one of the main sources of information we have is church tradition. But of course, church tradition isn’t inspired like Scripture, and many people wonder if it’s trustworthy. How reliable is church tradition regarding the authorship of Mark’s gospel?

I think that the very earliest church traditions we have are sufficiently close to the time of the writing of the Gospels and the early circulation of the Gospels for people to have had some good information. And much the best example of this is what we know from Papias who was Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, the beginning of the 2nd century. Papias tells us that Mark wrote his gospel depending on the preaching of Peter. He was Peter’s interpreter according to Papias, which presumably means that he translated Peter’s Aramaic into Greek or Latin. And Papias tells us that he composed the gospel out of his knowledge of Peter’s preaching. I think that’s probably the most authentic and early tradition we have about the Gospels, and really, I see no reason to question it. It’s from an early date. And Papias, we also know that Papias was really in touch with figures from the apostolic age. He didn’t know Mark or Peter, but he tells us that in the late first century at a time when some of the eyewitnesses of the Gospels were around, certainly people who had known them… in his own town of Hierapolis, the daughters of Philip the Evangelist who are mentioned in Acts… Philip and his daughters settled and it looks very much as though Papias knew the daughters. So he’s in close contact with important figures in the early church. So I think Papias knew what he was talking about. I think probably most church tradition after the second century is dependent on those second-century sources that we know. So, I think in a way the Fathers, the later writers of the church, were simply repeating these earlier testimonies. So I think it’s these earliest ones that are really well worth looking at very carefully and weighing up as good evidence. Some scholars have simply dismissed it all and, really, because their own view of how the Gospels originate doesn’t fit with what these early testimonies were saying. But I think we should take them much more seriously than that.