Saint Mark the Evangelist

Saint Mark the Evangelist is the author of the second Gospel, a disciple and interpreter of Saint Peter, and a co-worker of Saint Paul. The Church celebrates his feast on April 25.

The Acts of the Apostles call him John, who is called Mark: John was his Jewish name, Mark his Latin one. His mother Mary had a house in Jerusalem where the first Christians gathered to pray and where Peter went after his release from prison. Mark was a cousin of Barnabas. He was not among the disciples who followed Jesus. Some see him in the young man who, according to his Gospel, fled from the Garden of Olives on the night Jesus was arrested, but this is only a conjecture.

Barnabas and Paul took him from Jerusalem to Antioch and then, as their assistant, on the first missionary journey to Cyprus. At Perga in Pamphylia Mark left them and returned to Jerusalem. Before the second journey Barnabas wanted to take him along again, but Paul objected; a sharp disagreement followed, and Barnabas sailed with Mark to Cyprus. Benedict XVI saw in this quarrel a sign that the saints did not fall from heaven and that holiness grows through conversion, reconciliation, and forgiveness. Later Paul names Mark in his letters among his co-workers, and in the Second Letter to Timothy he asks that Mark be brought to him, because he is useful to him in the ministry.

The First Letter of Saint Peter, written from Rome, which the letter calls Babylon, sends greetings from Mark, whom the apostle calls his son. Papias, a second-century writer whose testimony was preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, wrote that Mark was Peter’s interpreter and carefully wrote down what he remembered of Peter’s teaching. Pope Paul VI saw in the Gospel of Mark the written catechesis of Peter preached in Rome: short, simple, and full of the vivid details of an eyewitness. The symbol of the evangelist is the lion.

According to an ancient tradition, handed down among others by Eusebius, Mark preached the Gospel in Egypt and founded the Church of Alexandria. On the same day the Roman Martyrology commemorates his successor in that see, Saint Anianus. The date of Mark’s death is not known for certain. The Acts of Mark, written in the fourth century, relate that he suffered martyrdom in Alexandria, dragged through the streets of the city; older sources say nothing of this.

According to tradition, in 828 Venetian merchants brought his body from Alexandria to Venice, where the saint’s relics are venerated in the basilica that bears his name; Mark is the patron of that city. In 1968, when the 1900th anniversary of his death was being commemorated, Pope Paul VI gave a relic of the saint to the Coptic Church for its new cathedral in Cairo and called this gesture a new bond between the see of Peter and the see of Mark. Mark has been venerated in the Church since antiquity, long before canonization processes came into being.