The Gospel of Mark is widely regarded by scholars today as the first of the Gospels to be penned. But when, specifically, did that happen?
Let’s take a look at the evidence . . .
Was Mark First?
For many centuries, it was commonly held that Matthew was the first of the Gospels to be written, and that Mark then abridged Matthew to make it shorter. This view is known as the Augustinian Hypothesis, since St. Augustine proposed it.
As the author of a book on the Church Fathers, I take the views expressed in early centuries seriously.
However, after a careful study of the issue, I was forced to conclude that the Augustinian Hypothesis is incorrect, that Mark wrote first and then Matthew expanded it.
I explain the reasons for this here.
Mark’s Relationship to Luke
It is widely recognized that Luke—like Matthew—used Mark as one of his sources.
Luke even refers to prior written sources in his prologue, telling his patron Theophilus that “many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us” (Luke 1:1).
The fact that Mark was one of those narratives is confirmed by the fact that Luke uses about 55% of the material in Mark (B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, 160).
This means that we can place the composition of Mark sometime before that of Luke.
In our previous post we saw that there are good reasons to hold that Luke was written around A.D. 59, which would then be the latest possible date for Mark.
However, it is probable that it was written some time before that.
How much before?
Mark’s Life Story
We first meet Mark in Acts 12:12, when Peter visits the house of his mother in Jerusalem.
In Acts 12:25, Barnabas and Paul take Mark with them when they return from Jerusalem to their home base in Antioch.
In the next chapter, the Holy Spirit calls Barnabas and Paul to embark on the First Missionary Journey (Acts 13:2), and they take Mark with them.
However, we later learn (Acts 15:38) that Mark had turned back early in the journey, when they reached Pamphylia on the southern coast of modern Turkey.
Thus when Paul and Barnabas were preparing to set out on the Second Missionary Journey, a dispute arose between them:
Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia, and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp contention, so that they separated from each other; Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus (Acts 15:37-39).
A factor in this dispute was likely that Mark was Barnabas’s cousin (Col. 4:10).
Paul and Barnabas thus dissolved their longstanding partnership over the dispute concerning Mark, and Barnabas took him on an otherwise unrecorded journey to Barnabas’s native island of Cyprus (Acts 4:36).
We know from the New Testament that Mark later formed a close bond with Peter, who refers to him as his spiritual son and who was with him during his ministry in Rome (1 Pet. 5:13).
We also learn that Paul eventually reconciled with Mark (2 Tim. 4:11).
Putting Dates to Events
The part of Mark’s life story that is important for our purposes is the period he spent with Peter.
We do not know when this began, but the journey that Mark took with Barnabas would have occurred in A.D. 49, and it would have taken some time. Mark thus likely became a companion of Peter in the 50s.
This is significant because the first century source John the Presbyter reveals that Mark based his Gospel on Peter’s reminiscences. The Presbyter is reported to have said:
Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely (Eusebius, Church History 3:39:15).
If we know that Mark didn’t become Peter’s traveling companion until the 50s, and if he had to have written before Luke was published in 59, then this means Mark must have written his Gospel sometime in that decade.
Although Mark likely heard Peter preach in Jerusalem, John the Presbyter ties the composition of his Gospel to the period when he was serving as Peter’s assistant. We should thus understand it to be based on not Mark’s memories of Peter’s preaching from years earlier, but on what he heard during their period of mutual ministry.
We should thus allow some time (1) for Mark to absorb (or re-absorb) Peter’s preaching and (2) some time for Mark’s Gospel to come into Luke’s hands and be absorbed by him.
We can therefore estimate that Mark’s Gospel was written sometime in the mid 50s, say around A.D. 55.
It might even be slightly earlier than this if Mark is the mysterious “brother whose praise is in the gospel” that Paul refers to in 2 Corinthians 8:18, since 2 Corinthians was written around A.D. 54-55.
In any event, we have good reason to place the dating of Luke in 59 and Mark a few years earlier than that, in the 50s.
What about Matthew? That’s the subject we will turn to next.
The Pontifical Commission into Scripture wrote in 1911 that the author of the first gospel was Matthew and that it was written in Aramaic. We do not have a copy of the Aramaic gospel and the first gospel of Matthew that we have is in Greek. This means that a translation of Mathew’s Aramaic was made into Greek and it may be that the Greek version of Matthew was made after the gospel of Mark. But the official teaching of the Church stands that Matthew was the first gospel and it is an error to hold that Mark was the first gospel. It may even be the case that Matthew composed his gospel and it simply was never written down at all in Aramaic but it was learned in Aramaic just as the very first books of the Bible were never written down but they were memorised by the people and it was actually centuries after the events that any writing was done of the books of the Bible. Memory is a very powerful tool and we have lost the art of memorising huge of prose. My grandfather could stand up and recite ballads and poems for hours! This was a common ability in centuries gone by.