The Friends of Paul - Luke and Mark
Did They Author any Books in the New Testament?
Popular Christian belief, especially Roman Catholic, and even a fair part of Biblical scholarship take the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as the double work of the Luke who figures three times in the Epistles of Paul (Colossians 4:14; Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11). Similarly they accept, as the author of the Gospel that passes under the name of Mark, another friend of Paul's named Mark whom he mentions in his Epistle to the Colossians (4:10) as the cousin of Barnabas and who features in Acts (13:4-13) as the assistant of Barnabas and Paul in the mission to Cyprus.
On rare occasions a voice is raised from the Roman Catholic fold against the first ascription. Thus, apropos of the attempt by an over-orthodox expositor to contradict the impression we get from Paul (Galatians 4:5) that unlike Luke he attributed a normal and not a virgin birth to Jesus, the notably fair-minded scholar Father Raymond Brown1 speaks of "the unverifiable assumption that Luke, Paul's companion, was the evangelist, an assumption that vitiates much of R. J. C. Cooke's
Did Paul know of the Virgin Birth?____" But even Brown does not go further than suspending judgment on the question of Luke. And several of his notes to the Infancy Narratives in the New Testament seem to suggest Acts to be the composition of whoever is responsible for the Lucan Gospel. About the alleged connection of the Evangelist Mark with his namesake in the Epistles of Paul and in Acts, Brown has expressed no opinion. Here silence appears to be consent and, along with his general attitude to Luke/Acts, it places Brown in a large company of exegetes Protestant no less than Catholic.
The thesis in the present essay is threefold: (1) Paul's Luke was not the Evangelist; (2) he did not write the Acts of the Apostles either; (3) the Mark who gives his name to a Gospel could not be Paul's companion. The problem whether the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were penned by
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the same person is not discussed. It is left for another essay: the current belief in the same person does not affect our first and second conclusions, while it is irrelevant to the third.
I
To soften up the common assurance about Luke's Gospel we may begin by glancing at some critical remarks in a recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.2 We find Krister Stendahl pronouncing: "the author has been identified with Luke, 'the beloved physician,' Paul's companion on his journeys, presumably a Gentile.... There is no Papias fragment concerning Luke [as about Mark in c. 130 A.D.], and only late-2nd-century traditions claim (somewhat ambiguously) that Paul was the guarantor of Luke's Gospel. The Muratorian Canon refers to Luke, the physician, Paul's companion; Ire-naeus depicts Luke as a follower of Paul's Gospel. Eusebius [early 4th century] has Luke as an Antiochene physician who was with Paul in order to give the Gospel apostolic authority. References are often made to Luke's medical language, but there is no evidence of such language beyond that to which any educated Greek might have been exposed. Of more import is the fact that in the writings of Luke specifically Pauline ideas are significantly missing; while Paul speaks of the death of Christ, Luke speaks rather of the suffering, and there are other differing and discrepant ideas on Law and eschatology. In short, the author of the Gospel remains unknown."
In regard to the claim for Luke the Evangelist as a medical man we may support Stendahl's criticism by quoting, from The Scientific American, November 1979, p. 39, part of a review of Literary Detection by A. Q. Morton: "Once it was held that the Gospel of Luke was written by a physician, since medical terms were frequent in it. The context of the words, however, was nonmedical, and their use was shared by the historian Josephus (1st century A.D. like Luke), never a physician. In the Book of Acts the same compiler, judging by his vocabulary, has become an old salt displaying much knowledge of shipwreck.
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Nouns notably mark the topics and not the author."
At one place in his commentary on Luke's infancy narrative, Raymond Brown afrords us an example of how facilely some scholars read the doctor in Luke. The passage concerned is Luke 1: 41: "the baby jumped in her womb." Brown3 writes: "Grotius and others have raised the possibility that [the original Greek word] skirtan might have been a technical term for movement within the womb and thus confirm the theory that Luke the physician (Colossians 4:14) was the author of the Gospel. But it is a general verb for skipping or leaping as of sheep in a field, and is applied to a baby already in Genesis 25:22."
The language employed by Luke may not be incompatible with the old tradition of the author having been a doctor, but if we do not already assume his medical profession on the basis of Paul's Luke, as the reports of the late 2nd century and of periods still later almost certainly did, nothing can set him apart from the other Evangelists as a follower of it. Perhaps G. B. Caird,4 who is not adverse to that tradition, assesses best the general situation neutralising the brief for doctorship. Referring to the medical terms said at one time to be especially present in the writings ascribed to Luke, he states: "It has since been shown that the same argument would make doctors of almost all the writers of antiquity, and that the whole thesis is in any case ill-founded, since Galen himself claimed not to use a medical jargon but to write in the common parlance of ordinary men."5 With the mention of Galen we have the testimony of the greatest medical authority in ancient times proving the alleged medical terms to be no specialist distinguishing lingo at all.
To return to Stendahl. His comment6 on Acts goes: "In the latter part are several sections known as the 'we-passages' (e.g., 16:10; 20:5; 21:1, 8; 27:1; 28:16) that appear to be extracts from a travel diary, or narrative. These do not, however, necessarily point to Luke as a companion of Paul - as has been commonly assumed - but are rather a stylistic device, such as that noted particularly in itinerary accounts in other
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ancient historical works (e.g., Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana). Though the pronoun changes from 'they' to 'we', the style, subject matter, and theology do not differ. That an actual companion of Paul writing about his mission journeys could be in so much disagreement with Paul (whose theology is evidenced in his letters) about fundamental issues such as the Law, his apostleship, and his relationship to the Jerusalem church is hardly conceivable...Acts presents a picture of Paul that differs from his own description of himself in many of his letters, both factually and theologically.... The account of Paul's relation to Judaism in Acts also differs from that in his letter...In Acts Paul is not called an Apostle except in passing, and the impression is given, contrary to Paul's letters, that he is subordinate to and dependent upon the twelve Apostles."
Even an advocate of the orthodox Luke-Paul companionship cannot but feel rather pulled up at least at one very important juncture. J. B. Phillips7 ruminates: "Perhaps we are not supposed to speculate, but one cannot help wondering why there is no mention of the incident which Paul recorded in Galatians 2:11 and ff., and where it fits into this story. It was indeed a crucial moment for the Church. Peter, it will be recalled, unhappily exhibiting that same fear of other people's opinion which led him to deny his Master, was refusing to eat his meals with the Gentile Christians. Paul immediately saw what was at stake and publicly condemned Peter's action. Since Luke was such a close associate of Paul's it is a remarkable thing that no mention is made of this momentous reprimand."
Perhaps the most dramatic instance of the inconsistency of Acts with Paul's own Epistles is in the famous "conversion" of Paul from persecutor to preacher of Christianity. The Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible8 annotating Acts 9:3-9 says: "Crucial event in the Church's history. Luke gives three accounts whose discrepancies of detail are explained by their differing literary forms: the second and third accounts are found in Paul's discourses. See also Ga 1:12-17." Even about the first account and
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its sequel (9:1-30) we are informed that "Paul himself could have told Luke" of his "conversion".9 How then is it that both here (9:15) and in the second account (22:14) Paul's mission to work among the Gentiles is revealed to him by a man named Ananias of Damascus and is made explicit, according to the second account (22:21) in the Temple, whereas Paul's own direct assertion (Galatians 1:11-21) is that for his mission he was not responsible to anyone except Jesus and needed neither telling nor confirming of it by human beings? The Jerusalem Bible10 translates Paul: "The fact is, brothers, and I want you to realise this, the Good News I preached is not a human message that I was given by men, it is something I learnt only through a revelation of Jesus Christ... God... called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I might preach the Good News about him to the pagans. I did not stop to discuss this with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me, but I went off to Arabia at once and later went straight back from there to Damascus. Even when after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him for fifteen days, I did not see any of the other apostles; I only saw James, the brother of the Lord, and I swear before God that what I have just written is the literal truth." It is clear that Paul could not have given the author of Acts either the first or the second account, although the latter is made out as if Paul himself were relating his experience to the Jews of Jerusalem.11
The third account is again put into Paul's own mouth, now as told to King Agrippa in Caesarea. Here Jesus, not Ananias, sends Paul to the Pagans to open their eyes (26:17-18).12 So a contradiction is introduced in Acts itself between two accounts which are both ascribed to Paul. And even the third is not wholly "found in Paul's discourses". In the discourses we find nothing to correspond to the story of Jesus appearing to Paul on the road to Damascus nor anything answering to the statement: "After that, King Agrippa, I could not disobey the heavenly vision. On the contrary I started preaching first to
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the people of Damascus, then to those of Jerusalem and all the countryside of Judaea..." (Acts 26:19-20)." In Galatians we are expressly informed that Paul did not "go up to Jerusalem" but "went off to Arabia at once". The mention of going "straight back from there to Damascus" does imply that Damascus figures in the "crucial event": still, it is as if it took place in this city itself where he was staying before going off to Arabia and not on the road to Damascus.
The road, however, is not quite ruled out. The third account in Acts, which seems the least out of accord with Paul's Galatians-statement, depicts the antecedents of the experience thus: "...I once thought it was my duty to use every means to oppose the name of Jesus the Nazarene. This I did in Jerusalem; I myself threw many of the saints into prison, acting on authority from the chief priests, and when they were sentenced to death I cast my vote against them. I often went round the synagogues inflicting penalties, trying in this way to force them to renounce their faith. My fury against them was so extreme that I even pursued them into foreign cities. On one such expedition I was going to Damascus, armed with full powers and a commission from the chief priests, and at midday as I was on my way, your Majesty, I saw a light brighter than the sun come down from heaven..." (26:9-13).14 On turning to the autobiography in Galatians we find the same antecedents to the "revelation" connected with Damascus: "You must have heard of my career as a practising Jew, how merciless I was in persecuting the Church of God, and how enthusiastic I was for the traditions of my ancestors" (1:13-14).15
In passing, we may contradict the excuse offered for "the discrepancies of detail" in the three accounts as being due to "their differing literary forms". In the first account, after "the light from heaven" had shone around Paul, the men travelling with him "heard the voice" addressing him but "could see no one" (Acts 9:7).16 The second account makes Paul say about Jesus: "The people with me saw the light but did not hear his voice as he spoke to me" (22:9).17 What has literary form
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to do with hearing the voice in one account and not hearing it in another? Again, in the former where no one is seen in the midst of the light it is natural that Paul was temporarily blinded by the light and his fellow-travellers "had to lead him into Damascus by the hand" (9:8).18 But in the latter account they saw the light and yet Paul is reported as saying: "The light had been so dazzling that I was blind and my companions had to take me by the hand; and so I came to Damascus" (22:11).19 Why were they not equally dazzled into blindness? The third account records Paul's words: "I saw a light brighter than the sun come down. It shone brilliantly round me and my fellow travellers. We all fell to the ground" (27:13-14).20 Now all should have been blinded, yet there is no reference to any effect on any one's eyes, including Paul's. Why should consideration of literary form demand such an unlikely lack of result? The simple fact is internal haphazardness no less than dissonance with Paul's ipsissima verba in the Epistles.
We may close with the remark that all the accounts in Acts show the "crucial event" to be partly shared by Paul's road-companions. Galatians discloses his experience to be strictly individual and solitary - a unique one for a specific purpose. The only other reference to it - 1 Corinthians 15:8 - comes at the tail-end of a tally of Christ's appearances after death to many of his followers: "...and last of all he appeared to me too; it was as though I was born when no one expected it."21 Here the declaration falls into one of the two categories Paul makes, though not systematically. He mentions (15:5-7) the appearance "to the Twelve", "to more than five hundred of the brothers" and "to all the apostles" and by contrast we have it "first to Cephas", "then... to James"22 and finally to himself. There is a collective appearance and there is an individual one to a person all alone. Obviously, Paul's Damascus-vision occurred when no one was about.. The list does not include anybody accompanying him.
A still more subtle aspect may be noted. The broad impression we have so far considered is of a vision that had objective reality in the sense of having been a spiritual being's
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physical-looking "appearance" in front of the beholder as if outside him. But the very passage in Paul (Galatians 1:11-21), which speaks of Christ giving him directly his mission to the Gentiles and which we have balanced against the vision in Acts on the Damascus-road, has the sentence: "God... called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me..." The last two words - "in me" (en emoi in the original Greek) -suggest an inward revelation, as though Christ's "appearance" was witnessed in a trance or in some sort of communion with an indwelling divine being.
In the Epistles the "appearance" is not said to be the occasion for the mandate to preach to the non-Jews. Here, contrary to what Acts conveys, the two events seem likely to be distinct from each other. Doubtless, the "appearance"-event, like that of the mandate, is linked with an allusion (1 Corinthians 15:9) to Paul's past persecution of" the church of God", and it brings in the idea of a strange birth - "as though I was born when no one expected it" - just as the mandate-event is preceded by a phrase (Galatians 1:15) about God specially choosing Paul while he was still in his mother's womb;23 but there is not a word in the appearance-event about Paul's being spiritually allotted the wider task outside Jewry. Indeed the Encyclopaedia Britannica,24 remembering Galatians' turn of speech (1:15) about God calling Paul through his grace, indicates the mandate in a way which tends to bring home a probable distinction between the two events: "Paul viewed himself as chosen to be an instrument to take the message of God and Christ to the Gentiles, a call rather than a 'conversion-experience.' Hand-picked as God's servant (slave), he received a revelation -not from men but by secret knowledge from God - that the Gentiles will come to the Christian faith without the Law, the Torah of the Jews."
In every significant point, whether clear-cut or presumably valid, the author of Acts emerges as somebody who had no acquaintance with Paul.
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II
As a parting word on the subject we may point out how incongruous it would be to associate the author of the Gospel according to Luke with Paul in view of the situation the lat-ter's Colossians displays to us. This Epistle, like all the others except the one to Philemon, was dictated by Paul and only at the end he said: "Here is a greeting in my own handwriting." Before putting pen to the document he has communicated, among messages from those around him, one as follows: "Greetings from my dear friend Luke, the doctor..." (4:14).25 Evidently, Paul's Luke, along with some others whose greeting too the Apostle conveyed, was on the spot to hear the latter make the dictation, starting in his own name and Timothy's and concluding with good wishes from everybody present. If such is the position, the contents of the Epistle acquires a special bearing on our subject. Broadly, we may take Paul's Luke, as well as all his other companions, to have been under the influence of the great preacher's personality and of his religious outlook. But there is Paulinism in general and there is Paulinism in particular. In the second category would fall certain central doctrines. Colossians in its opening part contains a poem which is one of the centre-pieces of the Pauline Weltanschauung and which prompts The Jerusalem Bible to say that this late Letter retains Paul's "basic ideas".26 In that case, Luke's direct association with it as hearer and greetings-sender must allow us to consider him imbued not only with Paulinism in a general sense but also with Paul's most characteristic Christology as it declares itself in the grand poem here on Christ:
He is the image of the unseen God
and the first-born of all creation,
for in him were created
all things in heaven and on earth:
everything visible and everything invisible,
Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties, Powers -
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all things were created through him and for him.
Before anything was created, he existed,
and he holds all things in unity.
Now the Church is his body, he its head.
As he is the Beginning,
he was first to be born from the dead,
so that he should be the first in every way;
because God wanted all perfection
to be found in him
and all things to be reconciled through him and for him,
everything in heaven and everything on earth,
when he made peace
by his death on the cross.27
As The Jerusalem Bible notes, "The subject of the poem is the pre-existent Christ," though "considered only in so far as he was manifest in the unique historic person that is the son of God made man..."28 We are referred to the note at Philippians 2:5+, where we read about the poem in verses 6-11: "... Each stanza deals with one stage of the mystery of Christ: divine pre-existence, kenosis [self-emptying] in the Incarnation, his further kenosis in death, his glorification, adoration by the cosmos, new title of Lord. This hymn is concerned solely with the historical Christ in whose personality godhead and manhood are not divided..."29 Elsewhere we are informed of Philippians 2:6-11: "...this poem is our chief proof that the early Church believed in the divine pre-existence of Jesus."30 This "pre-existence" is something typical of Paul and the Evangelist John and the writer of one other portion of the New Testament which will shortly get mentioned. The mode in which it becomes a problem, in relation both to the Evangelist Luke and to whoever is the author of Acts may be focused with the help of a few words from Brown.31
We may leave aside the steps by which the highest "chris-tological emphasis" moved from "the return of Jesus at the
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end of time" to the exalted status "already at the resurrection" in contrast with "a ministry of service and lowliness" and then to "the public ministry" itself. What concerns us is the picture as between Luke and Paul. Brown writes: "In Matthew and Luke we have the christology moved back to Jesus' infancy in Mary's womb, for an angel proclaims that from the moment of his conception he was already the Messiah and the Son of God. On the other hand, in hymns quoted in the Pauline epistles (Philip 2:6-7; Col 1:15-17), in Hebrews (1:2), and in John (1:1; 17:5) the christology is moved toward pre-existence." Next Brown remarks: "The NT authors did not have the difficult task of reconciling these two 'pre-ministry' christologies, one centred on conception, the other on pre-existence; for we have no evidence that the proponents of one were aware of the other." What Brown tells us is that Matthew and Luke are not only devoid of the vision of Jesus' divine pre-existence but also unaware of such a vision occurring in the Epistles of Paul, in Hebrews and in John's Gospel. He is absolutely right. Luke's Gospel no less than Matthew's contains no trace of the Pauline Christology just as Paul's letters contain no sign of the Virgin Birth. But how is ignorance possible to the Evangelist Luke as well as to the Luke of Acts if he was present when Paul dictated to Timothy the poem of pre-existence meant for the people of Colossae? The conclusion stares us in the face that this Luke and Paul could never have been together.*
III
Side by side with the disqualification of Paul's Luke from being the man generally taken to be behind the third Gospel and Acts, there is involved the disqualification of Paul's John
* In fairness it must be stated that a few Protestant exegetes regard Colossians, along with Ephesians, as a post-Pauline composition by a Paulinist, dating to the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd. But the majority are of the opposite opinion. All Catholic commentators, while recognising some problems, uphold the Apostle's authorship.
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Mark from having the identity which The Jerusalem Bible,32 following "traditional dating from the 2nd century", gives to him: "John Mark, a disciple from Jerusalem (Ac 12:12) who assisted Paul in his apostolic work (Ac 12:25; 13:5, 13; Phm 24; 2 Tm) and Barnabas his cousin (Ac 15:37, 39; Col 4:10) and Peter (1P 5:13), whose 'interpreter' he was, put Peter's preaching down in writing at Rome." But the book called "The Gospel according to Mark" could not be the work of John Mark to whom Paul refers towards the end of his Colossians: "Aristarchus, who is here in prison with me, sends his greetings, and so does Mark, the cousin of Barnabas..." (4:10).33 For, like Paul's "dear friend Luke, the doctor", John Mark is shown by the "greetings" sent in his name to have been listening while Colossians, with its poem on the pre-existence of Jesus, was composed by Paul with Timothy as his scribe. By contrast, the author of "The Gospel according to Mark" lacks the pre-existence Christology and favours the Christology describable broadly as Adoptionist, in which at the baptism of Jesus there was an adoption of him as God's Son: "No sooner had he come out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on you'" (1:10-11).34*
What, then, are we to make of the old tradition reported by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History (III.39) in the 4th century A.D. from Papias, a 2nd-century bishop of Hierapolis, on which The Jerusalem Bible relies to figure Mark as an associate of Peter and thus the same Mark whom Paul knew? D. E. Nineham35 has a very appropriate comment:
* We say "describable broadly as Adoptionist", because, strictly speaking, Adoptionism came to connote the stance of the "heresy" known as Gnosticism and Docetism which held that at Jesus' baptism a supernatural being entered one who was not himself divine and worked through him as a receptacle for a time and left him before the Crucifixion, so that Jesus was merely a "seeming" or "phantasmal" Son of God and not truly born as such in the flesh.
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"It may well be that some of the material in the Gospel does derive ultimately from Peter, but in the last forty years or so Papias's statement has come in for a good deal of criticism, and most contemporary scholars agree that in places St Mark's material bears all the signs of having been community tradition and cannot therefore be derived directly from St Peter or any other eye-witness. But once that admission has been made about some of St Mark's material, it seems only logical to go on and make it about all his material, for,... all of it, without exception, seems to bear the characteristic marks of communal tradition."
This means "that the tradition on which the Gospels are based was handed on during the greater part of the oral period in the context of public and formal occasions; that is to say, the people by whom it was passed on were preachers and teachers, speaking at meetings for public worship or addressing groups of catechumens and the like".36 The grounds for this important claim are set out convincingly in such works as R.H. Rawlin-son's History and Interpretation in the Gospels, especially chapter II. The result is that, although an amount of information in Mark is such that it can be termed reminiscence, at a second or third remove, from Peter, there is a distinct distance from Peter's time or Peter's own words. A straightforward bearing of the Apostle on the contents here collected cannot be attested at all.
This conclusion vitally affects the problem of the Evangelist's identity. Nineham,37 again, has very apt words on the problem. He sees no reason to doubt the tradition that the Evangelist's name was Mark. "No one of that name is known to have been in specially close relationship with our Lord or to have been particularly prominent in the early Church, so there would have been no good reason for attributing the Gospel to Mark unless he had been known to have written it. It is less certain that the tradition is right in identifying the Mark who wrote the Gospel with the John Mark of Acts (e.g. 12:12, 25, etc.) and the Mark of 1 Pet. 5:13 (cf. also Col. 4:10, 2 Tim. 4:11, Philem. 24). The early Church was in the habit of assuming that all occurrences of a given name in the
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New Testament referred to a single individual, but when we remember that Mark (Marcus) was the commonest Latin name in the Roman Empire* and that the early Church must have contained innumerable Marks, we realize how precarious any assumption of identity is in this case. In favour of identifying the Evangelist with the Mark of 1 Pet. 5:13 it is often pointed out that the Mark there referred to is expressly associated with Peter, as the Evangelist is by Papias, and that the two are associated together in Babylon, the code name often used by early Christians for Rome, the traditional birthplace of the Gospel. For its full force this argument rests on the belief that 1 Peter was written by Simon Peter [the chief of the Apostles chosen by Jesus], a belief not shared by many scholars; and even if it was, we must reckon very seriously with the possibility that the Papias tradition is itself a deduction from the verse in 1 Peter taken together with the fact that the Gospel was known to have been written by someone called Mark.** In favour of the Evangelist's being the John Mark of Acts it is pointed out that the latter was a native of Palestine and so his authorship would account for the knowledge of Palestine and its conditions which the Gospel betrays. Certainly, as the commentary will show, the general picture in the Gospel is remarkably true to the conditions of Palestine in Jesus' day, and from time to time Aramaic expressions are quoted in the original; but it is not clear how far all this is due to the Evangelist and how far to the tradition; and numerous vaguenesses and inaccuracies are most naturally explained if the Evangelist was not directly acquainted with Palestine." (See the commentary on e.g. 5:1; 6:45; 7:2-4; 7:31; 8:22; 10:1; 11:1.)
Nineham38 ends on the note that certainty with regard
* Cf. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Antony, etc., etc.
** See H. J. Cadbury, The Making of Luke-Acts, pp. 85ff, who rightly points out how largely second-century statements about the authorship of biblical books was based on conjecture.
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to the author is clearly unattainable. However, if 1 Peter is taken as the crucial point, Nineham's mention of scholarly uncertainty on its authorship can be modified radically by an argument in the "Biblical Glossary" of the 1979-80 edition of Pears Cyclopaedia (S21, col. 2), dealing with the two letters alleged to be from the Apostle Peter whose death is traditionally put during Nero's persecution of A.D. 64: "The first letter is written to encourage Christians in Asia Minor who are suffering or are likely to suffer for their Christian faith. If this were written during a specific period of persecution it would almost certainly have been that under the Roman emperor Domitian (A.D. 81-96), since Nero's persecution does not appear to have extended far beyond the capital, and this would rule out authorship by Peter if he had died in A.D. 64."
A plausible alternative, even more explicitly against 1 Peter being from the chief Apostle's pen, is in a comment in the Encyclopaedia Britannica:39 "The milieu of the letter seems to reflect the time and temper of the correspondence of the emperor Trajan with Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (c. 117) [in Asia Minor]. Pliny requested clarification as to the punishment of Christians 'for the name itself or for crimes supposedly associated with being a Christian. 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse 15, appears to reflect this situation: that a Christian be blameless of all crimes and, if punished, be persecuted only 'as a Christian'____The warning in 1 Peter, chapter 3, on a Christian's manner of defense and submission to authority points to a date in the first quarter of the 2nd century. Such a date does not preclude reflection on earlier persecutions, such as those under Domitian."
It is extremely unlikely, if not downright impossible, for Paul's John Mark to have authored the Gospel. Christolog-ically, however, this Gospel, which is nearest in time (the 60s A.D.) than any other to Paul, is not so different from the Pauline view as is Luke's. The latter not only lacks the Pauline Christology of pre-existence: it also introduces the Virgin-Birth doctrine of which Paul has no trace: indeed, as Brown40 admits, "Paul never mentions Mary by name and
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shows no interest in her" and, when Paul speaks of Jesus in relation to his mother, he has the phrase "born of a woman" (Galatians 4:5) which, according to Brown41 "is meant to stress what Jesus shared with those whom he redeemed, precisely because it is applicable to everyone who walks this earth", as Brown42 himself exemplifies by quoting Matthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28 where we read of Jesus telling his disciples: "Among those born of women, none is greater than John the Baptist ..." Mark, in this connection, is Pauline in more than one respect. Apart from his utter omission of Jesus' infancy and boyhood as if there were nothing of note about them, he creates - unlike Luke - situations absolutely out of accord with Mary having any extraordinary grace from God. Brown43 has not failed to take account of them. He refers to Mark 6:4 "where Jesus compares himself to a prophet without honor in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house." Next, Brown44 writes: "A similar low estimate of the relations between Jesus and his family is found in 3:21, 31-35. There Mark first tells us that 'his own' thought that Jesus was beside himself (or frenzied) and went out to seize him; then Mark tells us that Jesus' mother and brothers came and, standing outside the place where he was, sent in to call him. Apparently, Mark includes Jesus' mother among the 'his own' who thought he was frenzied. Mark goes on to have Jesus distinguish his natural family, who are standing outside, from those inside listening to him, a family constituted by doing the will of God. Such an uncomplimentary view of Mary's relationship to Jesus is scarcely reconcilable with a knowledge of the virginal conception." Elsewhere Brown45 has touched on the same context and commented on its light upon Mary: "...the Marcan scene in which she features is scarcely favourable to her."
Thus Mark of the Gospel is doctrinally not so far as Luke from Paul, but the absence of the Christology of pre-existence from his work and, instead, the broadly Adoptionist posture and, furthermore, the total lack of objective evidence to equate him with his namesake known to Peter - all these factors
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undermine the case for identifying him with the Mark of Paul's Epistles.
References
1. The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 1973), p. 57, fn. 91.
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia (1977), Vol. 2, p. 954, col. 2.
3. The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (New York: Image Books, 1979), p. 332.
4. The Gospel of St. Luke (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Penguin Books, 1975), p. 17.
5. H. J. Cadbury, Harvard Theological Studies VI, "The Style and Literary Method of Luke"; cf. The Beginnings of Christianity, ed. Foakes Jackson and Lake, II, pp. 349-55.
6. Enc. Brit., Macropaedia, Vol. 2, p. 957, cols: 1 & 2.
7. The Young Church in Action: The Acts of the Apostles in Modern English (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1966), p. 19.
8. The Jerusalem Bible (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), The New Testament, p. 215, col. 1, note a.
9. Ibid., p. 196 (Introduction to the Acts of the Apostles).
10. Ibid., pp. 322-23.
11. Ibid., pp. 238-39.
12. Ibid., p. 244.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 214.
15. Ibid., p. 244.
16. Ibid., p. 322.
17. Ibid., p. 239.
18. Ibid., p. 215.
19. Ibid., p. 239.
20. Ibid., p. 244.
21. Ibid.,p.307.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 322.
24. Enc. Brit, Macropaedia, Vol. 2, p. 962, col. 2 and p. 963, Col. 1.
25. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 349.
26. Ibid., p. 261 (Introduction to the Letters of Saint Paul).
27. Ibid., pp. 344-45.
28. Ibid., p. 345, col. 1, note e.
29. Ibid., p. 339, col. 1, note d.
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30. Ibid., p. 260 (Introduction to the Letters of Saint Paul).
31. The Virginal Conception..., p. 44.
32. The Jerusalem Bible, p. 5 (Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels).
33. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament, p. 340.
34. Ibid., p. 65.
35. The Gospel of St. Mark (Harmondsworth: The Pelican New Testament Commentaries, Penguin Books, 1972), p. 27.
36. Ibid., pp. 39-40.
37. Ibid., pp. 21-22.
38. Ibid., p. 40.
39. Enc. Brit, Macropaedia, Vol. 2, p. 969, col. 2.
40. The Birth of the Messiah, p. 340.
41. Ibid., p. 519.
42. Ibid., fn. 5a.
43. Ibid., p. 520.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 340.
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