Mark

I can see no good reason for rejecting the early tradition that comes to us from Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, that Mark is the author of the gospel attributed to him. It has certainly not been disproved. Papias also states that Mark got most of his information from Peter and that "his one care was this - not to leave out anything that he had heard, and not to falsify anything in them" If this is correct, then we have a source very close to the original events.

Mark appears on several occasions in the story of the early church. We know his mother's home was in Jerusalem and became a meeting place for the first Christians (Acts 12:12). He went with Paul and his uncle Barnabas on their first missionary journey and later accompanied Barnabas after his separation from Paul. Apparently, he later joined Paul in Rome and Paul expresses his appreciation for his ministry (Colossians 4:10, Philemon 24, 2 Timothy 4:11).

Whether Mark knew Jesus we do not know. He was probably a young man, perhaps in his teens, living in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus' death. That he had had some contact is certainly a real possibility. A fascinating detail is recorded in Mark's gospel in connection with the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Mark tells us, "All of Jesus' disciples ran off and left him. One of them was a young man who was wearing only a linen cloth. And when the men grabbed him, he left the cloth behind and ran away naked" (Mark 14:50,51). Why would Mark, alone of the gospel writers, want to tell of this young man, as it adds nothing to the significance of the events? I have a strong hunch that the young man was Mark himself. If so it would have been natural to include it. The incident certainly has an eyewitness touch about it.

Writer Frank Morison at one time in his life had planned to write a monograph on the trial of Jesus. He intended to call it Jesus the Last Phase. He regarded Jesus as a legendary figure of purity and noble manhood, but nothing more. However, when he eventually studied the gospel writings he was confronted by the fact that his followers believed he had risen from the dead. Convinced by the evidence, he eventually wrote instead Who Moved the Stone? Of Mark's Gospel he says:

It arrests even the uncritical reader by the granite sharpness of its detail. And nowhere do we feel its realism more than in that strangely graphic description of the last hour of Christ's freedom. This is surely no merely literary creation of a secondary age...This is obviously a true history of that never-to-be-forgotten night. It spares no feelings, least of all those of the disciples themselves. It stands out as a stark and imperishable record of one of the master episodes of human history. And if there be one thing which clinches and confirms the veracity of the narrative it is surely that curiously irrelevant detail of the young man whose cloak was snatched from him in the struggle and who fled naked into the night. Why should we be told anything about this man except for the weighty and sufficient reason that the thing happened? The retreating figure of this naked youth is clearly one of the ineffaceable impressions of a dramatic five minutes which remained engraved deeply in the memory of everyone present.

Whether or not Mark knew Christ personally, we may be sure that he counted amongst some of his closest friends those who did.