St Mark’s Day
April 25 honours the writer of the third Gospel. The fourth-century Christian historian Eusebius, using much earlier records, says of him: And so greatly did the splendor of piety illumine the minds of Peter’s hearers that they were not satisfied with hearing once only, and were not content with the unwritten teaching of the divine Gospel, but with all sorts of entreaties they besought Mark, a follower of Peter, and the one whose Gospel is extant, that he would leave them a written monument of the doctrine which had been orally communicated to them. Nor did they cease until they had prevailed with the man, and had thus become the occasion of the written Gospel which bears the name of Mark. . . And they say that this Mark was the first that was sent to Egypt, and that he proclaimed the Gospel which he had written, and first established churches in Alexandria. (Eccl. Hist. II, 15-16)
But who was Mark? Tradition links him to “John Mark”, the cousin of Barnabas, mentioned in the books of Acts, Timothy, Philemon and Colossians. He seems to have been a Jewish Christian who served in Paul’s missions for a time, was with Peter in Rome, and then went to Egypt becoming the first bishop of the African church in Alexandria. For a very long time Mark’s Gospel was seen merely as a summary of Matthew, but most scholars now agree that Mark’s was the first Gospel to be written and place the date of writing some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, though others date it from the 60s. The latter argue that Mark was writing for an audience of Roman Christians, then undergoing the persecution of Nero. We have no reliable account of his death but the Coptic Church claims that he was martyred in Alexandria by outraged pagans.
In the 7th century Egypt was overrun by Arab invaders and the native Christians placed under religious restrictions, largely cut off from western and Byzantine Christendom. In 828 Venetian merchants are said to have smuggled the relics of St Mark out of Alexandria and taken them to Venice where the basilica of San Marco was built to house them. (Coptic Christians assert, however, that the head of St Mark remains in Alexandria.)
Each of the Gospellers has been traditionally denoted by a particular figure, derived from visions recorded in the Book of Ezekiel and Revelation: Luke by an ox; John by an eagle; Matthew by a man; and Mark by a lion. The Lion of St Mark remains the emblem of Venice, on its flag and atop a pillar in the Piazzetta beside the Doge’s Palace.