If Mark’s apostolic credentials purchased its admission into the canon, it was not treated as an equal partner alongside the other three Gospels. Not until the advent of the theory of Markan priority—partly due to the discovery of Mark as the middle term among the Synoptics and partly in reaction to the radical criticism of Strauss or the Tübingen School—was Mark placed in the spotlight. The result was a new sense of excitement among modernist scholars about Mark as the primary record of the Jesus of history straight from an apostolic eyewitness, untainted by legendary accretions or dogma.¹...

Many Gospel scholars proceed on the assumption that form, redaction, and literary criticism has dispensed, once and for all, with the patristic testimony about the evangelists. In this chapter, I will track the conservative backlash against the new methodological approaches to the Gospels and the re-emergence of the patristic tradition in some quarters of scholarship, exemplified in the work of Robert Gundry, Martin Hengel, Samuel Byrskog, Richard Bauckham, and Michael Bird. There is a pressing need for dialogue between scholars with different presuppositions of the origins of the Gospels and a fresh evaluation of the evidence to determine if the...

The New Testament and patristic references to an individual named “Mark” need to be put under the microscope to pinpoint when he became linked with Peter and identified as the author of a Gospel. Confidence on the grounds that “[t]he evidence of the tradition supporting Markan authorship can be described in general as early, universal and extensive”¹ is less secure if all the witnesses are carried by the same stream of tradition that has its source in Papias. The argument that “Mark,” as a minor character, was not an obvious choice has more force.² Then again, apocryphal Gospels were attributed...

In pushing the classification “Petrine” or “Pauline” on Mark, the ghost of F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School lingers on to haunt the halls of the academy.¹ Since the work of Walter Bauer, this rigid dichotomy has given way to an appreciation of the variegated nature of the Christ movement, a richly diverse landscape in which the evangelist was an active participant.² This anonymous text was a voice among many in the Christian wilderness, shaped by and in reaction to a social context. Although the patristic writers tried to balance the particular and the universal in their localizing traditions...

At the start of my investigation, I chased a trail of implicit clues on the manuscripts, citations, and emendations of Mark to exhibit its lukewarm reception. Brenda Deen Schildgen has an apt summary of the patristic sentiment: “The gospel [of Mark] lacks the necessary data found in Matthew and John useful to the fathers in clarifying liturgical, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, or sacramental practices.”¹ Turning to the explicit patristic statements, Mark is both affirmed and disavowed. Its apostolicity is affirmed at the same time as its literary or theological qualities are denigrated—the Gospel is not in order (τάξις) (Papias, inHist....

Mark was grudgingly tolerated in centrist Christian circles. It is time to inquire whether it was positively received elsewhere in the same way that the Montanists had affection for John or Marcion for an expurgated version of Luke.¹ Although fewer patristic comments explicitly name a community that principally cherished Mark, I will delve into the scribal revisions and patristic exegesis of Mark in the context of the polemical situation in the second century. Learned scribes and exegetes correct Mark to counteract an actual, or what was feared as a potential, aberrant reading. Specifically, they were wary about how Mark lends...