Mark of Boukolou: Alexandria’s Evangelist and “the Gospel of the Lord”

What drops out of this little dossier on Mark, once you put the pieces side by side, is a surprisingly consistent cult-memory wrapped in some very revealing language about “gospel.”

The Vienna Dorotheus notice gives us the neatest version. Mark is “the evangelist and first bishop of Alexandria,” not a shadowy helper in the background but the founding figure. His work is framed geographically and verbally in one dense line: he “preached the gospel of the Lord to the Alexandrians and to all the surrounding region, from Egypt as far as Pentapolis.” The “gospel” here is not “το κατὰ Μᾶρκον” but explicitly “τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ κυρίου.” The object is the Lord’s gospel; Mark is the preacher and bishop. When the text turns to his death, the details are those you’d expect from a well-settled hagiographical tradition: under Trajan, in Alexandria, he is seized with ropes around his neck, dragged from the district called Boukolou (“the Cow-Pasture”) to the place called the Angels, burned by the idol-mad and buried in Boukolou. The whole scene is date-stamped liturgically: Pharmouthi 30.

As the post points out, this is essentially the same story the Chronicon Paschale tells, embedded in its Christianized consular chronicle. There, Mark’s martyrdom falls in Trajan’s eighth year, under the consuls Candidus and Quadratus, alongside notices of John’s death at age 100+, of Simon son of Clopas, and Ignatius of Antioch. Again Mark is dragged with ropes from Boukolia to the “Angels” and burned; the date is now Pharmouthi 1. The chronicle pushes the whole cluster to 106 CE and even hints at the theological weight of the date by noting that March 25 was traditionally associated with the passion or resurrection of Jesus. It is classic late antique synchronism: apostles and evangelists are made to die in tidy relation to emperors, Olympiads, and festal symbolism. As Andrew Criddle notes, there is almost certainly some conflation going on between Mark, John Mark, and the Johannine tradition which also gets tied to Trajan in some strands. The point, though, is that by the time of the Chronicon Paschale and the Vienna list, Mark’s death is firmly located in Trajan’s reign and in Pharmouthi, with the same rope-dragging and the same two toponyms.

Von Soden’s “Life of Mark” drawn from the Dorotheus synopsis is essentially a prose restatement of the same notice: evangelist and first bishop of Alexandria, preaching the gospel of the Lord to the Alexandrians and the surrounding region “from Egypt to Pentapolis,” dragged with a rope around his neck from Boukolou to Angelion under Trajan, burned, buried there. If you strip out a few case endings and word-order shifts, you are looking at the same short vita being reused in slightly different frames.

The Epiphanian “Index of the Apostles” then adds a layer of theological color. Here Mark is explicitly “from Cyrene in Libya,” which neatly matches the Pentapolis mission and ties him into a wider North African geography. He receives “the gospel” from Peter, preaches through all Egypt and as far as Pentapolis, and in Alexandria “passes on the mystery of godliness (τῆς εὐσεβείας μυστήριον).” The martyrdom is again by ropes and fire, and again his body lies in Boukolia; the day is now clearly nailed down as Pharmouthi 30, glossed for Greek readers as “April.” A further notice has him buried “in the Boukolia, alongside Iktas, the protomartyr in Lykos,” and makes the Boukolia the necropolis of Alexandrian bishops. So Boukolia is not a throw-away detail; it is the cult center where Mark and the episcopal line rest.

Three things stand out once you read all of this together.

First, the textual tradition is more stable than it looks in Schermann’s rather messy edition. The Vienna list, the von Soden vita, the Epiphanian index, and the Chronicon Paschale are all reproducing the same little dossier with minor adjustments: Mark’s titles, the formula “preached the gospel of the Lord,” the missionary arc “from Egypt to Pentapolis,” the Trajan synchronism, the rope-dragging, the fire, Boukolia and the Angels, the Pharmouthi commemoration. The post’s fresh transcription from Vienna, Theol. gr. 40 (77) mainly shows how much of that was already there once you correct typos and a bad conjecture that had garbled the Greek.

Second, the language about gospel and mystery is doing more than just filling space. In both the Vienna/Dorotheus material and the Epiphanian index, Mark does not “write” a gospel; he preaches “the gospel of the Lord.” In the Epiphanian version, what he hands on in Alexandria is specifically “the mystery of godliness,” echoing 1 Timothy 3:16. That verse is a key text for Irenaeus when he talks about the “assembly of the living God” as “pillar and foundation of the truth,” and the tradition here is clearly hearing it in a quasi-gospel sense: the “mystery of godliness” is the evangelic content Mark mediates. Put that alongside the recurring “εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ κυρίου” and you get a picture in which Mark’s authority is primarily that of a mystagogue of “our secret godliness,” not the front-cover author of a codex.

That feeds directly into the observation that “τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ κυρίου” almost functions, here, as the name of the book that we later call “Mark,” just without a superscription. It is “the gospel of the Lord” that Mark preaches and that later Alexandrians will read in his church; the lists simply don’t bother to attach “κατὰ Μᾶρκον.” That doesn’t mean anyone imagined a different, secret text. On the contrary, it fits a pattern where in liturgical and hagiographical discourse the evangelion is treated as one, Christocentric proclamation, and individual evangelists are remembered as the ones who preached and interpreted it in particular locales. The written scroll is there, but in these brief notices it is the proclamation and its “mystery” that matter.

Third, the Trajan dating sits in an ambiguous space between historical claim and theological harmonization. The Chronicon Paschale is quite explicit: this is Trajan’s persecution, other apostolic figures are dying at great age, and Mark’s death is aligned with a charged calendrical date. The Dorotheus and Epiphanian lists simply echo “under Trajan” with Pharmouthi 30 in tow. Given how late and composite these sources are, it is hard to treat “106 CE” as a serious chronological datum. Criddle’s suggestion that the Trajan notice arises from confusion between different “John/Mark” traditions is very plausible. But even if the year is not recoverable, the fact that these compilers want Mark under Trajan tells you something about how the Alexandrian imagination was knitting him into the grand narrative of the apostolic age and imperial persecutions.

For the broader questions that often sit behind this—Alexandria, Mark, and talk of “mystic” gospels—the upshot, to my mind, is twofold. On the one hand, there is no hint here of a second, esoteric codex. What is remembered and celebrated is one Mark: evangelist, first bishop of Alexandria, missionary to Pentapolis, martyr at Boukolia. His gospel is “the gospel of the Lord,” and his special role is to pass on the “mystery of godliness” in Alexandria. On the other hand, that “mystery” language and the absence of a Markan superscription fit quite comfortably with an Alexandrian habit of thinking of the evangelion as a single salvific proclamation with an inner depth that is handled mystagogically in a concrete place. Later claims about more “mystic” or “spiritual” readings of Mark’s narrative don’t need a separate book to make sense; they sit very naturally in the world presupposed by these late lists, where Mark’s name is tied to a city, a martyr’s grave in the Boukolia, a feast in Pharmouthi, and a “gospel of the Lord” whose mystery he handed on.