Various Early Traditions About the Life of St Mark

If you line up the scattered notices about Mark of Alexandria from late antique lists and chronicles, what emerges isn’t a tidy historical biography so much as a compact cult-dossier: founder, evangelist, mystagogue, and martyr, all wrapped into a few stylized sentences that scribes keep copying and lightly reshaping.

The little cluster that circulates under the name of “Dorotheus of Tyre” (really a Pseudo-Epiphanius compilation in various forms) is a good example. In its best-preserved form, in the Vienna Theol. gr. 40 manuscript, Mark is “evangelist and first bishop of Alexandria.” He preaches “the gospel of the Lord” to the Alexandrians and then out toward Pentapolis. Under Trajan, he is seized during a festival, dragged through the city by ropes from Boukolou to a place called Angeloi, burned, and then buried back at Boukolou. The notice even anchors his cult in time by marking the martyrdom in the Coptic month Pharmouthi.

What makes this more than just another hagiographic thumbnail is the way the Vienna text has been carefully re-edited against Schermann’s printed version. Once you clean up the typos and over-eager conjectures, you can see just how stable the core elements actually are. The same basic story reappears in parallel apostolic catalogues: in a more anonymous list form, in the Paris 1115 manuscript with a Latin translation by Moses of Bergamo, and in a “Life of Mark” excerpt cited by von Soden. Names, place-names, and the structure of the sentence vary slightly, but the through-line stays the same: Mark, Alexandria, Pentapolis, Boukolou, Angeloi, rope-dragging, fire, Pharmouthi.

A late chronicle, the Chronicon Paschale, piles on a chronological gloss by dating Mark’s death to Trajan’s reign, around 106 CE, and making Pharmouthi 1 the day of observance. Other calendars drift toward Pharmouthi 30, but the point is that by the time these texts take shape, Mark’s martyrdom has a calendrical “address” and a liturgical home. Whether that date has anything to do with what actually happened in early second-century Alexandria is another question. The compilers are clearly working in the same stew of harmonized apostolic vitae that can confuse Mark the evangelist, John Mark, and John the evangelist under Trajan’s umbrella.

A particularly interesting variant is found in an “Index of the Apostles” ascribed to Epiphanius. Here Mark is called a Cyrenian by origin, who receives the gospel from Peter, goes through Egypt and Pentapolis, and hands on “the mystery of godliness” in Alexandria. The martyrdom is the same: the ropes, the dragging, the fire, the burial at Boukolou, the Pharmouthi commemoration. But the wording leans even harder into two themes that matter for later debates. First, it consistently speaks of “the gospel of the Lord” rather than “the gospel according to Mark.” Second, it couples Mark’s preaching with the phrase “mystery of godliness,” giving him not just a pastoral role but a specifically mystagogical one.

That phrase “the gospel of the Lord” is where things get hermeneutically interesting. On one reading, it’s nothing more than a devotional formula: they’re talking about the same canonical text that later generations will call “the gospel according to Mark,” but here, in a liturgical and hagiographical context, the focus is on the content and the Lord rather than on the human author. It fits a broader late-antique habit of speaking simply of “the gospel” or “the gospel of the Lord” when reading in church, even when everyone knows which evangelist is being read.

On another reading, the fact that these notices never say “το κατὰ Μάρκον” can be taken as a tiny data point in favor of something like the picture Clement gives us: Mark’s authority in Alexandria is anchored in his person and his preaching, and the written narrative is a kind of aide-mémoire toward mystagogical teaching rather than a self-standing, author-titled “book” in our sense. That, after all, is exactly how the Vienna Dorotheus-notice glosses Mark’s role: he preaches “the gospel of the Lord” as evangelist and bishop, and in the Epiphanius-type version he hands on “the mystery of godliness.”

But here the limits of the material kick in. The Dorotheus attribution is secondary. The “Pseudo-Epiphanius” apostolic lists are late and fluid compilations, stitched together from earlier catalogues, martyrologies, and pious imagination. Chronicon Paschale is centuries after the fact and happy to synchronize biblical and imperial timelines in ways no modern historian would. Pharmouthi 1 versus Pharmouthi 30 shows how easily even a liturgical anchor can drift. And “gospel of the Lord” can be heard as a generic pious phrase without any heavy bibliographical implications.

What the dossier really gives us, then, is not a smoking gun for an Alexandrian “Secret Mark,” but a snapshot of how closely civic, liturgical, and textual memories of Mark were woven together. Alexandria remembers Mark as founder-bishop, as missionary reaching out toward Pentapolis, as martyr whose body lies at Boukolou, as the one who preached the “gospel of the Lord” and handed on the “mystery of godliness.” The cult is grounded in a specific topography (Boukolou, Angeloi) and in a specific slot in the year (Pharmouthi), and it treats Mark as the bearer of a gospel that is at once proclamation and mystery, story and sacrament.

For the “Secret Mark” debate, that’s a useful reminder and a quiet corrective. Nothing here points to a second, hidden Alexandrian codex lurking behind the canonical text. The traditions don’t know a “Gospel of Mark” versus a “Secret Gospel of Mark”; they know Mark and “the gospel of the Lord,” and they frame his authority in terms of founding, preaching, and mystagogy. If later Alexandrian writers talk about a more “mystic” or “spiritual” reading of Mark, they are working within a horizon where Mark’s persona, his martyrdom, and his liturgical gospel are already fused. The mystery is not a different book; it is the depth of the same gospel, mediated by the same figure whose rope-torn body, in these traditions, lies in the red earth at Boukolou.