Procopius' attestation of Mark's Gospel

From Peter Kirby. What Procopius does with Mark is a nice little case study in how late antique readers could load a Gospel with centuries of theology and still think of themselves as “just” summarizing it.

a wise architect who carves into the vessel of his Gospel new laws, which Jeremiah had announced before in proclamation, saying: “And I will accomplish with the house of Israel and the house of Judah a new covenant, putting my laws in their hearts” (cf. Jer 31:31), so that not only by words but also by the evangelical scripture he might explain for posterity the incarnation of the eternal Logos and his life among men; placing in plain view the divine signs, the things suffered for us, the rising up from the tomb, and the ascension into the heavens, from whence he descended (Encom. in Marc.). Translated from the Greek text in PG 100:1193.

On the surface, the encomium is standard Byzantine praise: Mark is a “wise architect” who carves “new laws” into the vessel of his Gospel, fulfilling Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant written on hearts; he explains for posterity the incarnation of the eternal Logos, his life among humans, the divine signs, the passion, the rising from the tomb, and the ascension “into the heavens, from whence he descended.” Every phrase there is doing double duty. “New laws” is not some eccentric innovation; it is the stock Christian move of reading Jeremiah 31 through the lens of the Gospels, casting them as the charter of the new covenant. “Logos” is Johannine Christology pure and simple. “Ascension into the heavens” is the Longer Ending of Mark (16:19), not the abrupt empty-tomb stop of 16:8. And the descent–ascent arc—“into the heavens, from whence he descended”—plants Mark firmly inside a theological frame that looks, at first glance, a lot more like John and classic anti-Marcionite preaching than like bare canonical Mark.

That is what makes the passage worth pausing over. It is not merely that Procopius knows a form of Mark with the Longer Ending; that is already clear from how broadly that ending was received in Byzantium. It is the way he fuses Jeremiah’s “new covenant,” Johannine Logos language, and a descent–ascent Christology into a single compressed portrait of what “Mark” is about. For him, Mark is not just the shortest Gospel or the least ornate storyteller. Mark is the architect who inscribes the new covenant into writing, the scribe of the incarnate Logos, and the narrator of a Christ who comes down and goes back up.

Once you notice that, it is hard not to hear distant echoes of the debates about Marcion’s Gospel and about John. Tertullian’s Against Marcion hammers away at the idea that Christ “came down” in reality, not as a phantasm or a temporary indwelling. Johannine texts like “no one has ascended into heaven but the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man” present that descent–ascent arc almost as a creed in miniature. Anti-Marcionite prologues depict John the evangelist expelling Marcion for preaching in opposition to him. In that older world, “descent” talk is polemical: it distinguishes a real heavenly Christ who truly descends and ascends from a merely human Jesus adopted by a Spirit at baptism or from a docetic apparition that never really dies.

By the ninth century, that charged vocabulary has been domesticated. Procopius can talk about Christ descending and ascending without necessarily signaling any specific Marcionite controversy. The idiom has become part of the air of orthodoxy. Yet the fact that he applies it to Mark is suggestive. It shows that Byzantine readers felt no discomfort in recounting “Mark’s Gospel” in strongly Johannine cadences. The Logos can be named in a Mark encomium; the descent–ascent can be attributed to Mark’s narrative arc; the ascension can be treated as a Markan theme because the Longer Ending has long since been absorbed as Mark’s “proper” conclusion. What began historically as a patch and a harmonization—the grafting of a resurrection-and-ascension ending onto a text that originally lacked it—has become the lens through which Mark’s very identity is described.

This is why Procopius is both interesting and limited for any attempt to reconstruct earlier Mark. Interesting, because he crystallizes how thoroughly Mark has been read through Jeremiah, John, and anti-Marcionite catechesis: new covenant, Logos, descent–ascent, and Longer Ending are all bundled as if they were native to Mark’s DNA. Limited, because precisely that thorough harmonization means he is almost certainly not preserving some lost primitive Markan “new law” discourse or an independent Markan descent tradition. He is standing at the far end of a long process of reception in which Mark has been steadily pulled into line with the other Gospels and with the dogmatic grammar of Nicene orthodoxy.

The “new laws” image is a good example. It is tempting, if you are hunting for an esoteric Mark, to hear in that phrase an echo of a lost Sermon-on-the-Mount-type discourse or a Marcionite “new law” that Mark once contained. But there is no need to posit anything that strong. A Byzantine preacher who has spent his life hearing the Gospels read as the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s new covenant will very naturally talk about an evangelist “inscribing new laws” on hearts—even if the Gospel in question never contains a single extended legal sermon. The rhetoric is covenantal rather than textual. Mark becomes, by association, a new-law architect simply because any Gospel can be described that way once Jeremiah 31 is in play.

The same goes for the descent motif. There are real and intriguing overlaps here with the way Marcionites seem to have spoken of Christ descending into the world, and with the Johannine habit of structuring Christology as “from above / from below.” But Procopius never tips his hand in a way that forces a specifically Marcionite source. He could just as easily be echoing John’s “from whence he descended” and stock homiletic formulae about the Son who came down and returned, with Mark’s Longer Ending providing the narrative hook for the ascent. If there is a line back from Procopius to earlier Mark/Marcion traditions, it is an echo of an echo, not a clean quotation.

Where this matters for the whole Secret Mark universe is less on the level of evidence and more on the level of imaginative plausibility. Procopius shows how natural it was, in some Christian circles, to think of “Mark” as: theologically dense enough to talk about the Logos; ethically weighty enough to be the carving of “new laws”; cosmically plotted enough to be about descent and ascent; and narratively complete enough to climax in an ascension. In other words, he stands at the end of a trajectory in which Mark is not the rough, bare-bones primitive text beloved by some modern scholars, but a richly allegorizable Gospel that can bear almost any “spiritual” reading you like.

That does not, on its own, push us any closer to proving that there once existed an esoteric, “more spiritual” Mark behind Clement’s Letter to Theodore. The chronological gap is too large, and the harmonizing instincts of Byzantine exegesis are too strong. What it does do is map the conceptual space in which later Christians could easily imagine such a Mark. If you already read canonical Mark through Jeremiah’s new covenant, John’s Logos, and the descent–ascent formulas of anti-Marcionite preaching, it takes almost no further step to think of Mark as a Gospel that, at least in some form, contains deeper law, higher Christology, or “more spiritual” material than the surface narrative lets on.

Put differently: Procopius is a witness not to Secret Mark, but to how malleable Mark’s profile had become. By his day, Mark can be dressed in Johannine clothes, fitted with an ascension, and praised as a legislator of the heart without any sense of strain. That tells us more about Byzantine confidence in the fourfold Gospel as a single theological organism than about first- or second-century textual history. Yet it also marks the kind of interpretive environment in which any rumor of a “more spiritual” Mark—whether genuine or constructed—would be readily domesticated, retold, and eventually absorbed into the dense web of stories Christians tell about their Gospels and their authors.