Saint Mark

The Church identifies the Evangelist Mark with the “John, who was surnamed Mark” of the Acts of the Apostles. His mother Mary owned a house in Jerusalem where the first Christians gathered to pray, and it was there that Peter went when an angel freed him from prison (Acts 12). Some think Mark was the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane on the night of the arrest, a detail only his Gospel records.

He was a cousin of Barnabas, and he set out with Barnabas and Paul on their first missionary journey, but turned back halfway (Acts 13). Paul refused to take him on the next journey, and Barnabas and Paul parted over it. Years later the quarrel was healed. Paul, in prison, asked for Mark, “for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Timothy 4). Peter, writing from Rome, calls him “Mark my son.”

According to Papias, writing early in the second century, Mark was Peter’s interpreter in Rome and wrote down carefully what Peter remembered of the words and deeds of the Lord. His Gospel is the shortest of the four, direct and full of vivid detail. It begins with John the Baptist’s voice crying in the wilderness, and so his emblem is the lion, the voice roaring in the desert.

Tradition makes Mark the founder of the Church of Alexandria in Egypt, where he is said to have been martyred. In 828 Venetian merchants brought his relics to Venice, and the basilica of San Marco was built to hold them. The winged lion became the symbol of the city.