Saint Mark the Evangelist

Who Mark was

What is certain comes from the New Testament. Mark first appears in the Acts of the Apostles (12:12), when Peter, freed from prison, goes to the house of “Mary, the mother of John called Mark”, where Christians were gathered in prayer. He had two names: John, Jewish, and Mark, Roman. He is held to be the author of the second Gospel, the shortest of the four, at sixteen chapters.

The Acts then show him travelling with Barnabas — his cousin, or uncle — and Paul to Antioch and Cyprus, as their assistant. At Perge, in what is now Turkey, he left them and went back to Jerusalem. Paul took it as a betrayal and later refused to take him on a second journey, and Barnabas broke with Paul over it and sailed for Cyprus with Mark. Paul’s letter to Philemon, which scholars accept as his own, later names Mark among his fellow workers.

Many commentators, the Basilica notes, have read an autobiographical touch in a strange scene of Mark’s Gospel: at Jesus’s arrest a young man wrapped only in a linen cloth follows him, and when they try to seize him, flees naked (Mark 14:51–52).

Legend and tradition

The Basilica is careful to separate this from what came later. Coptic biographers of the ninth century gave Mark a birthplace in Cyrene, in today’s Libya, a father named Paul, and a family house in Jerusalem where the Last Supper was held. Saint Epiphanius, who died in 403, counted him among the seventy-two disciples.

Venice had its own tradition, gathered by Doge Andrea Dandolo in his Chronica around 1350. In it, Mark writes his Gospel in Rome, is sent by Peter to preach in Aquileia, and on the way back is driven by a storm onto an islet in the lagoon, where an angel greets him: “Peace to you, Mark. Here your body will rest.” The Basilica calls this account legendary; what it does accept is that Hermagoras, whom the story makes Mark’s successor, was a real first bishop of Aquileia — but two centuries later.

The Gospel

Tradition places the writing in Rome. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote that after Peter’s death Mark, “disciple and interpreter of Peter”, set down in writing what Peter had preached; the usual date is between 64 and 67. Mark seems to have acted as Peter’s interpreter into Greek.

The Gospel falls into two halves. The first eight chapters tell Jesus’s deeds and miracles, to show that he is the Son of God; the rest gives his words on what it takes to follow him to the cross. The Basilica describes Mark’s style as rapid, essential and nervous, with an eye for detail — a storm on the Sea of Galilee, a lost village.

Martyrdom in Alexandria

That Mark founded the Church of Alexandria rests, the Basilica says, on the solid testimony of Eusebius of Caesarea. The rest comes from later tradition. Mark enters the city, his sandal strap breaks, and the cobbler Anianus, who wounds his hand repairing it, is healed and becomes his first convert and later his successor.

The pagans of the city waited for their moment: an Easter that fell on the same day as the feast of Serapis. Armed men seized Mark at the altar, dragged him through the streets with a rope around his neck, and threw him into prison. During the night, the account says, Christ appeared to him with the words “Peace to you, Mark, my Evangelist”. The next day he was dragged again until he died. A storm put his killers to flight before they could burn his body, and the Christians buried it at Boucolis, by the sea, where his tomb became a shrine.

How Venice got the body

Around 828 Venetian merchants came to the shrine in Alexandria, set on bringing the Evangelist to their young city. Two of them, Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello, learned from its keepers, the monk Staurachius and the priest Theodore, that the Arab governor meant to strip Christian churches of their marble for a palace. They persuaded the two to come with them.

They put the body of a nearby martyr, Saint Claudia, in Mark’s place, hid the relics in wicker baskets under cabbage leaves and pork, and at the city’s customs called out “kanzir, kanzir” — pork — so that the officials held their noses and waved them through. The trick worked again when an Arab ship inspected them at sea. Off the islands south of Corfu, the story goes, Mark woke the sleeping sailors in time to save the ship from the rocks.

Because they had broken Venice’s embargo on trade with the Arabs, the merchants waited in Istria and sent word ahead. Allowed in, they landed the relics at Olivolo, where the bishop and Doge Giustiniano Partecipazio received them. The Basilica’s page on the Evangelist dates this to 31 January 828; its chronology lists it under 829. The relics were kept in a corner of the Doge’s Palace until a church was built for them — the first St Mark’s. The history page follows the three churches.

The rediscovery of 1094

When the present church was nearly finished, in June 1094, no one could find the body. After days of fasting and prayer, on 25 June, the tradition says, the saint revealed it to Doge Vitale Falier, the bishop and the people gathered in the Basilica by stretching an arm out of a pillar on the right side of the church. On 8 October 1094 the Doge laid it in a sarcophagus in the enlarged crypt, where pilgrims came on their knees to touch the tomb. It now lies in the high altar, under the ciborium — see what to see inside.

The lion

Venice made Mark its patron and his symbol its own: a winged lion holding a book. The book lies open in time of peace on the words Pax tibi Marce Evangelista meus, “Peace to you, Mark, my Evangelist”; in time of war the lion holds a sword. Why a lion? The Basilica answers from the Gospel itself: as the lion’s roar dominates the other animals, Mark proclaims aloud that Jesus is the Son of God. One lion stands at the centre of the west front, a nineteenth-century copy of the original destroyed in 1797.

His feast

Saint Mark’s day is 25 April, one of the solemnities at which the Patriarch presides in the Basilica. On that day the sarcophagus in the high altar is freed of its grilles and covered with red roses, and the Pala d’Oro is turned to face the faithful (the sculpture page describes the altar). The calendar of the Patriarch’s celebrations that the Basilica has published dates from 2022, so we give no times; check the year’s liturgical calendar. The Procuratoria already looks ahead to 2028, twelve hundred years since the relics arrived.