Was Peter Behind the Gospel of Mark?

Reconsidering some internal evidence

Did Mark base his gospel on the testimony of Peter?

The link between the Gospel of Mark and Peter is a very old one. It takes us all the way back to Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis (c. 60-130 CE). According to Papias, Mark was the hermeneutés – a ‘translator’ or ‘interpreter’ – of Peter in Rome. Mark wrote down some of the things the Lord said or did, but ‘not in order’.¹

Yet in modern scholarship, this tradition tends to raise the eyebrows of biblical critics.

One cause for suspicion is Papias himself. While Papias claims possession of a chain of living memory, some of the traditions he records are highly unusual in character. For instance, in one place, he records a comically gruesome version of Judas’ end. In another, he says that Matthew wrote down the logia of the Lord in Aramaic or Hebrew – but this bears little resemblance to the Greek gospel we call ‘Matthew’ today.

Yet there is another set of reasons why scholars are critical of Peter’s connection to Mark: namely, that there is nothing particularly Petrine about the gospel. The text doesn’t bear the hallmarks of eyewitness testimony – which we might expect from an ancient biography. And it consistently casts Peter in highly unflattering terms.

In this post, it is this second set of objections to Papias’ tradition that I want to briefly consider. While they are often raised as ‘internal evidence’ against the Peter-Mark connection, my doctoral supervisor, Professor Helen Bond, once wrote an interesting book chapter which challenges them. Here, I highlight three arguments from that essay, “Is Peter Behind Mark’s Gospel?” – which is well worth a read!²

1. Social & Personal Memory

The first common objection to the idea that Peter is behind Mark is that very little in the Gospel stands out as vivid, eyewitness memory. Joel Marcus, for example, notes that many of the stories lack the kind of detail expected of a participant.³