Introduction
Why should it matter who wrote the Gospel of Mark? I ask this question in deliberate reference to Michel Foucault’s opening gambit in his essay, “What is an Author?”: “The theme I would like to start from, I borrow its formulation from Beckett: ‘What does it matter who is speaking, someone said what does it matter who is speaking.’ ”Footnote 1 It arguably did not matter to its writer, because the work we know as the Gospel of Mark is formally anonymous.Footnote 2 The name “Mark” is found nowhere within the text of the gospel, and nowhere does the text identify any person as its author.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, the identity of the one who wrote this gospel seems to matter today because the veil of this formal anonymity is regularly pierced by editors, commentators, and readers, who name its author as “Mark” and attempt to locate his place within early Christianity, routinely as the first order of business.Footnote 4
Equally routinely, these discussions revolve around a fragment from a lost five-volume work, Exposition of Dominical Oracles, by Papias of Hierapolis from the early second century and preserved by the fourth-century church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, as follows:Footnote 5
14 … ἀναγκαίως νῦν προσθήσομεν ταῖς προεκτεθείσαις αὐτοῦ φωναῖς παράδοσιν ἣν περὶ Mάρκου τοῦ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον γεγραφότος ἐκτέθειται διὰ τούτων· 15 Καὶ τοῦθ’ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν· «Mάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα.» οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστερον δέ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ· ὃς πρὸς τὰς χρείας ἐποιεῖτο τὰς διδασκαλίας, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, ὥστε οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Mάρκος οὕτως ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν. †ἑνὸς γὰρ ἐποιήσατο πρόνοιαν, τοῦ μηδὲν ὧν ἤκουσεν παραλιπεῖν ἢ ψεύσασθαί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς.†
14 … We now need to add to these statements of his [Papias’s] a tradition which he set forth about Mark who wrote the gospel as follows: 15 “And this is what the Elder would say: ‘Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, accurately wrote what he remembered, yet not in order the things either said or done by the Lord.’Footnote 6 For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but later, as I said, Peter, who would give his teachings as needed, but not, as it were, making a compilation of the dominical oracles, so that Mark did not fail at all by writing some of them as he recalled.”Footnote 7 †For he took care of one thing, to omit nothing of what he heard or falsify anything among them.†
It is not hard to see why this testimonium is featured so prominently in discussions of the gospel’s authorship: it is the earliest and most detailed discussion of someone named Mark writing about what Jesus said and did. As expected from historical-critical commentaries, their interest lies in assessing the historical reliability of what Papias said, and the results are at best meager and qualified. Papias might be right about some things but not, as it turns out, about anything important.Footnote 8 For example, Papias might be right that its author was named “Mark,” but this is merely one of the most common names in the Roman Empire and could well be coincidental with anyone else by that name in the New Testament.Footnote 9 Papias might also be right about this Mark’s relationship with Peter but this too is of little practical consequence for the source of his traditions, as many of them would not be Petrine.Footnote 10 In other words, despite the detail of Papias’s remarks about Mark, they hardly perform any useful work in the historical criticism of the gospel. The name “Mark” merely furnishes a convenient label to distinguish this gospel from others.Footnote 11
Even this nominal use of “Mark” as a distinguishing label has been questioned. Citing Foucault’s famous essay, Matthew D. C. Larsen contends that “retaining the name ‘Mark,’ however, encourages the idea of an author figure.”Footnote 12 Larsen says that the idea that the Gospel of Mark had an author was anachronistic in the first century on the grounds that an author is the one who authorized a finished book.Footnote 13 He contends that the Gospel of Mark was not finished but was rather an “unfinished note collection,”Footnote 14 rather like hypomnēmata or commentarii.Footnote 15 In fact, Larsen regards Irenaeus at the end of the second century to be the earliest one to deem Mark a finished book.Footnote 16 As a result, he recommends that to avoid anachronism when discussing textual traditions of the first and second century we ought not refer simply to the name “Mark,” but to “the Gospel according to Mark.”Footnote 17 This recommendation, however, raises the issue of what to make of the fact that, in the first and second centuries, there were two people, Papias and the Elder, who named Mark as someone who wrote down the words and deeds of Jesus.Footnote 18 Larsen’s response is to introduce a distinction: “Mark, in Papias’s account, is a text producer, not an author,” because Papias did not explicitly refer to Mark’s writing as a “gospel” or any kind of finished book.Footnote 19 This categorial denial of Mark’s status as an author in Papias recalls Foucault’s observation that some written texts have authors but others do not,Footnote 20 except that Larsen locates authorship in whether a text is considered finished.Footnote 21
Foucault’s essay is also the point of departure for Karen L. King’s study of attribution in early Christian literature.Footnote 22 King adopts Foucault’s terminology of the “author-function” and uses it “to point toward the characteristic roles that attribution performs in terms of the discourses that are in play.”Footnote 23 She proposes a detailed taxonomy of the characteristic roles, deployments, and material conditions around ancient author-function,Footnote 24 and applies it to the chain of attributions embedded in the Apocryphon of John and the Revelation of John.Footnote 25 The Gospel of Mark and other formally anonymous works are not the focus of her essay, but she suggests that such unattributed works were given attributions for organizational purposes or “to give it authority (for example, by linking gospels to apostles).”Footnote 26 Both these suggestions were already in Foucault, but King’s stature as a scholar has encouraged subsequent scholars to explore this approach with increasing sophistication.Footnote 27 In the case of the Gospel of Mark, however, we have the curious situation where the apostolic attribution is indirect, to someone associated with Peter, which raises questions about the importance of authority in the attribution of this gospel.
Authorship as authority, moreover, is precisely what Foucault problematizes when he asks, “what does it matter who is talking?,” both as his initial ploy and his final coup de grâce.Footnote 28 Foucault’s own—and surprisingly overlooked—answer to this question stems from his insight that texts, books, and other discourses acquire authors to the extent that their creators can be punished for their transgressive content.Footnote 29 Foucault sees this punitive liability as a culturally imposed form of ownership in the work to the transgressor (l’appropriation pénale), and he generalizes this characteristic of the author-function to encompass modern and more rewarding forms of intellectual property.Footnote 30 More colloquially, Howard Love characterizes this function of authorship as the author’s “owning the words” of the work, such that the author is made to accrue both the benefits and liabilities of authoring the work.Footnote 31 In this study, I refer to this approach under the rubric of accountability, and this facet of the author-function is evident in discourses whenever a person becomes the locus of credit or blame for a work. An advantage of this way of conceptualizing authorship is that it brings a different and complementary lens on the author-work relation, a lens that looks at what work the attribution is doing for a certain person, rather than the work the attribution is doing for the text.
These different ways of conceptualizing authorship should be tested, and an excellent place to see how useful they are and their limitations is the Papias passage. It is not one homogenous block of discourse but three embedded discourses with three voices—Eusebius’s, Papias’s, and the Elder’s—and they do not form a unison, but three different, even dissonant, notes on the authorship of the Gospel of Mark. Moreover, because Papias flourished at the beginning of the second century and the Elder at the end of the first, the earliest two voices flourished within living memory of Mark’s composition, probably within the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.Footnote 32 In other words, the detailed description of the Papias testimonium could promisingly elucidate how the discourse of Markan authorship has changed among these three people over time and refine our understanding of ancient authorship. This study, then, will tease out and situate the different voices in the Papias testimonium on Mark and then analyze what the Elder, Papias, and Eusebius have to say about the relationship of Mark and Peter to the writing of the Gospel of Mark, paying close attention to how well the concepts of authority, authorization of a finished book, and accountability explain their differences. It turns out that Foucault’s notion of appropriation—that is, a socially constructed and imposed form of accountability over a text—explains their distinctive emphases the most fully. The final part of this article returns to the formal anonymity of the Gospel of Mark and offers some reasons why the writer may have wanted to avoid being made to “own the words” of the gospel, and why later Christians refused to go along with it. Here too, the notion of accountability is shown to be sufficiently useful enough to belong in the scholarly toolbox.
Three voices in the Papias Testimonium
The most famous and most quoted statement about etiology of Mark in antiquity is a joint production of three different people living at three different times: Eusebius, Papias, and the Elder. All of them contributed to the surviving shape of the passage, and all of them had different purposes for conveying their traditions about Mark. This complexity tends to be effaced in the literature, however, because many quotations of the testimonium begin at an editorially imposed section boundary in the Historia ecclesiastica 3.39.15.Footnote 33 A clearer picture is painted when Eusebius’s introduction to the passage in section 14 is included:
14 … ἀναγκαίως νῦν προσθήσομεν ταῖς προεκτεθείσαις αὐτοῦ φωναῖς παράδοσιν ἣν περὶ Mάρκου τοῦ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον γεγραφότος ἐκτέθειται διὰ τούτων· 15 Καὶ τοῦθ’ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν·…
14 … We now need to add to these statements of his [Papias’s] a tradition which he set forth about Mark who wrote the gospel as follows: 15 “And this is what the Elder would say: ‘…Footnote 34
The nested quotations introducing the material alert us to the presence of three embedded voices in this passage. The first belongs to Eusebius, the church historian who was interested in the origins of the gospels and quoted various church authorities for their testimonies about them. The second is that of Papias, who was interested in collecting the “dominical oracles,” and in this connection he quoted an unnamed predecessor, the “Elder,”Footnote 35 about the literary activity of someone named Mark and his relationship to Peter. The third comes from this unnamed Elder and, as the imperfect ἔλεγεν indicates, Papias’s quotation provides the gist of what he said at various unrecoverable occasions. To understand this composite discourse on the Gospel of Mark, then, it is important to understand as best we can each of these tradents who passed the tradition down to us.
Eusebius of Caesarea was a prolific historian, exegete, and apologist of the early fourth century at a time when great changes were taking place with Christianity’s role in the Roman world.Footnote 36 His most famous work is a ten-volume history of the church, the Historia ecclesiastica, which covers the history of Christianity from the time of Jesus through various persecutions to its triumph under Constantine. It is within this work—in the final chapter of the third book—that Eusebius quotes Papias on the origin of the Gospel of Mark (Hist. eccl. 3.39.15), and for this reason his church history establishes a natural frame of reference for contextualizing Eusebius’s attitude toward Papias on the origins of the gospels. But this is incomplete. Generally neglected in scholarly treatments of Papias are Eusebius’s other writings, and two such works are important: the Demonstratio written before the Historia and the Theophania published afterwards. They bracket the Historia and furnish a baseline for Eusebius’s attitude toward the Gospel of Mark.
The Demonstratio is an apologetic work composed around 311 to prove the excellence of Christianity over its competitors.Footnote 37 One of the criticisms of Christianity treated in the Demonstratio is that the miracle accounts of Jesus written in the gospels, which Eusebius viewed as proofs of Christ’s divinity, are not to be trusted because Jesus’s disciples were not trustworthy men (Dem. ev. 3.5). Eusebius’s response was to stress the character of the disciples who wrote the gospels, arguing that they were modest men who did not conceal their ignoble pasts and who did not aggrandize themselves.Footnote 38 Proof of Peter’s humility is first seen in his not presuming to write a gospel himself; that task fell to his “friend and companion” Mark (Dem. ev. 3.5.88–90). Particularly important for Eusebius was Peter and Mark’s honesty in recording the denials of Peter and his weeping bitterly about them (Dem. ev. 3.5.92–94, quoting Mark 14:66–72). At this point, Eusebius points out that the entirety of Mark’s gospel consists of the memoirs (ἀπομνημονεύματα) of Peter’s discourses (Dem. ev. 3.5.95, πάντα γὰρ τὰ παρὰ Mάρκῳ τῶν Πέτρου διαλέξεων εἶναι λέγεται ἀπομνημονεύματα), and both men transmitted the private criticisms against Peter out of their respect for the truth (ibid., φιλαλήθους δὲ διαθέσεως). According to Eusebius, then, Mark contains exactly what Peter taught to such an extent that Peter’s modest character comes through in the telling. For this argument to work, it is vital that the Gospel of Mark conveys Peter’s teaching exactly.
This view of the Gospel of Mark as a testament of Peter’s humility and credibility is evident elsewhere in Eusebius’s works. In the Theophania, a later apologetical work preserved mainly in Syriac, Eusebius maintains his argument in the Demonstratio that Mark reflects the teachings of Peter, right down to the apostle’s modesty, but is even more defensive over Mark’s omissions of teaching, reiterating that Mark’s lack of the commendation of Peter that is present in Matt 16:16 is due to Peter’s own omission of it in his teaching (Theoph. 6.40).Footnote 39 Thus, Mark’s omission is not something that the gospel should be faulted for, but ironically the very proof that it should be trusted. Within the Historia itself but before the Papias chapter, Eusebius tells one version of Clement’s story on the origin of the Gospel of Mark, in which Peter’s audience in Rome begged Mark for a record of Peter’s teaching (Hist. eccl. 2.15), Mark complied with their request, and Peter ratified the work afterwards in response to a spiritual revelation.Footnote 40 This after-the-fact ratification of the gospel by Peter supports Eusebius’s view that the Gospel of Mark contains Peter’s preaching by confirming that Peter agreed with the contents.
Eusebius’s citation of Clement also provides an insight into how the historian treats his sources. In Hist. eccl. 2.15, Eusebius adduces Clement in support of Peter’s ratification of Mark, yet when Eusebius returns to Clement on the origin of the gospels in Hist. eccl. 6.16.6, we find out that Peter was noncommittal, neither encouraging nor discouraging it (Hist. eccl. 6.14.6).Footnote 41 There is a palpable contradiction, then, between Eusebius’s characterization of Clement’s testimony on Mark and his quotation of it. The latter quotation is an admission against the church historian’s interest, which supports the accuracy of the quotation over the characterization.Footnote 42 Because many sources are only preserved in Eusebius, scholars have been interested in Eusebius’s citation technique, especially where Eusebius can be shown to distort his sources. For example, Sabrina Inowlocki finds that Eusebius is usually (but not always) faithful to the wording of his source texts, and his greatest distortions tend to involve manipulating the context and creatively cutting the quotation from its original context.Footnote 43 This case shows that Eusebius’s pre-understanding of the origin of Mark influences how he frames his quotations of his witnesses on this very matter.
Eusebius’s use of Clement on the Gospel of Mark is part of the church historian’s larger project for establishing the apostolic bona fides and orthodox use of all the genuine New Testament works (Hist. eccl. 3.3.3). This led Eusebius to Papias, whom he quotes as a witness for the ecclesiastical use of the gospels, two of the Catholic Epistles, and the Revelation of John. This last text presented a problem for Eusebius’s opinion of Papias, because while Eusebius was inclined to reject the authenticity of Revelation,Footnote 44 Irenaeus had identified Papias’s teacher, John the disciple of the Lord, as the seer of Revelation.Footnote 45 Eusebius’s answer was simple: Papias was actually talking about a different John. In a bid to prove this,Footnote 46 Eusebius quoted extensively from Papias’s prologue (Hist. eccl. 3.39.3–4), inadvertently preserving Papias’s aims for his work.
Papias was the author of five books of Exposition of the Dominical Oracles,Footnote 47 probably in the time of Trajan (97–118 CE).Footnote 48 Nearly all of his work has perished aside from quotations by his later readers, and we are grateful to Eusebius for preserving substantial portions of his prologue, though many mysteries about Papias’s work remain.Footnote 49 In his prologue, Papias explains that he went about collecting the authoritative traditions he learned from his elders because books were not as important as a living and lasting voice.Footnote 50 His invocation of the “living voice” is not a disparagement of literature in general but a trope common in antiquity that underscores one’s own expertise as a properly instructed disciple, while at the same time denigrating books as a complete source of information.Footnote 51 To this end, Papias states that he used to quiz anyone who came to visit and was a follower of the elders about what the disciples of the Lord said, listing nine of them by name including Peter.Footnote 52 At this point we can get a sense of how the Gospel of Mark would have mattered to Papias. As a book, the Gospel of Mark would not be Papias’s sole source of teaching because every book is necessarily insufficient and requires supplementation. What matters then to Papias is the authoritativeness of the author, whether the author himself had the benefit of a “living and lasting voice,” and Papias’s own practice in seeking out traditions from various disciples of Jesus suggests that one’s living voice should not be a single voice.Footnote 53
Papias specifies his oral source for his information about Mark’s writing: the “Elder” (ὁ πρεσβύτερος). As a member of a generation prior to Papias, this individual must have flourished in the final decades of the first century, but hardly anything else is known about him. He could be the person Papias identifies as “John the elder,” who was a “disciple of the Lord,” and, as such, a potentially independent witness to evaluate what Mark wrote.Footnote 54 Or he could be some other authoritative teacher for Papias of the previous generation. In either case, all that can be ascertained with some confidence is that he was likely to have been an adult Christian when the Gospel of Mark was written, and thus a roughly contemporary, though not necessarily a knowledgeable, source about the writing of this gospel.
In sum, the diverse tendencies of the tradents for the Mark testimonium should be taken into account. Eusebius’s tendency as applied to the testimonium would be that he would want the contents of Mark to reflect Peter’s preaching as closely as possible. Even the omissions of important material, such as Jesus’s commendation of Peter as the rock upon which he will build his church, must be attributed to omissions in Peter’s teaching and thereby to Peter’s humility. For Papias, it is less important that the content of Mark be a direct window to Peter, as long as the evangelist had access to the living and lasting voices of various “disciples of the Lord.” Finally, we have the shadowy Elder, who was an authority for Papias as someone aware of the circumstances around the Gospel of Mark and its contents, if not an actual disciple of Jesus.
What the Elder, Papias, and Eusebius say about Mark
We will now take the statements of the testimonium in order, paying particular attention to whom each statement belongs and what different notions of authorship they implicate in regard to what they have to say about the authority of the writer, the finishing of the work, and the ownership of the words. The first statement in the testimonium is explicitly attributed to the “Elder,” and the μὲν…μέντοι construction suggests that at least the entire sentence belongs together:Footnote 55
Καὶ τοῦθ’ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν· «Mάρκος μὲν ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος, ὅσα ἐμνημόνευσεν, ἀκριβῶς ἔγραψεν, οὐ μέντοι τάξει τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ κυρίου ἢ λεχθέντα ἢ πραχθέντα.»
And this is what the Elder would say: “Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, accurately wrote what he remembered, yet not in order the things either said or done by the Lord.”Footnote 56
This brief statement by the Elder touches on all three notions of authorship under question. In terms of authority, the Elder identifies someone named Mark as the person who wrote down what he remembered (ἐμνημόνευσεν).Footnote 57 As with Papias’s self-commendation for his own authority to write his exegetical treatises,Footnote 58 the verb μνημονεύειν underscores how well Mark had retained in memory what he wrote.Footnote 59 Mark could also derive authority from his relationship to Peter as his interpreter (ἑρμηνευτής), which could have afforded him access to what Peter told others, but this relationship was already over (γενόμενος).Footnote 60 As for accountability, Mark is the locus of the Elder’s credit and blame. The Elder praises Mark for writing accurately (ἀκριβῶς). This praise is immediately juxtaposed with the comment that it was not in order (οὐ. . . τάξει). This is not merely a neutral observation. The adversative particle μέντοι signals a modification or denial of expectation raised by the preceding context.Footnote 61 That preceding context was Mark’s accuracy, raising a positive expectation that it is contradicted by his lack of order. In neither case does the Elder connect these literary aspects to Peter specifically. Rather, it is Mark who “owns the words” of the gospel.
Concerning the literary completeness of Mark’s writing, there is less material to work with. The aorist ἔγραψεν could suggest that Mark’s writing was complete and that he did nothing more with it, but on Larsen’s approach this observation would only apply to the completeness of the text that Mark produced, and not to whether he considered it a finished piece of literature.Footnote 62 Indeed, the Elder’s remarks do not address Mark’s attitude toward his work product at all. Candida R. Moss emphasizes that the work of many interpreters in antiquity was perceived as servile, which would suggest that Mark qua interpreter would not be regarded as producing a literary work.Footnote 63 Although the following statement by Papias does link Mark’s work product to his employment as an interpreter, those facets of Mark’s life are not connected in the Elder’s statement. Rather, Mark was Peter’s former interpreter when he wrote down what Jesus said and did. Several scholars have suggested that the term τάξει reflects a rhetorical judgment that Mark lacked a literary order,Footnote 64 but even here it is not clear whether the Elder’s judgment was that Mark’s writing was a poor or failed attempt at an authored literary product or that his effort was simply not a literary work at all. Then again, in the absence of any evidence of rhetorical training for Papias’s predecessor, the Elder’s judgment may well represent a criticism of Mark’s chronological order, as Mark’s mediation of his content through Peter should not affect Mark’s own ability give it a literary order.Footnote 65
The Elder’s statement about Mark is introduced by Papias with the formula, καὶ τοῦθ’ ὁ πρεσβύτερος ἔλεγεν (“and this is what the elder used to say”). The imperfect ἔλεγεν suggests that Papias did not have in mind a single occurrence, but rather a statement that the Elder would make from time to time and that Papias’s rendition of it is not to be regarded as a verbatim quotation but rather the gist of what this figure authoritative to Papias would say.Footnote 66 This general statement is then followed by a γάρ-clause that expands upon and explains some of its details:
οὔτε γὰρ ἤκουσεν τοῦ κυρίου οὔτε παρηκολούθησεν αὐτῷ, ὕστερον δέ, ὡς ἔφην, Πέτρῳ· ὃς πρὸς τὰς χρείας ἐποιεῖτο τὰς διδασκαλίας, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων, ὥστε οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Mάρκος οὕτως ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν.
For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but later, as I said, Peter, who would give his teachings as needed, but not, as it were, making a compilation of the dominical oracles, so that Mark did not fail at all by writing some of them as he recalled.Footnote 67
This segment probably belongs to Papias rather than the Elder.Footnote 68 An immediate difficulty is that the first-person parenthetical, ὡς ἔφη (“as I said”), is difficult to account for in a general summary of what the Elder would have orally said at various occasions. Given the constraints of human memory, Papias is unlikely to be quoting the Elder word-for-word.Footnote 69 It is also unlikely that the “as I said” would refer back to Mark being Peter’s interpreter in the immediately previous sentence,Footnote 70 not only because it is otiose in this context but also because they are not the same thing. Following someone and being someone’s interpreter are not coterminous activities: one can do one without the other.Footnote 71 Rather, the callback fits some earlier mention that Papias had made of Mark’s relationship to Peter.Footnote 72 Finally, as will be discussed in the following paragraphs, the evaluation of Mark’s writing shifts from his accuracy and order to his comprehensiveness.Footnote 73
Papias’s statement clarifies the authority of Mark and explicitly transfers some of the accountability for the literary features of the gospel to Peter. It also strengthens the sense of completion for Mark’s written text by comparing it with Peter’s incomplete oral teachings.Footnote 74 More specifically, Papias states that Mark followed Peter but not Jesus and therefore more plainly represents a meditated authority for the content of the gospel. Peter’s authority as an eye- and ear-witness of Jesus here is present but implicit, though Papias elsewhere explicitly calls Peter a “disciple of the Lord.”Footnote 75 Furthermore, there is a movement in the locus of accountability for the literary features of the gospel. Mark shoulders less of the praise or blame for Papias because he was a follower of Peter, and this accounts for both the Elder’s positive and negative evaluations of the gospel. The accuracy of the text comes from Peter’s authoritative teaching, while the lack of order comes from Peter’s ad hoc teaching (πρὸς τὰς χρείας).Footnote 76 Papias also introduces another criticism of Mark’s gospel, its relative lack of dominical oracles, by explaining that Mark is not to be blamed (οὐδὲν ἥμαρτεν Mάρκος) for only writing some of them down as he remembered (ἔνια γράψας ὡς ἀπεμνημόνευσεν), because Peter’s oral teaching did not amount to a compilation of the dominical oracles (οὐχ ὥσπερ σύνταξιν τῶν κυριακῶν ποιούμενος λογίων).Footnote 77 With these explanations, Papias makes Peter “own the words” of the gospel to a much greater extent than the Elder did. In terms of the literary completeness of the Gospel of Mark, there is not much to go on. Papias attributes its lack of order and comprehensiveness to corresponding aspects of Peter’s oral teaching. This could suggest that Mark’s textual product is not literarily polished. Another possibility rests on Moss’s observation that assistants like interpreters were viewed as servile and not ordinarily credited with producing literary work.Footnote 78 This aspect must remain implicit in Papias as he does not comment on it directly,Footnote 79 but it would represent in effect a literary subjection of Mark as an author in favor of Peter.
The most recent editor of Papias obelized the final sentence of the testimonium over doubt whether it belongs to Papias or Eusebius. At first impression the following editorial statement, Tαῦτα μὲν οὖν ἱστόρηται τῷ Παπίᾳ περὶ τοῦ Mάρκου· περὶ δὲ τοῦ Mατθαῖου ταῦτ’ εἴρηται,Footnote 80 seems to demarcate the end of Eusebius’s quotation of Papias.Footnote 81 On the one hand, Eusebius does use the phrase ταῦτα ἱστορεῖν to close off quotations.Footnote 82 On the other hand, Eusebius is fond of using the μὲν οὖν. . . δέ construction to perform a topic shift,Footnote 83 and some of these involve extensive intrusion into the quotations the church historian conveys. For example, at Hist. eccl. 1.8.2, Eusebius deploys this construction to shift from his account of Jesus’s infancy and flight to Egypt in Matthew 2 with editorializing about Herod’s motives. As another example, at Hist. eccl. 1.12.4–13.1, the church historian quotes and extensively glosses Paul’s resurrection appearance account in 1 Cor 15:5–7, before using this construction to shift the topic to Thaddeus. Other times, Eusebius merely cuts off a quotation mid-sentence.Footnote 84 Furthermore, Eusebius has been known to gloss his quotations with explanatory material,Footnote 85 occasionally even at the end of quotations such that the actual ending is not always clear.Footnote 86 As a result, it is prudent to be on guard for editorial commentary and other framing around Eusebius’s quotations, and one ought to be suspicious of such an editorial intervention in this case because the comprehensiveness of Mark’s testimony is key to Eusebius’s defense of the credibility of Peter and Mark.Footnote 87 This is made clear in Dem. ev. 3.5 and Theoph. 6.40, where Eusebius’s proof of Peter’s modesty critically depends on Mark’s gospel being a transcription of his teaching so that the gospel’s reticence about Peter can be attributed to Peter’s self-reticence. Whether Eusebius saw this statement in Papias or added it himself, this final comment does reflect Eusebian concerns seen elsewhere in his writings and can be taken as representative of them:
†ἑνὸς γὰρ ἐποιήσατο πρόνοιαν, τοῦ μηδὲν ὧν ἤκουσεν παραλιπεῖν ἢ ψεύσασθαί τι ἐν αὐτοῖς.†
†For he took care of one thing, to omit nothing of what he heard or falsify anything among them.†Footnote 88
In this final explanation, Mark’s words are also no longer his to own but a conduit for Peter’s teachings: Mark left nothing out, so the gospel’s comprehensiveness of the dominical oracles belongs to Peter, and Mark changed nothing, so its accuracy belongs to Peter.Footnote 89 The criticism about order first seen in the Elder’s statement, however, is not to be found, and order is not a concern of Eusebius. As for authorizing the work as finished, this statement does not contribute to that notion of authorship directly.Footnote 90 Elsewhere in Eusebius, however, there is support for this concept. Although his quotation of Clement in Book 6 stated that Peter neither encouraged nor discouraged the Romans from reading Mark’s gospel (Y8 Clement, Hypot. 6 in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.5–7), his mischaracterization of Clement’s remarks in Book 2 makes the express claim that Peter ratified the gospel after the fact (T3 Hist. eccl. 2.15). The ratification of the gospel by the chief apostle would, under this notion of authorship, assign authorship of the second gospel to Peter for Eusebius, and the claim that Mark left nothing out of Peter’s teachings and did not falsify them would support that assignment.
To recap, the discourses of Mark’s authorship preserved in Papias present an increasing involvement of Peter with respect to the composition of the Gospel of Mark. The Elder has relatively little to say about Peter, Papias makes him ultimately responsible for the main literary aspects of the gospel, and Eusebius finishes off the testimonium by substantially subordinating Mark to Peter in the gospel’s composition. When we look at the three different approaches to ancient authorship explored here, we see that each of them calls attention to different details in the Papias testimonium. In particular, Foucault’s accountability-insight focuses on who receives blame or credit for the work, King’s authority model considers the social status of the relevant agents (Peter the apostle, Mark the interpreter/follower/amanuensis), and Larsen’s authorization of a literary work looks at how they regard the textual object. It turns out that these details are not distributed evenly or to the same extent. They are not equally useful for analyzing the Papias testimonium. Of these, the notion of authorship as accountability has the greatest coverage, followed by authorship as authority, and finally locating authorship in the authorization of a finished book has the least coverage of the testimonium compared with the other approaches.
As to accountability, every statement in the Papias testimonium goes to locating blame or praise over the gospel to someone. The Elder credits Mark for his accuracy but faults him for his lack of order. Papias pushes these criticisms to Peter and also faults Peter for a lack of comprehensiveness in compiling the dominical oracles. If the final sentence is Eusebius’s (and it is consistent with Eusebius’s thinking elsewhere), Mark is viewed as a reliable conduit of Peter’s words. Viewing these statements diachronically, accountability for praise and blame over the gospel shifts from Mark to Peter, so that Peter gains more and more accountability at Mark’s expense.
As to authority, the three voices are somewhat more muted. The Elder views Mark with some modest authority, as being someone entrusted with remembering (ἐμνημόνευσεν) and having once been an interpreter of Peter (ἑρμηνευτὴς Πέτρου γενόμενος).Footnote 91 Papias further subordinates Mark to Peter’s authority as his follower and views Peter as a disciple of Jesus with the authority of someone who heard and followed Jesus. The final statement is consistent with Eusebius’s view on Mark’s authority, which is fully derivative of Peter’s as his scribe such that even the Gospel of Mark’s omissions can be attributed to Peter. Diachronically, Mark’s authority changes from being Peter’s interpreter, to his follower, and then to his amanuensis. Peter’s authority remains the same.
As to an authorized, finished book, there is little in this testimonium to go on as none of the participants are interested in the literary status of the textual objects that instantiate the Gospel of Mark, and what little evidence that exists is not definitive. The statements about the gospel’s lack of order and comprehensiveness are inconclusive, for they could indicate either an unfinished literary work or a finished work that was literarily defective. Moss’s study on the servility of scribes and interpreters could suggest that Papias would not have considered Mark a literary producer, but this should apply all the more to Eusebius, well after the time Larsen concedes that the gospels became books.Footnote 92 Finally, this view of authorship has little, if anything, to contribute about the shift from Mark to Peter, because even as Peter is brought into the discussion more and more, the textual object that is the Gospel of Mark does not become finished in the process.Footnote 93 Whatever insight this notion of authorship can provide must be found elsewhere, and the best place is Eusebius’s misleading and anachronistic characterization of Clement’s remarks on the origin of Mark’s gospel as having been ratified by the chief apostle.
While the notion of accountability is effective at describing the shift from Mark to Peter, why this shift should take place still requires explanation. The standard authorship as authority model would hold that Peter is the greater authority than Mark and so it is plausible to see a connection between the increasing respect for the Gospel of Mark and the increasing involvement of the apostolic Peter.Footnote 94 But even here, the notion of accountability has something to contribute. Although Peter’s authority does not change from the Elder to Papias to Eusebius, Mark’s status does, from erstwhile interpreter to follower and finally to amanuensis, becoming in this process a person with less and less accountability.
Mark’s Anonymity and Subsequent Attribution
There is a fourth voice to consider, the one that started it all. This is the voice of the person who wrote the Gospel of Mark. The text of the gospel makes no authorial ascription, and the authorial presence in the text is limited to a readerly aside at 13:14, ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω (“let the reader understand”), and its paratextual first line, Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίον Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ θεοῦ (“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God.”). The use of the term εὐαγγέλιον suggests that the work is due more to a herald than an author.Footnote 95 Within the gospel, the εὐαγγέλιον is something that is of Jesus Christ (1:1) and God (1:14);Footnote 96 it is something preached (1:14, 13:10, 14:9, [16:15]) and believed in (1:15); and, in coordination with Jesus, it is a cause or reason to lose one’s life (8:35) and family (10:29). In other words, it is an oral proclamation of disruptive content.
Nevertheless, Mark’s attempt to avoid being declared an author was fleeting. According to Papias’s testimonium, he was named by the Elder within living memory of its composition.Footnote 97 Foucault’s notion of authorship as appropriation, that is, a socially imposed form of ownership over the work, straightforwardly explains why the text’s veil of anonymity was not respected: the author-function is not a relation dictated by the author. But there are additional reasons that also drove early Christians to attribute their gospels to authors. For example, textual competition encourages the assignment of authors: as other gospels arose, some based on Mark’s gospel and others with content distinctive in ways that mattered in Christian communities, it was convenient to identify them by their putative author, if not for critique, then at least for distinguishing them from others of their kind.
If the Gospel of Mark is a writing down of an oral proclamation of disruptive content, then the various views of ancient authorship would have different accounts for its anonymity. From the perspective of Foucault’s accountability, proclamations of good news were not the kind of discourse to be endowed with an author-function.Footnote 98 The herald is not normally accountable for its content, just as scribes and translators are not ordinarily responsible for the content of the texts they have a hand in producing, though some messengers in antiquity have been punished for the unsettling news that they brought.Footnote 99 Also plausible in accounting for the formal anonymity of the Gospel of Mark is Larsen’s view that informally published works need not be ascribed,Footnote 100 though almost nothing is known of the gospel’s publication.Footnote 101 Under the conventional view of authorship as authority, however, the failure to name any authority at all for the written work is difficult to account for.Footnote 102 Of the three analytical approaches to authorship, Larsen’s focus on the polished state of the textual object works well for the gospel’s initial anonymity though, as we have seen, it offers little purchase on Papias’s remarks about Mark as someone who wrote what Jesus did and said. The opposite is true for the conventional authorship-as-authority approach represented by King, which explains the increasing involvement of Peter but not the initial anonymity. By contrast, looking at authorship in terms of accountability does contribute reasons why the gospel would be anonymous and why it would acquire an attribution: the Gospel of Mark was endowed with an author-function when the writer was criticized (and praised) by name for what he wrote.
This article has explored the rich detail of the Papias testimonium on Mark from the perspective of three different conceptualizations of authorship to see how useful they are at explaining the differing discourses about Mark’s authorship. Viewing authorship in terms of authorizing a polished literary book had little traction in the testimonium, mainly because the tradents were more interested in the people of Mark and Peter than the gospel as a textual object, though Mark’s status as an interpreter would militate against his being considered a literary figure. Moreover, the textual object itself remained relatively stable throughout the different discourses and could not as a result account well for the shift in focus from Mark to Peter. Viewing authorship in terms of authority fared somewhat better. It promises to explain the shift in focus from the sub-apostolic Mark to the apostolic Peter, but it does not explain very well why the gospel was anonymous in the first place, why it was associated with an obscure interpreter of Peter, and why Papias advanced another criticism of the gospel, its lack of comprehensiveness, and blamed Peter for it. Finally, viewing authorship in terms of accountability fared the best. It offers an explanation for the initial formal anonymity of the gospel, as well as for the localization of accountability about its content in the named individuals of Mark and Peter. The shift from Mark to Peter may be explained by Mark’s increasing servility becoming a less convenient locus of praise and blame. In any case, Foucault’s notion of appropriation for understanding authorship has been shown here to be so useful that scholars should not be content with merely citing Foucault for the concept of the author-function but should also take his own proposal seriously as a useful abstraction for thinking about authorship.
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