Gospel Authorship: Mark

The question of who wrote the gospels is a fascinating, and one I would like to briefly dip into. Let us start with Mark, as it is generally thought to be written first.

Around 300 AD, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea quotes Papias:

This also the presbyter said: Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things done or said by Christ.  For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord's discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote some things as he remembered them.  For he was careful of one thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and not to state any of them falsely.

Eusebius also cites Clement of Alexandria:

And so greatly did the splendor of piety illumine the minds of Peter's hearers that they were not satisfied with hearing once only, and were not content with the unwritten teaching of the divine Gospel, but with all sorts of entreaties they besought Mark, a follower of Peter, and the one whose Gospel is extant, that he would leave them a written monument of the doctrine which had been orally communicated to them. Nor did they cease until they had prevailed with the man, and had thus become the occasion of the written Gospel which bears the name of Mark.  And they say that Peter when he had learned, through a revelation of the Spirit, of that which had been done, was pleased with the zeal of the men, and that the work obtained the sanction of his authority for the purpose of being used in the churches.  Clement in the eighth book of his Hypotyposes gives this account, and with him agrees the bishop of Hierapolis named Papias.

From here.

A little later, 392 AD, Jerome, in the eighth chapter of Lives of Illustrious Men says:

Mark(55) the disciple and interpreter of Peter wrote a short gospel at the request of the brethren at Rome embodying what he had heard Peter tell. When Peter had heard this, he approved it and published it to the churches to be read by his authority as Clemens in the sixth book of his Hypotyposes and Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, record.

From here.

From the The "Anti-Marcionite" prologues to the gospels, we also have:

Mark recorded, who was called Colobodactylus 1, because he had fingers that were too small for the height of the rest of his body.  He himself was the interpreter of Peter.  After the death of Peter himself, the same man wrote this gospel in the parts of Italy.

From here.

What this seems to point to is that some kind of gospel was indeed written by Peter's scribe, Mark. Whether it is the same body of work as we have today is not certain, but I think it is reasonable to conclude that it largely is. It is worth pointing out that the third and fourth quotes above are probably only referring to Eusebius, which means we really only have a single witness, but conversely that does lend credence to the claim that what Eusebius was talking about is - more or less - the same text as we have today.

Some would have us believe that the gospel counts as a first-hand witness account on the basis that Peter dictated the gospel to Mark. While it does seem as though Mark was Peter's scribe, the quotes above indicate that the gospel was not dictated by Peter, but rather was Mark recalling what Peter had said at some remove. This then would be a second-hand account.

The Ending of Mark (16:9-20)

It is fairly well accepted that the last few verses on the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20) are a later addition (even some Bibles admit this), as they are missing from some of the oldest manuscripts, the Vaticanus (350 AD) and Sinaiticus (375 AD) (see here).

It is also noted that the addition introduces Mary Magdalene, "out of whom he had cast seven devils", and yet she had been referred to just a few verses earlier. Furthermore, the women had just been told Jesus would appear to the disciples in Galilee, then in the addition, Jesus appears to the women and later the disciples in Jerusalem. It is worth also noting that the order of appearances in the late addition has no resemblance to that presented in 1 Corinthians 15, believed to be the oldest text we have on that subject.

Some claim the text is obviously incomplete if it ends at 16:8, but I disagree. Here we have the triumph of the empty tomb, and the promise of the resurrection to come - plus a neat explanation for why no one checked the tomb at the time. That said, I think it is plausible that there was originally another ending, detailing the appearance in Galilee. Perhaps a non-corporeal appearance in Galilee did not fit the later beliefs of the church of a bodily resurrection (eg John 20), so was quietly removed. We just do not know.

The addition seems to be derived from Luke and John, so post-dates both of them.

More on the ending here:
http://www.bible-researcher.com/endmark.html

Summary

The consensus appears to be that the Gospel of Mark (to 16:8) was written in Rome between 65 and 80 AD, quite possibly by Mark, the scribe of Peter.

More here:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/mark.html