Companion of the Apostles

Mark is the New Testament’s great traveling companion — the young assistant who set out with Paul and Barnabas, turned back at Perga, became the cause of the sharp parting between the two apostles, and was later restored to Paul’s favor and named among his fellow workers, while standing throughout in a special bond with Peter, who calls him “Marcus my son.” This file traces Mark through the apostolic mission as Acts and the epistles present him, with attention to the rupture of Acts 15:37–39 and its healing.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The First Journey and the Turning Back at Perga

Mark’s missionary career begins in Antioch. When Barnabas and Saul return from their famine-relief visit to Jerusalem, they take John Mark with them (Acts 12:25), and when the church at Antioch sends out Barnabas and Saul on the first missionary journey, “they had also John to their minister” (Acts 13:5, KJV) — the Greek hyperetes, an “assistant” or “helper,” indicating a supporting rather than leading role. With them Mark sails to Cyprus, Barnabas’s home island, and proclaims the word in the synagogues at Salamis (Acts 13:4–5). But when the party sails on from Paphos to Perga in Pamphylia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, Mark leaves them: “and John departing from them returned to Jerusalem” (Acts 13:13, KJV). Luke records the fact without explanation. Whether Mark withdrew from homesickness, from reluctance at the turn toward the Gentile interior, from a disagreement over the direction of the mission, or for some other cause, the text does not say; what is clear is that Paul regarded the departure as a desertion (Acts 13:13; cf. 15:38).

The Parting of Paul and Barnabas

The consequence surfaces at the start of the second journey. Barnabas proposes to take John Mark again; Paul refuses, “thought not good to take him with them, who departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work” (Acts 15:38, KJV). The dispute is sharp. Luke uses the strong word paroxysmos — “and the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other” (Acts 15:39, KJV) — and the two apostles separate: “Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus; and Paul chose Silas, and departed” (Acts 15:39–40, KJV). The rupture is one of the most candid moments in Acts, and the early Church did not soften it. Two great apostles part company over the young man, and the providential result is that the mission doubles: Barnabas and Mark to Cyprus, Paul and Silas through Syria and Cilicia and into Asia and Europe (Acts 15:39–41). The kinship between Barnabas and Mark (Col. 4:10; see John Mark of Jerusalem) plainly weighed in Barnabas’s decision, and it is to Barnabas’s loyalty that tradition credits Mark’s perseverance in the apostolate.

After Acts 15, Luke’s narrative follows Paul and drops Mark entirely; the New Testament’s further notices come from the epistles. The Orthodox tradition holds that Mark continued in mission, both with Barnabas in Cyprus and, in time, with Peter and at Alexandria (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.16; see The Alexandrian Mission).

The Healing of the Breach: Mark Restored to Paul

The epistles show the breach with Paul fully healed. Writing from imprisonment, Paul lists Mark among those who send greetings and calls him a “fellowlabourer”: “Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, Lucas, my fellowlabourers” (Philemon 24, KJV). In Colossians, written in the same captivity, Paul commends Mark explicitly: “Marcus, sister’s son to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you, receive him;)” (Colossians 4:10, KJV) — Paul not merely tolerating Mark but vouching for him and instructing the Colossian church to welcome him. The reconciliation reaches its most moving point in the last of the Pauline letters. From his final imprisonment, expecting death, Paul writes to Timothy: “Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11, KJV). The man Paul once refused to take is now the man Paul sends for in his last need. The early Church read this arc — desertion, rupture, restoration, and final usefulness — as a pattern of repentance and grace, and as testimony that the young man who turned back at Perga grew into a trusted apostle of the Gentile mission.

“Marcus My Son”: The Bond with Peter

Running alongside the bond with Paul and Barnabas is the relationship that the tradition makes central: Mark’s discipleship under Peter. The clearest New Testament witness is the close of the First Epistle of Peter, written from “Babylon” — taken by the early Church as a cipher for Rome — where Peter conveys greetings: “The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son” (1 Peter 5:13, KJV). The phrase “Marcus my son” (Markos ho huios mou) marks a relationship of spiritual fatherhood: Mark is Peter’s disciple, his close associate, perhaps his convert. It is this bond that grounds the tradition, attested from Papias onward, that Mark served as Peter’s interpreter and set down Peter’s preaching in the Second Gospel (Papias, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1; see Peter and the Gospel). The harmony of the evidence is striking: the same Mark is with Paul in one set of letters and with Peter in another, and the early Church saw in this no contradiction but the picture of an apostolic man who served the whole mission, eventually carrying the gospel of Peter to writing and the faith to Alexandria.

A Man of the Apostolic Mission

Taken together, the New Testament notices give a coherent portrait. John Mark is not an independent apostolic founder in his own right but a man formed in the company of the greatest apostles — assistant to Paul and Barnabas, cousin and companion of Barnabas, restored fellow-worker of Paul, and spiritual son of Peter. His significance is precisely that of a bearer and tradent: he carries the gospel between the apostles and, in the Church’s memory, carries Peter’s preaching into the written Gospel and the apostolic faith into Egypt. The candor of the record — the desertion at Perga, the paroxysmos between the apostles — only deepens the portrait, showing that the Church’s memory of its evangelist was not a sanitized legend but a man who failed, repented, and was made “profitable for the ministry” (2 Tim. 4:11).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible (Acts 12:25; 13:4–5, 13; 15:36–41; Colossians 4:10; Philemon 24; 2 Timothy 4:11; 1 Peter 5:13). King James Version and Revised Standard Version consulted.
  • Papias of Hierapolis, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.15. Trans. McGiffert, NPNF II/1.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.1.1. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 2.16. Trans. McGiffert, NPNF II/1.
  • Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017 (on Mark and Peter).