Mark

Mark — also known as John Mark — is the author of the earliest and shortest of the four Gospels, and his account shaped the way every subsequent generation has understood the story of Jesus. He was a young man from Jerusalem whose mother Mary owned the house where the early Christians gathered (Acts 12:12) — quite possibly the same upper room where the Last Supper took place. Ancient tradition identifies Mark as the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane on the night of Jesus' arrest (Mk 14:51-52).

Mark's Gospel is raw, urgent, and relentlessly paced. It opens not with a birth narrative but with the adult Jesus bursting onto the scene at His baptism, and the word "immediately" appears more than forty times. Mark's Jesus is a man of action who heals, casts out demons, and confronts religious hypocrisy with startling directness. Yet Mark also presents the most vulnerable portrait of Jesus: sweating in Gethsemane, crying out on the cross, misunderstood even by His own disciples. It is the Gospel of the Suffering Servant.

Mark's early career included a controversial moment: he abandoned Paul and Barnabas during their first missionary journey, prompting a sharp disagreement between the two apostles. Yet Barnabas gave him a second chance, and Mark eventually proved himself so thoroughly that even Paul later wrote: "Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me" (2 Tim 4:11). Peter called Mark "my son" (1 Pet 5:13), and tradition holds that Mark's Gospel is essentially Peter's testimony. Mark went on to found the Church in Alexandria, Egypt, becoming one of the great evangelists of the ancient world. His symbol is the winged lion — strength tempered by the Spirit.