Introduction

The Evangelist and His Gospel

Mark, on the tradition Theophylact relates, was the disciple and interpreter of the Apostle Peter—the same short life of the Evangelist, drawn from earlier tradition, that Theophylact sets, as a matter of custom, at the head of each Gospel commentary. At the request of the brethren in Rome he set down in writing what he had heard from Peter’s own preaching—a Gospel that Peter himself, on reading it, approved and authorized to be read in the churches. Mark then carried this Gospel to Egypt, became the first to preach Christ in Alexandria, and founded a church there, over which he presided until his death in the reign of Nero. This account, inherited from Papias and Clement of Alexandria by way of Eusebius, sets the frame for everything that follows: the reader is to hear, behind Mark’s voice, Peter’s own testimony.

The Gospel that results is the shortest of the four and, in its manner, the most urgent. Mark’s narrative moves at a pace unlike Matthew’s or Luke’s, joining one scene to the next with a rapid “and immediately” that Theophylact notices and comments on more than once. There is little extended discourse; there is a great deal of action—healings, exorcisms, journeys by boat across the Sea of Galilee, crowds pressing in from every side. Mark also records, more candidly than the other Evangelists, the disciples’ slowness to understand and the Lord’s own repeated commands that His identity and His works not yet be broadcast. Theophylact reads these features not as incidental but as bound up with Mark’s purpose: to set before the reader, without delay or embellishment, who Jesus Christ is and what He did.

A Gospel Without Chrysostom

For most of the New Testament, Theophylact’s method is to distill the great expositions of Saint John Chrysostom into a form a reader could take in at a single sitting. On Mark this method meets an obstacle: Chrysostom, who preached at such length on Matthew, left no homilies on the second Gospel. Where the Gospel narratives run in parallel—an episode Mark tells that Matthew also tells—Theophylact can and does draw on Chrysostom’s comment on the corresponding verse in Matthew, adapting it to Mark’s shorter wording. But for the material proper to Mark alone, and even for much that the Gospels share, he is working with a thinner patristic record and a good deal more of his own judgment.

The result is that Theophylact’s Explanation of Mark stands, in effect, as the first continuous Greek patristic commentary to cover the whole of that Gospel from beginning to end. Earlier Fathers had written on individual passages or had touched on Mark within broader harmonizing works, but no one before Theophylact had left a running, verse-by-verse exposition of Mark as its own book. That fact alone secured the work an importance beyond what its modest length might suggest, and it explains why, centuries later, a Latin scholar assembling a chain of patristic comment on the Gospels would turn to Theophylact here with particular frequency: in the volume on Mark he appears well over three hundred times, a share of the whole considerably higher than in the commentaries on Matthew or Luke, precisely because so little else of comparable range and clarity for this Gospel had survived from the Greek Fathers.

Argument and Distinctive Emphases

The commentary follows Mark’s sixteen chapters in their given order: the preaching of the Baptist and the baptism of the Lord; the Galilean ministry of teaching, healing, and exorcism; the confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi and the first prediction of the Passion; the journey to Jerusalem; the last week in the city, ending in betrayal, crucifixion, and the empty tomb. Because Mark spends comparatively little space on formal discourse, Theophylact spends comparatively little of his own commentary unpacking parables and sermons at length; instead he lingers over the meaning of individual miracles—what each act of healing signifies about the person of Christ and about the condition of the one healed—and over the exact wording Mark chooses, which he treats as never accidental even where it is terse.

Throughout, the commentary keeps a steady eye on two questions that Mark’s spare narrative raises insistently: why does Christ so often silence those He heals and the demons He casts out, and why do the disciples, who have witnessed so much, understand so little until the very end? Theophylact answers both in terms of timing and pedagogy—Christ withholds premature acclaim to spare the crowds a shallow, wonder-seeking faith, and the disciples’ slowness is itself instructive, a preparation for the fuller understanding that will come only after the resurrection and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

How to Read This Commentary

Because Mark and Matthew overlap so extensively, a reader who has already gone through Theophylact’s Matthew will recognize much of the ground here, though rarely in identical words; where the two accounts diverge, even slightly, Theophylact treats the difference as meaningful and worth pausing over, and the attentive reader does well to pause with him. Read each episode with Mark’s own text open first, noting its brevity and pace, before turning to the comment—the commentary rewards a reader who has already felt the urgency of the narrative it is explaining. Because so much of this exposition stands on its own rather than borrowed from an earlier voice, it is also, more than in some of the other Gospel volumes, Theophylact speaking most directly in his own person.