Saint Mark

Mark was born in Palestine or in Cyprus around the year 7. Almost nothing is known of his youth; from the New Testament we know he was Barnabas’s cousin, and so a Jew of Levite descent. He appears in the Acts of the Apostles: he sets out with Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, then leaves them halfway and turns back. When it’s time to set out again, Paul no longer wants him, and he quarrels with Barnabas over it to the point that the two part ways. It’s one of the most human passages in the whole New Testament — two saints falling out over a young man who had backed out. Years later Paul, from prison, writes asking for him to be sent, because he is useful to him. He then became a disciple of Peter, and according to tradition Peter was his source: the Gospel according to Mark, the shortest and oldest of the four, would be Peter’s preaching put into writing. It’s a quick text, almost breathless, full of “and immediately.” The Coptic Church considers him its own patriarch and the first bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, where he died in the second half of the first century. The rest is Venetian history: in 828 two merchants from Venice smuggled his body out of Alexandria and took it to the lagoon, hidden — so the story goes — under pork, so that the Muslim customs officers wouldn’t search it. Since then Venice has been his city, his symbol is the lion, and on April 25 people there give a rosebud. If your name is Mark, today is your name day.