A Few Published Surveys of the Reception of Mark’s Gospel

As I have noted in an older post, my revised PhD published under the title The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015) was greatly indebted to Brenda Deen Schildgen’s Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of Mark (Detroit: Wayne University State Press, 1998). Another relevant publication that I completely managed to miss, unfortunately, was Seán P. Kealy’s Mark’s Gospel: A History of Its Interpretation (New York; Ramsey: Paulist Press, 1982) and A History of the Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark: Volume 1 Through the Nineteenth Century and Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (Lewiston – Queenston – Lampeter, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007). Since he covers so much data in these books, his surveys of the Patristic period do not go into too much depth, but he does also note the decline of interest in Mark’s Gospel throughout the Medieval area and into the modern period before the discovery of Markan priority.

Another important recent survey can be found in Joseph Verheyden’s chapter “The Reception History of the Gospel of Mark in the Early Church,” in Reading the Gospel of Mark in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Geert Van Oyen (BETL 301; Leuven: Peeters, 2019), 395–430. He also has an excellent survey of the 16 potential references to Mark’s Gospel in Irenaeus’s Against Heresies in “Four Gospels Indeed, but Where is Mark? On Irenaeus’s Use of the Gospel of Mark” in Irénée de Lyon et les débuts de la Bible chrétienne. Actes de la Journée du 1.VII.2014 à Lyon (IPM 77; Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 169-204. I appreciate Verheyden’s engagement with my own work as well as the ways he goes beyond it in closely examining the Patristic texts that do comment on Mark’s Gospel. I think that Verheyden’s work just further confirms the point that Mark’s Gospel, even though it was defended as an apostolic work and included in the New Testament canon, was mostly neglected in favour of the other canonical Gospels. Even for those who commented on specific passages in Mark’s text, their readings were often informed by the Synoptic parallels.