Why Mark MUST HAVE BEEN a Member of the 'Dosithean' Sect of Samaria

Let me make this as brief as possible.

Many people think it was 'ridiculous' for me to suggest that St Mark might have been the last king of Israel, Marcus Julius Agrippa. Alright, but what then can we really say about St Mark?

The Roman Church says that he wasn't an apostle and that he was only Peter's interpreter. At the same time the Alexandrian Church cries foul at the 'injustice' perpetrated by the Romans against their saint. The Egyptian Church similarly attacks anyone who goes beyond the twenty five things their tradition remembers about St. Mark.

So let's start again, examining only his gospel writing efforts. I will NOT mention the fact that - as a Jew - he MUST HAVE BEEN aware of the very fact that he was 'an apostle' engaging in establishing a 'new Torah' (there were no other 'evangelists' yet) that he seemed strikingly similar to 'Moses' [Deut 18:18]

I also won't mention that he must come across Samaritans - either in Palestine or Alexandria - who would have told him that his name was a numerological equivalent for Moses, ha Shem and Shilo - i.e. 345.

Let's avoid all of the 'crazy talk' about Mark thinking he rather than Jesus was the messiah and the witness of Irenaeus that there was a sect attached to Mark's gospel that thought that someone other than Jesus was the messiah [AH iii.11.7]

It is enough for me to emphasize again that there was a 'Samaritan named Mark' who likely lived around the time the 'Christian Mark' composed his gospel who had all these things attributed to his person and at the same time - as John MacDonald notes - this Mark cites verbatim references to the gospel of John in his Samaritan writings.

I will leave aside our inherited European understanding that all the saying that appear in a little book called 'the Gospel of Mark' were written by a man named Mark and all the sayings that appear in a little book called 'the Gospel of Mark' were written by a man named John. After all, the Alexandrian tradition makes ABSOLUTELY EXPLICIT that Mark was also called John.

I am not going to allow myself to get distracted by any of this. If you want to believe that there was one guy named John Mark who was different from another guy named Mark who wrote a gospel and both were different from another guy named John who wrote another gospel and another guy still named John who wrote the Revelations, I will leave you to your beliefs.

Indeed where it really gets complicated is that the early Roman text - the Muratorian canon - can be read to say that everything Mark put in his gospel were things he was physically there to witness firsthand. The Alexandrians acknowledge the same thing but - strangely - attribute 'scenes' where Mark was there in the presence of Jesus witnessing him do wonderful things ended up being 'preserved' in gospels other than his Gospel of Mark.

Duh?

Yes, let's recap. The earliest Romans and the Alexandrians agree that Mark was there witnessing firsthand everything that eventually was laid down in his gospel. The Passio Petri Sancti takes this principle to 'extreme lengths' and says explicitly that Mark was a beholder of Jesus' Passion. Yet with all of this said many of the things Mark saw do not appear in the Gospel of Mark but - strangely - are laid down in John.

Here is the list from Severus al'Ashmunein:

And he was among the servants who poured out the water which our Lord turned into wine, at the marriage of Cana in Galilee [John 2:1 - 11]. And it was he who carried the jar of water [Mark 14:13] into the house of Simon the Cyrenian [?], at the time of the sacramental Supper. And he also it was who entertained the disciples in his house, at the time of the Passion of the Lord Christ, and after his Resurrection from the dead, where he entered to them while the doors were shut [John 20:19 - 26]. [History of the Coptic Patriarchs i.1 p. 138 - 140]

I know the instincts of New Testament scholars is to dismiss the oral tradition of the Alexandrians but I am not sure this is far especially given that they already think that 'Mark' and 'John' were different names of the same evangelist.

But let's get back to our main point.

The real stumbling block for these silly ideas comes when you leave the relative 'certainty' of Rome and travel to Palestine - the land where the Samaritan guy named Mark or 'Marqe' who cites verbatim passages from the Gospel of John lived. Up until the fifth century they didn't know anything about two separate gospels attributed to separate guys named Mark and John.

These Christians living in Palestine only used a single gospel attributed undoubtedly to God himself - i.e. 'the gospel of Jesus Christ' or some such title. Surviving copies of this tradition have an acrostic in the introduction which attributes the composition of the work to a guy named 'Mark' or Marqe.

In short a scenario where a guy with the very uniquely Samaritan way of spelling the name 'Mark' was identified with writing a gospel that contained parts of what we would call 'the Johannine narrative' which necessarily included Jesus visit to a woman of the Samaritan sect called 'the Dositheans.'

Are you with me know?

I know that traditional New Testament scholars want everyone to swim around in the Roman prejudices about the 'four evangelists.' I don't understand why that has to be. There were other traditions. We have every right to explore them and - in fact - scholarship should ENCOURAGE the exploration of these new frontiers as a scientific duty.

So in fact you have TWO guys named Mark associated with arguing that Christianity was from its very beginnings related to or an outgrowth of the Samaritan sectarian tradition called 'Dositheanism.'

This should not be at all surprising in a way because the idea that Dositheus is always related to Christianity in Christian sources. Pseudo-Tertullian identifies Dositheanism as the first heresy. The Clementine Recognitions make Simon Magus the head of the Dosithean sect [Clem. Rec. ii.12] Scholars inevitably ignore the Recognitions account but it worth noting WHAT DOES NOT APPEAR HERE.

The text takes for granted that Christianity developed out of Dositheanism.

Now it is easy to argue that Marqe the Samaritan was a Dosithean. With regards to our claim that St. Mark originally wrote a 'fuller gospel' - something which resembled the Diatessaron which contained Johannine elements - is far more problematic. Nevertheless we have presented the evidence which suggests it is a real possibility.

At the very least I want to remind the readers that Jerome makes it explicit that the Samaritan woman who appears in this 'Johannine material' was a Dosithean. Indeed the material which inevitably provides John MacDonald with his 'verbatim gospel citations' are from this narrative. In my mind this idea is worth following up.

Of course the alternatives are to merely have faith in the beliefs of our ancestors and stop investigating other possibilities. This is what scholars have been doing for the last two hundred years. I think it is high time that we try something new. I am all in favor of the argument that Marqe might well have been the author of the original gospel just the way the acrostic at the beginning of Diatessaron claims.

It may well revolutionize scholarly research into the origins of the New Testment.