In the 4th century – amid fierce theological politics – Eusebius of Caesarea devised an ingenious cross-referencing system for the four Gospels, known as the Eusebian Canon Tables. Notably, Eusebius was an ally of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius during the Arian controversy, and he drew on Alexandrian scholarship in creating his system. In a letter to Carpianus, Eusebius credits Ammonius the Alexandrian for pioneering a harmony of the Gospels. This Alexandrian connection is fitting, since Mark the Evangelist himself was closely linked to Alexandria: according to church tradition recorded by Eusebius, Mark was the first to bring the Gospel to Egypt and “first established churches in Alexandria”. Indeed, a later Alexandrian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, even claimed that after Peter’s martyrdom Mark brought his writings to Alexandria and left behind a secret expanded version of his Gospel, “being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries”. Such hints of a “Secret Gospel of Mark” suggest that the origins of Mark’s Gospel have a political and cultural dimension in Alexandria – with certain deeper teachings possibly guarded by the Alexandrian church. In this context, Eusebius’s canon tables, built on an Alexandrian harmonization method, not only provided a practical tool for Bible study but also subtly reflect Alexandria’s influence and the unique status of Mark’s Gospel in that city.
Structure of Eusebius’s Ten Canon Tables (Alexandrian Inspiration)
Eusebius explains in his letter to Carpianus how the system works. Prior to modern chapter-and-verse numbers, he created a way for readers to find parallel passages among the Gospels while keeping each Gospel’s text intact. He first divided each Gospel into numbered sections (often called Ammonian or Eusebian sections) – about 1,165 sections in total (approximately 355 in Matthew, 235 in Mark, 343 in Luke, 232 in John). He then organized these sections into ten tables or “canons”, each table indicating a different set of Gospel parallels. The ten Eusebian canons can be summarized as follows:
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Canon I: Sections common to all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John).
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Canons II–IV: Sections shared by three Gospels. For example, Canon II lists passages in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the Synoptic trio); Canon III covers Matthew, Luke, and John; Canon IV covers Matthew, Mark, and John.
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Canons V–IX: Sections shared by two Gospels. For instance, Canon V lists passages only in Matthew and Luke; Canon VI has parallels only in Matthew and Mark; Canon VII in Matthew and John; Canon VIII in Mark and Luke; Canon IX in Luke and John. (Notably, there is no canon for “Mark and John” alone – apparently no significant section is found only in Mark and John without Matthew or Luke also reporting it.)
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Canon X: Sections unique to a single Gospel – material found in only one Gospel and in none of the others. This tenth table is divided into four parts, listing each Gospel’s unique sections separately.
In manuscripts, each section number in the Gospel margins was written with a small red numeral underneath indicating which Canon Table to consult. By looking up that table and finding the corresponding numbers for the other Gospels, a reader could instantly see which passages were parallel. In this way, Eusebius provided an early harmony/index of the Gospels, allowing study of their interrelationships while “keeping both the body and sequence of each Gospel completely intact”. This innovation built directly on the work of Ammonius of Alexandria – Eusebius “acquired the raw data from the work of the man mentioned above” (Ammonius) – illustrating how Alexandrian textual scholarship influenced the broader church. The very concept of comparing Gospels in parallel may have had cultural roots in Alexandria’s intellectual milieu, where scholars like Origen and Ammonius were keen to harmonize and reconcile scriptures. (Origen, another Alexandrian luminary whom Eusebius admired, was even accused of inspiring Arian ideas, showing how intertwined Alexandrian theology and Eusebius’s world were.)
Mark’s Gospel in the Canons: Overlap Patterns and Alexandrian Hints
One striking pattern in the Eusebian tables is how extensively Mark’s Gospel overlaps with the others – and how little in Mark is unique. According to Eusebius’s section numbers, Mark has only 21 sections that are peculiar to Mark alone, whereas Matthew and Luke each have dozens of unique sections (Luke has about 72; John has 97 unique sections). In other words, over 90% of Mark’s content has parallels in Matthew, Luke, or both. Eusebius’s Canons make this visually clear: the vast majority of Mark’s sections appear in Canon I (stories found in all four Gospels) or Canon II (stories in the three Synoptics). Mark shares nearly all its narratives with Matthew and/or Luke, whereas those longer Gospels include large portions not found in Mark. For example:
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Major Markan Episodes Found Elsewhere: Events like Jesus’s baptism, the feeding of the 5,000, many healings, and the Passion narrative appear in Mark and also in Matthew or Luke (and sometimes in John). These show up under Canon I or II – core stories present across multiple Gospels. Mark is essentially the common thread for the Synoptic Gospels’ shared stories.
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Mark’s Very Limited Unique Material: Only a few brief episodes in Mark have no parallel in the other Gospels. Often cited are the Parable of the Growing Seed (Mark 4:26–29), the healing of a deaf-mute (Mark 7:31–37), the odd detail of the young man fleeing naked at Jesus’ arrest (Mark 14:51–52), and a few unique phrases or minor details. These ~21 “Mark-only” sections are listed in Canon X (Mark’s individual material). By contrast, Matthew and Luke each have entire blocks of teaching or narrative unique to themselves (e.g. Matthew’s birth narrative and distinctive parables like the sheep & goats; Luke’s extensive infancy narrative and parables like the Good Samaritan, etc.). Mark’s Gospel contains very little that stands on its own.
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No “Mark–John” Pair: Eusebius’s tables notably have no dedicated category for stories found only in Mark and John. Any time Mark and John both relate an event (such as the feeding of the 5,000 or Jesus walking on water), those stories are also found in Matthew or Luke – meaning Mark never overlaps exclusively with John. This underscores that Mark’s content is fully within the orbit of the Synoptic tradition, and John’s unique material stands apart.
This overlap distribution highlights Mark as the linchpin of the Synoptic Gospels. Mark appears in all the major triple or double overlaps among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are many sections where Matthew–Mark–Luke all align (Canon II, the “triple tradition”). There are also sections where Mark and Matthew align without Luke (Canon VI, e.g. the story of the Syrophoenician woman) and where Mark and Luke align without Matthew (Canon VIII, e.g. the exorcism in the Capernaum synagogue). But Mark is essentially the common denominator. Matthew and Luke rarely agree with each other against Mark’s order or content; if one of them omits a Markan story, the other usually includes it. Eusebius’s system, by preserving each Gospel’s sequence and numbering their sections, incidentally documents this phenomenon.
Why is Mark so thoroughly subsumed by the others? Culturally and politically, this observation has intriguing implications. It suggests that Mark’s Gospel was not a regional or sectarian outlier with unique traditions; rather, it was a foundational narrative that the others built upon. In the context of Alexandria, where Mark is said to have established the church, one wonders if Mark’s text was so fundamental that Matthew and Luke (written later elsewhere) incorporated nearly all of it. The tiny amount of exclusive Markan material raises the possibility that Mark’s community (Alexandria included) might have intentionally kept certain stories confined to itself. In fact, Clement of Alexandria hints that Mark, after composing his initial Gospel, “transferred to his former book” additional stories for those progressing in knowledge and left this longer “mystic” Gospel to the Alexandrian church, to be read secretly to initiates. This could mean that the canonical Mark we know – which lacks, for example, a birth narrative and has a very curt ending at the empty tomb – was a deliberately succinct public account, while other Markan material circulated esoterically in Alexandria. The idea of guarding secret traditions was very much a part of Alexandrian Christian culture. Eusebius himself records that a Jewish philosopher (Philo) described ascetic believers in Alexandria (possibly an early Christian monastic community) who had “sacred writings” and “in each house a sanctuary” where they kept nothing but holy scriptures and allegorical works, interpreting them as “symbols of hidden truth”. Such a scenario aligns with an Alexandria that treasured deeper spiritual knowledge and perhaps held back certain texts (like a longer Mark) for the faithful. In summary, Eusebius’s canon tables starkly reveal Mark’s almost total overlap with other Gospels – a fact that not only feeds scholarly theories about sources, but also resonates with Alexandrian traditions of a “secret Mark” reserved outside the public canon.
Implications for Mark’s Origins and Alexandria’s Role
The patterns exposed by the Eusebian Canons have significant implications for how and where Mark’s Gospel originated relative to Matthew and Luke, and they intersect with the politics of early Christian teaching:
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Mark as the Earliest Source (Modern Marcan Priority): Modern biblical scholarship finds it easiest to explain the data by proposing that Mark was the first written Gospel, used as a source by the authors of Matthew and Luke. Since virtually everything in Mark reappears in one or both of the others, the theory is that Matthew and Luke independently took Mark’s narrative framework and expanded it with additional material. Mark, in this view, is the common ancestral text – the backbone of the Synoptic tradition. Eusebius’s tables unwittingly illustrate this: Mark’s sections lie at the heart of the overlaps. Scholars note that it’s hard to imagine two later writers both deciding to omit so many of each other’s favorite stories but each deciding to include almost all of Mark – unless Mark was already in hand as a source. Thus, Mark being first (often called Markan Priority) neatly explains why Mark has so little unique content: Mark provided the core story, and Matthew and Luke added teachings (like the Sermon on the Mount or various parables) and birth/resurrection details from other traditions. In Eusebius’s tables, Canon V (parallels in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark) corresponds to that extra non-Markan material (sometimes labeled the hypothetical “Q” source by scholars). Eusebius of course did not use modern source-critical language, but his index highlighted that Matthew and Luke shared quite a bit without Mark (hence a whole canon table for it) – hinting that Matthew and Luke drew on common non-Markan material in addition to Mark. Mark’s primacy also finds support in the order of episodes: wherever Mark and another Gospel overlap, Matthew and Luke tend to follow Mark’s sequence of events rather than each other’s. Later analysts observed that Matthew and Luke rarely both diverge from Mark’s order in the same way, suggesting Mark’s order was the original timeline. Eusebius’s numbering (which preserves each Gospel’s internal order) helped modern scholars like Lachmann discern that Mark’s narrative chronology underlies the others. In short, if Mark came first (perhaps in Rome, according to tradition, but very early), its text could have reached Alexandria quickly – indeed Mark himself “was the first sent to Egypt” with the Gospel. The Alexandrian church, having the Ur-Gospel, would naturally regard Mark as foundational. This is consistent with why an Alexandrian like Ammonius would use Matthew to line up everything – he recognized a core common story (likely via Mark’s content) across the Gospels.
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Mark as a Summary of Others (Traditional View and Its Dilemma): For over a millennium, the prevailing Christian view (from Augustine and others) was that Matthew wrote first, then Mark wrote essentially a shorter version, and then Luke, etc. In this scenario, Mark is an epitome or “abbreviator” of Matthew (and possibly Luke). Some ancient writers even suggested Mark omitted the genealogy and birth narrative found in Matthew out of deference to the already-written accounts. Clement of Alexandria reportedly said the Gospels with genealogies (Matthew and Luke) were written first, and that Mark came later, prompted by Peter’s preaching. Eusebius, in his Church History, echoes that Mark wrote his Gospel at Rome after listening to Peter, and then brought it to Alexandria. If Mark was indeed written after Matthew (and Luke), the overlap patterns in the canons become perplexing: why does Mark leave out so much important material present in the others? If Mark had Matthew’s Gospel in front of him, it’s hard to see why he would deliberately drop the Sermon on the Mount, the detailed birth of Christ, many miracles, and post-resurrection encounters. The Eusebian Canon X shows Mark lacks entire swaths of teaching that Matthew (and Luke) include. Politically, one might ask: was Mark’s community (e.g. in Alexandria) trying to downplay certain theological points found in Matthew/Luke? (For instance, Matthew and Luke begin with miraculous birth stories emphasizing Jesus’ divine sonship – something an Arian-inclined community might not emphasize as much.) Yet Mark’s omissions are glaring: he starts with Jesus’s baptism, not birth, and in the earliest ending of Mark (16:8) there are no appearances of the risen Jesus, whereas Matthew and Luke contain multiple resurrection scenes. The traditional explanation that Mark summarized or simplified a fuller Gospel runs into the question, to what end? Why produce a Gospel with less information? Unless we suppose Mark had a very specific audience or purpose that required brevity, the traditional view struggles. Eusebius’s contemporary, Athanasius of Alexandria (the staunch opponent of Arians), later listed the four Gospels as the only accepted ones – implying that any additional material (perhaps like “secret Mark” or apocrypha) should be rejected. It’s possible that by the fourth century the church deliberately favored Mark’s concise form for canon, leaving out esoteric narratives that might feed heterodox ideas. Thus, if Mark wrote last using Matthew and Luke, his Gospel looks inexplicably incomplete – unless one posits he had esoteric reasons to exclude certain stories (which circles back to the idea of a secret corpus of Markan tradition kept off the public record).
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Alexandrian “Secret Mark” Hypothesis: The Alexandrian tradition offers another angle that complements the modern view rather than contradicting it. According to the controversial letter attributed to Clement of Alexandria, Mark did not stop with the public Gospel. After Peter’s death, Mark “brought his own notes and those of Peter” to Alexandria and “transferred” additional stories into a second, more spiritual edition of his Gospel, which he left to the Alexandrian church to be kept secret. This suggests that two versions of Mark existed: one, the shorter Gospel for general use (essentially the canonical Mark), and two, a longer mystical version for advanced believers in Alexandria. If this is true, it might solve the riddle of Mark’s missing content: Mark didn’t so much “omit” the material we find in Matthew/Luke as he reserved some of it (and perhaps other unique narratives) for the secret Gospel. The political and theological climate of the time could explain why. Alexandria in the late 1st and 2nd centuries was a hotbed of both orthodox and heterodox Christian thought. Gnostic teachers often claimed secret traditions, and the orthodox Alexandrians like Clement were walking a fine line – acknowledging deeper teachings but keeping them out of the hands of those who might distort them (like the Carpocratian sect, whom Clement accused of corrupting Mark’s secret text). By the time of Eusebius and the Arian controversy (early 4th century), the church was extremely wary of non-canonical writings. Eusebius, being an Arian sympathizer, might have been especially sensitive to how Gospel texts were used in theological debate. It’s notable that he sticks to the four received Gospels in his canons and omits any mention of a “secret” Gospel. However, his reliance on the Alexandrian Ammonius to collate the Gospels shows that he respected Alexandrian biblical scholarship. We might speculate that Eusebius’s emphasis on the harmony of the four Gospels (showing they all tell essentially the same story) had a unifying political purpose: to demonstrate concord in the face of doctrinal disputes. By highlighting that Mark contains nothing fundamentally different from Matthew or Luke, Eusebius could be implying that there were no legitimate “secret” teachings of Jesus at odds with the apostolic record – a point congenial to orthodox interests. Yet, intriguingly, this very effort highlights Mark’s foundational role and raises the question of why Mark’s public Gospel was so short. The answer may lie in Alexandria’s corridors: the fuller story of Mark was there, but only for those deemed mature in faith. In any case, whether one accepts the Secret Mark story or not, the political reality is that by Eusebius’s day only the shorter Mark was canonized, and any alternate versions were suppressed or lost to time. The canon tables can thus be seen as both a scholarly tool and a quiet witness to the streamlining of Christian tradition.
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Evidence from Sequence: As mentioned, Eusebius’s numbering of sections preserves the order of episodes in each Gospel. Using his tables, one can observe that whenever Matthew or Luke includes a story from Mark, they generally stick to Mark’s sequence of events. It’s rare for Matthew and Luke to both rearrange the same story to a different place relative to Mark. This is exactly what we would expect if Mark’s narrative was the original chronology that the others followed. For instance, in the triple tradition (Matthew–Mark–Luke stories), if Matthew shifts a story’s location, Luke tends to keep Mark’s order, and vice versa – they don’t conspire to create a new order against Mark. This phenomenon, first systematically noted in the 19th century, reinforced the idea that Mark was the earliest Gospel compiled. Eusebius’s Canons, by “completely preserving the sequence” of each Gospel’s sections, provided the raw data for later scholars to detect this pattern. So not only do the canons show what material Mark shares, they even help reveal when in the narrative timeline Mark’s account was likely used as the base structure by others. The Alexandrian origin story for Mark meshes with this: if Mark’s Gospel (or its core) was an early text circulating, other evangelists would adhere to its timeline. Given that Mark eventually made its way to Alexandria (via Mark himself) and was deeply revered there, it’s plausible Alexandria played a key role in disseminating Mark’s text (or even in editing it). Some have wondered if the Alexandrian Church, known for its scholarship, might have produced an edition of Mark or a commentary that influenced how later Gospels were written or how scribes harmonized accounts.
In conclusion, Eusebius’s Canon Tables were a remarkable scholarly achievement that also carry unintended historical testimony. On the surface, they are a tool to navigate Gospel parallels, born from an Alexandrian idea and executed by a bishop entangled in the politics of Nicene Christianity. But within their structure lies the clear fact that Mark’s Gospel is almost entirely a subset of the others’ material. This strongly implies Mark’s foundational status – a conclusion modern scholars draw as evidence of Mark being the earliest Gospel source. Additionally, in the context of Alexandria, it underscores how central Mark was to that church’s identity: Mark’s text was the backbone of the story of Jesus, and yet the Alexandrians claimed to possess even more Markan teaching than met the eye. Eusebius, consciously or not, gives a nod to Alexandria by citing “Ammonius the Alexandrian” at the outset of his work, integrating Alexandrian wisdom into the universal church’s study of Scripture. Politically, this may have also served to legitimize his work amid the tension with Alexandrian leaders like Athanasius. Culturally, it reflects the transmission of knowledge from Alexandria’s famed catechetical tradition (of Philo, Origen, Clement, Ammonius) to the broader Christian world. The story of the Gospel of Mark – from its near-total incorporation by Matthew and Luke, to its secret second edition whispered of in Alexandria – reminds us that our canonical texts were shaped by both practical usage and theological politics. Eusebius’s tables inadvertently highlight Mark as the narrative core of the Christian message, a core that was publicly shared in the four Gospels and, if we trust Clement of Alexandria, privately treasured in the great city of Alexandria. Thus, the humble canon tables open a window not just to Gospel harmony, but to a historical tableau of how Alexandria’s influence and Mark’s legacy were interwoven in the early Church.
