Simon Says: Inconspicuous Evidence of Eyewitnesses in Mark

When I watch Jesus films, whether the current series The Chosen, The Passion of the Christ in the early 2000s, or even Godspell from the 1970s, I can’t help but ask, Where did they get those stories? Sometimes I can piece together bits from Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. Occasionally I detect legendary material from church history or the apocryphal gospels. But at other times, my best guess is “They made it up,” and I ascribe the scene to creative liberty.

When we turn to the Gospel of Mark, which most scholars see as the first extant telling of the story of Jesus, we might also wonder, Where did Mark get these stories?

Around the 1920s to ’50s, the fashionable scholarly answer was found in a field of study known as form criticism. This enterprise tried to tie different sayings and stories of Jesus back to an occasion within the early church that would have prompted their creation. Though the heyday of form criticism has passed, the legacy of seeing the Gospels as a “mixtape” of various ad hoc literary traditions can still be seen today.

In contrast to form criticism and the Jesus-film industry, the canonical Gospels are sourced in eye-witness testimony and were written within living memory of the events they describe. Perhaps no other scholar has written so persuasively on this subject as Richard Bauckham in his magisterial Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

Indications of eye-witness testimony are peppered throughout Mark’s gospel. Here we will consider just a few, each revolving around the name “Simon.” These are more obscure than what normally make their way into works on apologetics, but their subtlety is a strength since they are not the kind of details one fabricates.

We will discover that inconspicuous indicators of eyewitnesses reveal what is happening behind the scenes more than front-and-center observations.

Evidence of Simon Peter

There are signs that Simon Peter has been a significant source for Mark’s Gospel, despite Mark not making a show of it. The church father Papias famously stated that Mark was Peter’s interpreter, who wrote down what he remembered from his preaching. Though many scholars doubt Papias here, Mark goes out of his way to emphasize Simon Peter. Several features indicate that Mark is particularly told from a Petrine perspective.

For example, his prominence verges on redundancy when he is introduced in 1:16: “Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, [Jesus] saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.” This is part of what Bauckham calls a Peter inclusio, so that his testimony brackets the Gospel of Mark (see 16:7).

Later in the narrative, those “sick or oppressed by demons” are brought to Jesus in Capernaum (1:32), the summary after the climactic exorcism at the synagogue (vv. 21–28). But sandwiched in the middle is the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law (vv. 29–31).

Similarly, Mark writes of when the disciples look for Jesus, “Simon and those who were with him searched for him” (v. 36). Details like these betray a “Simon-centric” source. Bauckham argues that, with few exceptions, “Peter is actually present through a large proportion of the narrative from 1:16 to 14:72.”

Several features indicate that Mark is particularly told from a Petrine perspective.

An oddity in Mark’s grammatical style reinforces not just Simon Peter’s perspective but that of all the disciples: Mark uniquely favors using plural verbs to introduce singular ones. For example, Mark 11:12 reads, “On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he [Jesus] was hungry” (emphasis added). This provides the perspective of the group, as opposed to Matthew’s retelling: “In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry” (21:18). This literary device occurs 21 times in Mark’s narrative.

Evidence of Many Simons

The name “Simon” occurs 11 times in Mark. It most famously refers to Peter (1:16 [twice], 29, 30, 36; 3:16; 14:37), but it also refers to the other apostle, “Simon the Zealot” (3:18), the brother of Jesus (6:3), the leper (14:3), and the one below, the father of Alexander and Rufus (15:21). That’s five Simons in Mark’s relatively short story.

Not only does this not seem like the kind of detail that would be fabricated, but Tal Ilan demonstrates that the name Simon was, in this area and at this time, the most frequently used male name for a Jew. This kind of distribution suggests Mark is retelling real stories and not fictional constructions.

Evidence of Simon of Cyrene and His Family

Another reference to a Simon in Mark 15:21 also subtly shows the importance of eye-witness testimony for Mark. While stories often become more complex over time by incorporating well-known figures, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes the opposite happens: Names are dropped because newer audiences no longer know their significance. This seems to happen in Mark.

For example, in accord with the now standard hypothesis that Mark wrote first and that Matthew and Luke used his material, the scene of Simon carrying the cross decreases in specificity across the books. Mark’s version, the earliest, says, “They compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry [Jesus’s] cross” (15:21). Matthew (27:32) and Luke (23:26), however, omit these details about Alexander and Rufus. Why would the two evangelists leave out these names?

There was a community of living memory, people who had firsthand details and provided them to Mark.

Bauckham’s answer is the best on the market: Mark’s audience knew these men who could have testified to their father’s actions, but by the time and place Matthew and Luke wrote, they weren’t so well known. Details like this show there was a community of living memory, people who had firsthand details and provided them to Mark.

Though Mark himself was not an eyewitness, ancient readers valued accounts from people who were there from the beginning (see Luke 1:2; John 15:27, 21:24). Mark’s inconspicuous evidence of sources who were there promotes the historical reliability of this first account of Jesus. Works like Bauckham’s illustrate the rich rewards that can come from attention to seemingly obscure details.