Most scholars believe the Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark was the same one mentioned in the book of Acts who traveled with Paul and Barnabas and then bailed on them creating a disagreement between Paul and Barnabas, who was Mark’s cousin.
Mark went from not completing a journey to coming to visit Paul later on in his ministry and became known as Mark the Evangelist. According to the early church, Mark was the first bishop of Alexandria and the first person to establish a Christian church in Africa.
Mark’s journey from reluctant to heroic reminds me of Thomas who is mentioned only once in each Gospel except for in John. Some church scholars contend the one who is known as doubting Thomas because of the stories shared in the Gospel of John about needing to see the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet before believing He was truly alive actually went all the way to India with the message of Jesus.
The popularity of Jesus seemed to be especially important to Mark who was trying to encourage followers of Christ being persecuted because they were telling others about the one true living God in a time and place where the people believed in many gods.
The episodes of Mark were filmed in India, a land of many gods where followers of Jesus have been persecuted much like the target audience Mark was writing. India is ⅓ the land mass of the United States with 3-4x the population at over 1 billion people. It is now the most populous country in the world, surpassing China just this past year. The crowd in the market reminded me of the throngs of people crowding around Jesus during his ministry as described in the Gospels.
