René Salm has kindly shared with me a new translation (I think it’s the first English translation) of the Acts of Mark, a text I had never heard of till now. Until René’s contribution the most detail available on the internet about this document was from an old Synoptic L exchange between Philip James McCosker and Mark Goodacre. McCosker posted the abstract of a 1992 thesis about the Acts, which I copy here. Of particular interest, I also copy here notes from René in which he epitomizes much of the content.
Here is an abstract from a dissertation written recently here at Harvard
on the Acts of Mark, I hope it helps. . . . .There are also other items of literature listed below.
A.D.Callahan ‘The Acts of Saint Mark : an introduction and commentary’
Thesis (Ph.D.)–Harvard University, 1992
According to the Church’s most venerable traditions, it was the
evangelist reputed to have written the Second Gospel who was first to
proclaim the Christian message in the Nile Valley; Mark the Evangelist
was Alexandria’s first bishop and first martyr, his miracles, prodigies
and passion recorded in the so-called Acts of Saint Mark (AM). The AM
probably existed in some literary form by the late fourth century. The
age of the underlying traditions, of course, remains an open question.
Such a dating puts the AM in the same historical continuum as other of
the so-called apocryphal Acts, yet it is little known and virtually
ignored by modern Western scholarship. Continue reading “The Acts of Mark”