Tag: Acts of Mark

2012-02-13

Acts of Mark now translated into English

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Biblical Studies
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Earlier this month I posted notes from the Acts of Mark that René Salm had shared.

Since then René Salm has posted the first ever English translation of the Acts of Mark on his website. Translator is Dr Mark A. House.

See The Acts of Mark: Translation.

This is “a fairly literal translation, and so it may sound a bit rough – it is a provisional translation.

René has another page of notes discussion the background to his own interest in the Acts and comments on the translation itself.

See The Acts of Mark: Notes and Bibliography

Of particular interest is René’s discussion of the date of the text. What relevance could an ostensibly 5th century text have for mythicists or anyone interested in the origins of Christianity?

See The Acts of Mark: “What is the date of this text?”

There’s main gateway to these links is Rene’s resources for the study of Christian origins page which also leads to a summary of the Acts.

The same page contains a translation of part of a work by Ditlef Nielsen’s (1904 ) titled The Natsarene and Hidden Gnosis.

2012-02-01

The Acts of Mark

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Biblical Studies
Tags: ,

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”