Ælfric's Mark, Other Things, and Apostolic Authority

Ælfric's sermon on Mark in his Lives of Saints demonstrates strikingly that even after most if not all of the sources for a work in this genre have been identified, it is still necessary to consider why the author has brought together his material as he has.¹ Here the sources for the two parts of the sermon are both so different and so differently handled that one might, were it not for the manuscript evidence and an explicit comment by Ælfric, consider it two works rather than one.² Closely following the Passio Sancti Marci, its first 103 lines retell the saint's martyrdom; the remaining 122 take their structure and some of their content from Jerome's preface to his commentary on Matthew, yet change many individual details. Indeed, it has never been made clear why Jerome's preface, which treats the four evangelists equally, belongs specifically with the passion of Mark.³

I will argue that Ælfric has joined and modified these sources to establish Mark's authority as the writer of a gospel even though he, like Luke but unlike Matthew and John, was not one of the original twelve apostles. He alludes to parts of his theme in the comment that links the two parts:⁴ his subject is the apostles "ðe gode gecorene synd" (Lives, 107) (who were chosen by God), and his concern is with the human transmission of Christ's teaching. He then develops the antithesis of his main point in a brief discussion of the writers of apocryphal gospels, who have no source of knowledge beyond themselves. In the following discussions of each of the evangelists, he focuses specifically on the differing sources of their authority. Finally, he stresses that all four were revealed in both the Old and New Testaments. Taken together, these details reveal his purpose, to show that while all the evangelists were selected from the beginning of time by God, even those not chosen in this world by Christ had a direct source for their knowledge. Mark, the disciple of Peter, is an apt point of reference for this discussion, and one detail in his passion, Christ's appearance to him after he has been tortured, may also have encouraged Ælfric to address the topic. In any case, the sermon, in its entirety, is a sophisticated reflection on the legitimacy of the gospels and their relationship to apostolic authority.

Manuscripts

Although the two parts of the sermon are combined differently in each of the four manuscripts that preserve them, taken as a whole this evidence suggests that both Ælfric and the scribes viewed the sections as distinct yet related. The manuscript most likely to represent Ælfric's intention is British Library, Cotton Julius E. vii. N. R. Ker, who dates it to the beginning of the eleventh century, comments that "the prefaces and the style vouch for Ælfric's authorship of the collection as a whole"; however, he notes that a few non-Ælfrician items have already crept into the manuscript, some early enough to be included in the table of contents.⁵ Here the first part of the sermon on Mark concludes with an "amen," which is followed by the rubric "item alia" (The Same, Other Things); the first letter of the second section is an enlarged wynn.⁶

The three other texts of the sermon survive in manuscripts less closely related to Ælfric's original plan. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 198 consists, according to Ker, of three parts: "an orderly collection written in the early eleventh century," "additions in nearly contemporary hands," and further additions "in hands of s. xi²."⁷ The first and second parts are drawn largely from Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, generally following the liturgical year, until the third section of the second part, which Ker characterizes as "miscellaneous"; Mark is the second item in this section.⁸ London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii, damaged in the fire of 1731, is dated by Ker to the mid-eleventh century; he characterizes it as "homilies for Saints' days, not in an orderly arrangement...