Gray: New Day For Copts, If St. Mark is 'Beloved Disciple'
John Mark, Not Zebedee’s John, Wrote John’s Gospel, Revelation, As Well As Mark, Writer Says
by Eli Akim
ATLANTA, May 2, 2008 — A resurgent new day of respect and influence for the Coptic Orthodox Christian church may lie ahead, an American Bible researcher and writer says, if his stunning hypothesis stands up that African scholar St. Mark, or John Mark, an apostle of Jesus, is the author of the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation, in addition to Mark’s Gospel, as the writer claims. St. Mark evangelized Alexandria, Egypt in the 1st century and founded the Coptic church.
If true, the new finding, which would reveal a vast cover-up some 1,900 years old, would turn Christianity upside down — and reveal the depth of an age-old racially motivated heresy campaign involving extensive biblical tampering.
In support of his claim, Randall Gray first alludes to “a critically telling” scene in John’s Gospel (Jn. 18:15,16) in which the unnamed “other disciple” serves as defense counsel for Jesus, arguing on Jesus’ behalf before the high priest Annas.
“John Mark, a scholar, and Jesus’ beloved friend, is arguing to defend Jesus, while Peter cowers outside denying Jesus, and Zebedee’s John and James are high-tailing it from Gethsemane,” the writer said. “How it has been possible to place Zebedee’s John in the courtyard with Jesus and Annas, while he is running from Gethsemane in fear, is hard to fathom. Scholars have overlooked the illogic of this for centuries, those who have contended that Zebedee’s John was the ‘other disciple,’ which is inferred by the identifier ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.’ But it doesn’t work.”
The point Gray makes is a valid one in stating that John the apostle, a Galilean, is “no different in terms of profession, education or place of residence (Galilee, 200 miles north of Jerusalem) than Peter would have been, who wilts at the hour of reckoning.”
Solving this enduring New Testament mystery, Gray said, has involved a list of complicated assumptions — some of which have been based on “comparing the physical locations and likely behaviors of four disciples after Jesus was arrested — namely Peter, James, John and John Mark or St. Mark.” His suspicions that heretical alterations of the Bible were to blame for obscuring of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” grew out of his recollections of a Sunday school class one Easter morning, when “a devout teacher, who believed the Bible is God’s inspired word,” raised the idea of “John and Mary problems” at the end of each of the four gospels. Common sense, Gray said, had always caused him to believe that fishermen, i.e., John and Peter, could not have written so eloquently biblical scripture.
And, Gray added, the idea that John, the son of Zebedee, could ever have been known to the high priests Annas and Caiaphas in Jerusalem, when he was from Galilee and a member of Jesus’ “little band of rebels” flew in the face of credulity and logic.
“Zebedee’s John didn’t work in Jerusalem as a scribe … John Mark did,” Gray said. “The so-called ‘other disciple’ got an audience with Annas, because Annas knew John Mark, and he knew him because Annas worked with him. Zebedee’s John the Galilean would have been crucified right along with Jesus if he had showed his face. Peter surely knew that.
“And John was martyred, as Jesus predicted,” Gray added, “if you happen to believe the figurative words of Jesus (Mk. 10:38,40), which are of the sort that Jesus would use, and if you suspect, as we do, that racist heretics tampered with the Bible to cover up John’s death so as to obscure the African John Mark or Saint Mark as Revelation’s author.”
Jesus tells both John and James, the sons of Zebedee — who were both likely Jesus’ cousins, Gray says — that they would drink “the same cup” as Jesus, which is clearly a metaphor for martyrdom. The pronouncement by Jesus that Zebedee’s John and James will die, and soon, comes after yet another demand by the brothers to know if they will be given special consideration in heaven, a request John and James made “shortly after Jesus has just predicted his own death for a third time,” Gray said. “You can imagine how this must have irritated Jesus, which puts John and his brother James in a less than beloved light.”
Gray said the direct biblical evidence for John Mark as the true “beloved disciple” of Jesus unmistakably apparent in one of the apostle Paul’s last epistles to his young assistant Timothy who is in Asia Minor, probably Ephesus.
“John Mark, of Cyrene, was the only man named John whom the apostle Paul places in or near Ephesus (2 Tim. 4:11), when he asks Timothy to bring ‘Mark’ to Rome when Timothy departs to visit Paul. In between Asia Minor and Rome, the writer said, is Ephesus, where John Mark was apparently already established.
“And,” the writer noted, giving credit to a biography of St. Mark written by H.H. Pope Shenouda III, the current patriarch of the Coptic church in Alexandria, “John Mark wrote in Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew. Whom would you want — John Mark, or a fisherman, writing scripture for you?”
The former religion editor and reporter for a daily newspaper in the American South began his initially unintended quest to arrive at his “admittedly bold” conclusion after noting the “striking parallel” of “John and Mary problems” in the New Testament and Leonardo Da Vinci’s 15th century painting “The Last Supper.” This would launch a two-year effort to “uncode” the so-called Da Vinci Code. “Decode,” says Gray, would be an inappropriate term, as the former military cryptologist says there has “never existed a code” in the controversial work, but rather “a cover-up of a botched repainting” of the “dry-plaster fresco,” which he says occurred sometime after the French invaded Milan in 1499 and chased both the artist and his patron and employer, the duke of Milan, from the Italian city.
Gray suspects the Cyrenean John Mark was once present in the painting, because Leonardo’s patron for “The Last Supper” Milanese Duke Ludovico Sforza, nicknamed “il Moro” at birth, or “the Moor,” possessed African features. The terms “Moor” and “African” are synonymous, the writer points out. “Shakespeare confirms that in ‘Othello, the Moor,’ his last and best tragic play,” Gray pointed out, “as does the archaic term ‘blackamoor,’” which he said was used in England during the Elizabethan period to identify Africans.
Leonardo’s much-debated painting, which took the celebrated Italian Renaissance artist three years to paint (1495-1498), more closely resembles a parody or “a comedy of errors,” which Gray says Leonardo, “a perfectionist to a fault,” would never have committed. Among these errors, he says, is a plainly visible “hand gripping a knife with no arm attached, which is floating in midair behind the back of Judas.”
The greatly disintegrated but partially restored masterwork by Leonardo, which appears on a refectory wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie chapel in Milan, depicts the Passover meal Jesus shared with his disciples, a pivotal event which took place, the writer notes, “in none other than the home of John Mark and his mother Mary,” both of whom were African refugees in Jerusalem from Cyrene, known today as Libya. Gray further boldly asserts that the founder of the Coptic church and his mother Mary are the “John and Mary” at the foot of Jesus’ cross in John’s Gospel (19:25,27), and not Zebedee’s John (the evangelist or apostle) and Mary, the mother of Jesus, as implied. This means John Mark, or St. Mark, and not John, the son of Zebedee, a fisherman from Galilee, is the so-called “disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Gray defends this point by citing Acts 1:14, where Mary, the mother of Jesus, is in Jerusalem after Jesus’ ascension, being attended to by her “real sons,” Jesus’ half-brothers. “Why would Jesus have asked Zebedee’s John, who was probably his cousin and Mary’s nephew, to be her son, if she had plenty?”
Gray emphasized that his motives are not to discredit the Bible, but to discredit heretics, who “didn’t want in the first century, and obviously still don’t want, the Copts to get their due.”
“It’s important to me that Coptic Christians around the world, as well as their founding patriarch who has been hidden from us, get the credit they rightfully deserve as specially beloved of Jesus,” says Gray, who worked for a year in Ethiopia, at the time Haile Selassie was deposed in 1974. Prior to this assignment he was once arrested and detained at gunpoint at the Cairo airport at the height of the Yom Kippur War of 1973. “Nevertheless,” he says with a grin, “I loved visiting Egypt and its typically gracious people. My stay, unfortunately, was abruptly cut short.”
Gray rattled off a series of biblical contradictions or “errors” in the final, post-resurrection scenes of each gospel, which he says are not the fault of the gospel writers, but rather “the work of heretics who tampered with the Bible,” in like manner to the repainting efforts by heretics to remove John Mark from “The Last Supper.” He makes an irrefutable point to defend his charge of an alteration in the painting: “In the process, someone removed altogether anyone and everyone named John in the painting, so there are only eleven male disciples, none of whom are ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved,’ who is the one who asks Jesus who will betray him. The whole scene revolves around ‘the beloved disciple’s’ question, but no one named John is in the painting.”
But isn’t it possible that the disciple whom Jesus loved could have been someone other than a man named John? “No,” says Gray, “not in our view, because no other candidates of the four or five others who have been suggested as possible candidates for the beloved disciple — Lazarus, James the lesser, Nathaniel, Matthias and the ever-popular Mary Magdalen — are easily eliminated.
“Second, since the book of Revelation is signed John … and all of the other disciples of Jesus are martyred, the beloved disciple had to have lived on to be the writer of the Revelation between 65 and 90 A.D.” In John 21:21 Peter identifies “this man” who will live on, “this man” being the writer of John’s Gospel, who identifies himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. “John Mark lived into old age, John, the son of Zebedee, died as a martyr, as did his brother James roughly a year after Jesus ascended, though scripture only tells us about James.
“The identifier ‘this man,’” Gray adds with a sly smirk, “probably disqualifies Mary Magdalene.”
Asked to speculate on why the African apostle of Jesus and his mother have been obscured, as he claims, Gray rubbed his bald head and stroked his gray beard before answering. “If you want my cut-to-the-chase answer,” he replied, “they racially identify Jesus, clearly, which the powers that be presumably don’t want, whoever the powers that be might actually be — and John Mark and Mary elevate all Africans, but especially the Coptic Orthodox church, probably the most devout Christian sect in all of Christendom, as specially beloved of Jesus.
“But Jesus is much more than a man with dark skin, but rather, we think, a composite of all of the races which make up mankind, as Adam must have been.” Gray just in recent years has concluded that Eden, and a literal “first couple,” existed in Ethiopia, basing that conclusion on archaeological, genetic, paleographic and migratory findings in the ancient nation where he once lived and worked.
“Ethiopia is unique,” he explained, “which is more accurately called Abyssinia, which means ‘mixed races.’ Eighty languages, with Amharic being the national language, and hundreds of dialects exist in that one nation, as do people with a variety of features. People with white skin and red beards, who call themselves original Berbers, are found in Africa, as is a single Ethiopian tribe with composite DNA, like we believe Adam and Jesus possessed, after all … they had the same direct biological father.”
So if Adam was a dark-skinned man, containing within him the DNA for all dark-skinned races, where did white people come from?
The writer chuckled, but gave a straight-faced answer: “Eve came from Adam’s rib bone, didn’t she?” he asked rhetorically, “and aren’t bones white?”
Gray, 54, of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, who is completing a non-fiction manuscript titled ETHIOPIAN MELODIES, is currently seeking author representation, and is available for interviews.
Janet Devlin
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