Michael Kok’s book The Gospel on the Margins (Fortress Press, 2015) is the publication of the author’s PhD dissertation from the University of Sheffield. Opening with a consideration of the relative obscurity of the gospel of Mark in the first centuries of Christianity, Kok develops an intriguing thesis of the origin of the patristic tradition: the gospel is not in fact Mark’s collection of the memoirs of Peter but rather an anonymous first-century text whose apostolicity was asserted b...
