Gospel of Mark Trivia
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90 free Gospel of Mark trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Mark is the shortest Gospel and, most scholars think, the oldest, and it reads like it was written in a hurry: Jesus is baptised, tested and preaching within thirteen verses, and the book breaks off at an empty tomb with three frightened women. Matthew and Luke reused nearly all of it, which makes the details they changed or dropped the most revealing things in the book. These fifty questions stay on ground that is Mark's own: the scenes no other Gospel tells, the Aramaic phrases it preserves and translates, the repeated orders to keep quiet, the two-stage healing, the added ending that promises safety from snakes, and the chapter-and-verse oddities that scholars argue over. A second strand follows John Mark himself, from the house in Jerusalem to the tradition that he wrote down Peter's preaching and the theft of his relics. The set suits Bible study groups, Sunday school leaders wanting something beyond the familiar stories, and readers who know the Gospel well enough to notice what it leaves out. Play it online or print it with the answers for a quiz night.
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Q 01At what time does Mark 15:25 put the crucifixion, a detail that clashes with John's account of the trial?
Nine in the morning
Nine in the morning is Mark's 'third hour', while John 19:14 still has Jesus before Pilate at about noon. Mark then marks darkness at noon and death at three, a tidy three-hour grid.
Q 02What did the women do on leaving the empty tomb in Mark 16:8, where the oldest manuscripts stop?
Said nothing to anyone
Said nothing to anyone, 'because they were afraid', is how the earliest text of Mark ends, with no resurrection appearance at all. Verses 9 to 20 were added later, which is why modern Bibles bracket them.
Q 03What, says a promise found in Mark's disputed longer ending, 'will not hurt' believers at all when they drink it?
Deadly poison
Deadly poison, like picking up snakes, is promised in Mark 16:18 to do believers no harm, the verse that Appalachian snake-handling churches cite for the serpents and poison of their worship.
Q 04What do the demons call themselves in Mark 5 before entering a herd of about 2,000 pigs?
Legion
Legion, 'for we are many', is the name Jesus is given when he asks, and only Mark puts a number on the herd that then rushes into the lake, which Matthew and Luke leave uncounted.
Q 05What did the blind man at Bethsaida say people looked like after one touch from Jesus, in Mark 8?
Trees walking around
Trees walking around is what he saw until a second touch restored his sight fully, the only healing in the Gospels that takes Jesus two attempts. The story appears in no other Gospel.
Q 06On what was Jesus sleeping in the stern when the disciples woke him in the storm, a detail only Mark 4 gives?
A cushion
A cushion, probably the helmsman's seat pad, is the kind of vivid touch often taken as an eyewitness memory, perhaps Peter's. Matthew and Luke simply say he was asleep.
Q 07Under what did two Venetian merchants hide Mark's body when they smuggled it out of Egypt in 828?
Pork
Pork, which the Muslim customs officers would not touch, reportedly covered the basket holding the evangelist's relics. The stolen saint gave Venice its patron and, eventually, St Mark's Basilica.
Q 08Which creature, seen on flags all over Venice, stands for Mark the Evangelist in Christian art?
A winged lion
A winged lion is Mark's emblem in the scheme that matches the four evangelists to the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation, and Venice took the lion as its own once it held his relics.
Q 09Most scholars date Mark to which conflict, reading chapter 13's doomed Temple as an echo of it?
The First Jewish–Roman War
The First Jewish–Roman War saw Titus's army destroy the Temple in AD 70, and Mark 13's forecast of that ruin is why scholars place the Gospel just before or after it.
Q 10In which city was Mark most likely written, given that it explains Jewish hand-washing customs to its readers?
Rome
Rome is the traditional and still the most widely accepted setting, which also explains the Latin loanwords and the note in Mark 15:21 naming sons apparently known to the readers. Galilee and Syria are the main rival guesses.
Q 11Which adverb, the Greek 'euthys', does Mark use about forty times to keep his story moving?
Immediately
Immediately hurries Jesus from scene to scene in Mark, which also keeps slipping into the present tense, as if the story were being told aloud.
Q 12Who, says Mark 1:13 alone, kept Jesus company during his forty days in the desert, besides Satan and the angels?
Wild animals
Wild animals share the desert with Jesus in Mark's two-verse temptation, which never lists the three temptations Matthew and Luke spell out. Readers have seen either Eden restored or the beasts of the arena.
Q 13What did Herod swear to give Herodias's dancing daughter, a detail Mark 6:23 records but Matthew's version leaves out?
Half his kingdom
Q 21Which woman, named only by Mark, watched the crucifixion with the two Marys and brought spices to the tomb?
Salome
Salome appears in Mark 15:40 and 16:1 and nowhere else in the Gospels, and tradition often identifies her with the mother of Zebedee's sons whom Matthew places at the cross. She is not the dancer who asked for John the Baptist's head.
Q 22Which Aramaic word, meaning 'Be opened', did Jesus sigh while healing a deaf man in the Decapolis, in Mark 7?
Ephphatha
Ephphatha came after Jesus put his fingers in the man's ears and touched his tongue with spit, a hands-on cure that no other Gospel repeats. Mark translates the word for his Greek readers.
Q 23Which nickname, meaning 'sons of thunder', did Jesus give the two sons of Zebedee, in a detail only Mark 3:17 preserves?
Boanerges
Half his kingdom echoes what King Xerxes offers Esther, a royal cliche Mark lets a petty ruler borrow. Matthew's Herod swears only to give 'whatever she asked', and the girl asked for John the Baptist's head.
Q 14Which observance did Jesus say 'was made for man, not man for' it, a line only Mark 2:27 preserves?
The Sabbath
The Sabbath saying comes after the Pharisees objected to the disciples picking grain, and Matthew and Luke both drop the punchline while keeping the argument.
Q 15What did Jesus's own family say of him in Mark 3:21, coming to take him away?
He is out of his mind
He is out of his mind is a verdict so awkward that neither Matthew nor Luke repeats it, and Mark follows it with his mother and brothers standing outside, sending for him.
Q 16Which onlooker is the lone human voice in Mark's Gospel to call Jesus 'the Son of God', speaking as Jesus dies?
A Roman centurion
A Roman centurion, a Gentile soldier, declares what demons and a voice from heaven have declared and no disciple manages in Mark. Whether he meant it or sneered it is a long-running argument.
Q 17What does Mark 11:13 admit about the leafy tree Jesus cursed for bearing no fruit?
Figs were out of season
Figs were out of season, Mark says flatly, which is why the curse is often read as an acted parable of the fruitless Temple: Mark wraps the Temple cleansing inside the two halves of the tree story.
Q 18Which apostle refused to take John Mark on a second journey because he had deserted them in Pamphylia, in Acts 15?
Paul
Paul fell out with Barnabas so sharply over John Mark that the two missionaries split up, Barnabas sailing for Cyprus with his kinsman. Years later Paul's letters call Mark 'helpful to me', so the rift healed.
Q 19What kind of miracle opens Jesus's public ministry in Mark, performed on a shouting man in the Capernaum synagogue?
An exorcism
An exorcism comes before any healing in Mark, whose Jesus is recognised by an 'impure spirit' shouting 'the Holy One of God' before any human works out who he is. John's Gospel has no exorcisms at all.
Q 20Which term did William Wrede coin in 1901 for the way Mark's Jesus silences demons and the people he heals?
The Messianic Secret
The Messianic Secret covers the silenced demons, hushed-up healings and parables told to conceal, which Wrede argued Mark invented to explain why so few had hailed Jesus as Messiah in his lifetime.
Boanerges suits a pair who later offered to call down fire on a Samaritan village, and Mark gives the word right after the verse that renames Simon as Peter. No other Gospel mentions the nickname.
Q 24Which blind beggar, named only by Mark, threw off his cloak and jumped up when Jesus called him outside Jericho?
Bartimaeus
Bartimaeus is one of very few people Jesus heals who gets a name in the Gospels, and Matthew turns him into two anonymous blind men. Jesus asks him just what he had asked the sons of Zebedee: 'What do you want me to do for you?'
Q 25Which promise to Peter in Matthew's account of his confession at Caesarea Philippi is missing from Mark 8?
The keys of heaven
The keys of heaven, like 'on this rock I will build my church', are promised only in Matthew 16; in Mark, Peter is being called Satan within a few verses of his confession.
Q 26How does Mark 9:3 describe Jesus's clothes at the Transfiguration, in an image the other Gospels skip?
Whiter than bleach could make them
Whiter than bleach could make them is a laundry-day comparison typical of Mark's plain style, where Matthew compares the clothes to light and Luke to lightning. Peter then offers to build three shelters, 'not knowing what to say'.
Q 27Which two sons of Simon of Cyrene does Mark 15:21 name, apparently because the Gospel's readers knew them?
Alexander and Rufus
Alexander and Rufus are named for no reason the story needs, which suggests the cross-carrier's sons were known in the church Mark wrote for. A Rufus also gets greetings at the end of the Letter to the Romans.
Q 28What did the women ask each other on the way to the tomb in Mark 16:3?
Who will roll the stone away
Who will roll the stone away is a practical fret that Mark answers in the next verse: it 'had been rolled away' already, though he never says by whom. Matthew supplies an earthquake and an angel to do the job.
Q 29Whom do the women find sitting inside the tomb in Mark 16:5, where Matthew has an angel?
A young man in white
A young man in white is all Mark calls him, and readers have long paired him with the youth who fled naked at the arrest. Luke upgrades the figure to two men and John to two angels.
Q 30What was mixed into the wine Jesus refused at Golgotha in Mark 15:23, where Matthew's account says gall?
Myrrh
Myrrh in wine is usually read as a drink to dull the pain, so Mark's Jesus is turning down a sedative, while Matthew swaps in gall to match Psalm 69. Only Matthew has the spice offered to him as a baby.