The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20.
The two oldest and best Greek manuscripts don’t include Mark 16:9-20. Church fathers like
Eusebius and Jerome didn’t know the longer ending. Some experts see enough difference in the vocabulary and style of the section to wonder if it was written by the same writer. If you want to read further about this question, see the translation footnote of verse 9 in the NET Bible
(http://net.bible.org/verse.php?book=Mar&chapter=16&verse=9#).
I think that's probably right, although I won’t argue with someone who insists that Mark wrote the whole kit-and-caboodle, including the longer ending. Personally, I would just as soon skip all the questions in Bible class about handling snakes and drinking poison, but then that is just me. All the really important stuff is in Matthew, so I’m not sure we are sacrificing anything by admitting that Mark might not have written the longer ending… unless you really like snakes.
The problem we are left with is that Mark, if his book really ends with verse 8, ends very abruptly. I remember pouring hours into an old Atari video game called “Escape from Castle Wolfenstien.” There were endless puzzles to solve and guards to elude, and then finally I escaped and won… and the screen said “You have escaped. You won.” No bells, no whistles. How anticlimactic! And that is sort of the feeling you get if Mark ends, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). Maybe Mark, like Luke, was planning on writing a second volume and never got around to it? Come to think of it, Luke ends Acts rather abruptly as well.
Maybe Mark’s ending was sudden and abrupt on purpose. After all, Mark is pretty sudden and abrupt throughout the book. His favorite word is “immediately.” Immediately Jesus did this and immediately He did that until Peter confesses Him as the Christ. Then Jesus immediately predicts his coming death until that is exactly what happens. The angel then announces that Jesus is alive… and then the book ends without much of an ending.
Maybe that is the point. Jesus is alive and now you can write the ending of the story in your response and obedience to Him. Maybe that’s the whole point. It’s not really a question of how Mark ended the story of Jesus’ it’s really about how you will end His story in your life.
3 comments:
Greetings Charles,
Some of your resource-materials have apparently misled you about this subject. You wrote:
"The two oldest and best Greek manuscripts don’t include Mark 16:9-20."
That refers to Codex Vaticanus (c. 325) and Codex Sinaiticus (c. 350). But the earliest extant MS of Mark is really Papyrus 45 (C. 220 or 225). P-45 is so mutilated that it doesn't have any text at all from ch. 16, so we can't tell if it had vv. 9-20 or not.
In Vaticanus, after the closing title after 16:8, there is a prolonged blank space, including an entire blank column, before Luke begins on the next page. The copyist never left a blank column between books anywhere else in the New Testament. It's as if the copyist was aware of verses 9-20 but did not have access to them, so he tried to leave space for them, just in case someone might want to add them from another exemplar.
And in Sinaiticus, we don't have the pages at the end of Mark made by the main copyist. All the material from Mk. 14:54 to Lk. 1:56 is on four replacement-pages, consisting of one parchment-sheet (folded down the middle).
Also, we don't have the copies of Mark used by Justin Martyr (160), Tatian (172), and Irenaeus (184), since they worked in areas that didn't have a papyrus-friendly climate like Egypt. But we have copies of their writings, and each one made used of material from Mk. 16:9-20. So in this case the earliest manuscripts aren't the earliest pertinent evidence.
You wrote, "Church fathers like
Eusebius and Jerome didn’t know the longer ending."
That's not true. Eusebius wrote about Mk. 16:9-20 in "Ad Marinum," replying to a question about how to harmonize Mt. 28:1 and Mk. 16:9. He wrote that one way that a person might solve the harmonization-problem was to reject the entire passage, on the grounds that it was not in every single copy, or because it was in some copies but not in all, or because it was absent from almost all copies -- or, at any rate, because it was not in the accurate copies. (His descriptions of the ratios of copies with and without the passage are not consistent.) But then he explained that one could also harmonize the passages by adding a comma in Mk. 16:9.
As for Jerome, he included all 12 verses in the Vulgate in 383, and he referred to Mk. 16:14 in one of his later writings.
There is a lot of misinformation circulating in commentaries about Jerome's statement about Mark 16:9-20. What happened is this: in Epistle 120, Jerome answered a series of questions from a woman named Hedibia. One of her questions was, how do you resolve the differences between the Gospels' accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances? Now, Jerome was busy, and he had a lot of other mail to answer, so instead of forming an answer from scratch, he consulted a copy of Eusebius' "Ad Marinum," loosely put it into Latin, and answered Hedibia's question by repeating not only Eusebius' answers but also three of the questions asked by Marinus!
But if you never put the two compositions side-by-side, and see that Jerome has simply extracted material, you would have no way of seeing clearly what Jerome did, since he didn't inform Hedibia that he was paraphrasing Eusebius.
(Continued in the next comment.)
James Snapp, Jr.
Minister, Curtisville Christian Church
Indiana
Again, warm greetings, Charles. Continuing where I left off:
You wrote, "Some experts see enough difference in the vocabulary and style of the section to wonder if it was written by the same writer."
That's true, although Dr. Bruce Terry wrote an online essay which dismantles many of the "vocabulary and style" objections.
One feature of special significance is the lack of a transition between 16:8 and 16:9. It's as if we were watching a play in which there are three women on stage, and then, >bamf< only one is there. To me, this is a strong point in favor of the idea that 16:9-20 was not composed later to finish the book, because a person doing so would be motivated to continue the narrative at the same point where it left off.
Also, if one were to say that Mk. 16:9-20 was not attached by Mark, this wouldn't mean that it is not original: oodles of passages in Scripture, such as Jeremiah 52, were not added by the primary author, and yet are part of the finished form of the text. The "original" text is the text that was first disseminated for church-use, whether its production involved just one person or two or (as in Psalms) several.
I invite you to visit a brief online prentation about this, in which I summarize a case for the authenticity of Mark 16:9-20; it begins at
http://www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html
Yours in Christ,
James Snapp, Jr.
Minister, Curtisville Christian Church
Indiana
Thanks for your comments James. Metzgar has a lengthy discussion in This textual commentary that concludes that Mark ended at Mark 16:8 but that the longer entry is included within double brackets "out of deference to the evident antiquity of the longer ending." I rather doubt there will ever be universal acceptance up or down on this issue. Like I said in the blog, "I won’t argue with someone who insists that Mark wrote the whole kit-and-caboodle."
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