More about Mark – J. Fenton

This is a collection of hitherto unpublished thoughts about Mark’s Gospel plus a ragbag of other topics thrown in.

Fenton points out that Mark was never a popular gospel. The pre-reformation church used it for two per cent of its lectionary, Cranmer for four per cent – and it was mainly on two weekdays in Holy Week where the faithful few alone would have encountered it.. ASB 1980 used twelve percent. Now, the Common lectionary uses virtually all of it and the preacher has a hard task that year. A gospel was never meant to be chopped up and read in little bits, he says (really? People like Michael Goulder would disagree) and reading it all in one go (or hearing it, as I have twice encountered) is very powerful.

There are those who say that disagreements among eye-witnesses in court make them more convincing. But what it they have colluded, have copied one another? A crown court would be less convinced. Four phone books with conflicting are not helpful, to say the least. We should remember that each community only had one gospel and tha the weakest two in Revelation had none. Heretics clung to one version and were conservative whereas the church catholic had all four and was progressive. No literature = no controversy. The bible sprung out of argument so we should encourage, not stifle, debate.

Because ‘kiss’ in Greek also means ‘love’ only Judas says he loves Jesus before their deaths.

Mark’s Jesus comes across as mad. If you don’t detect the madness, you haven’t heard him aright.

Unlike Mark’s, Luke’s God comes across as tentative – in the parable of the wicked tenants, God says ‘perhaps – isos – they will respect my son’. And they don’t.

The disciple are equally unreliable: he says they were incapable of running a whelk stall, let along a church.

The tone of the Greek suggests that the centurion was being cynical when he pronounced Jesus to be the son of God.

In the ragbag at the end, there are two good essays and one bad.

The bad one suggests that the eucharist wasn’t countenanced by Hebrews, that if you eat someone it is because you hate them so Holy Communion must have meant some sort of acknowledgement of our guilt because of our implication in the crucifixion. He does, however, admit that there is more to be done on this.

An essay on Mary is excellent. He talks about the sheer fact that we know little about her (we know more about Pilate) means that she is an example of how God works surprises. She is a parvenu, ‘bumped up mud.’

There is also a good essay on the feast of Christ the King which makes it palatable for those of us who are republicans/anti-monarchists.

Good bits:

On the disciples as failures: Every time it says they are ‘afraid’ it means they lack under­standing; ‘amazed’, ‘astonished’ means they don’t believe. They run away when Jesus is arrested, one of them leaving his clothes behind, preferring nakedness to being with Jesus. And you have to remember here that these Hebrews hated the idea of nakedness. Hebrews hated taking their clothes off — see the story of Noah drunk after the flood. Jesus’ final words in Mark’s book are the unanswered question, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15.34). The women who come after the disciples have fled are no better than the men. In spite of the predictions that he would be raised after three days, they come to anoint a corpse on the very day that he has predicted resurrection….. Peter and the rest of the Twelve never get this point in Mark. The woman with the two coins got it, because she put in her whole bios, her whole livelihood, and the woman who anoints his body for burial. Mark has only two healing miracle stories in the second half of his book: one is the boy who is deaf and dumb in chapter 9, ‘He became as one dead,’ so that the majority said ‘He’s died.’ Jesus came and raised him and he arose. Death and resurrection, each one said twice for emphasis. That is the only way into life — death and resurrec­tion — no miracles to save us from that.

Bartimaeus in chapter 10 is the next miracle that comes after the middle of the book, and when he receives his sight, he followed him in the way, hock); ‘I am the way’, ‘Christianity — the way’, he followed him in the way to Jerusalem to death and resurrection. The third miracle is the cursing of the fig tree, the only negative miracle in the book. Totally destructive. The only miracle that is done in Jerusalem by Jesus. He is mocked during the crucifixion for not doing miracles. ‘He saved others — he cannot save himself.’ He can only cure others by not saving himself, by death and resurrection, and they must follow him, drinking the same cup, being baptized with the same baptism. Mark rubs our noses in humiliation. Joseph of Arimathaea asks for the body of Jesus, soma, Pilate donates the corpse, ptehna, a word that Matthew and Luke avoid here. It comes from a verb meaning to fall, collapse, pipta, and it refers to a corpse that is very dead. Where the corpse is there the vultures will be gathered. It is used in Mark also of the headless body of John the Baptist. Matthew and Luke and John avoid using this word of Jesus but Mark knows that the gospel is an offence. This is why the women are afraid and silent. They had gone to the tomb expecting to find the dead body and to do the necessary, as it were to draw a line under the whole incident and go back to Galilee to hot suppers cooked by Peter’s mother-in-law, and fishing and life as it used to be before Jesus had come….. So Mark leaves us with nothing No theology, no christol­ogy, no ethics, no eschatology, no ministry and sacraments, no church history. Thank goodness. These are all things that divide us from one another. And Mark keeps them away. He just gives us a story, a story of disaster. Out of that we might have faith. That is what the book assumes, that you might read it in a different way, with faith in a God who can do anything, even raise the dead, and that you might have love for him and for others and hope that all will be well in the end when the Kingdom comes.

Mark’s Gospel is, I believe, the best of the Gospels for the twenty-first century; it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century underneath Matthew, Luke and John, thanks to Karl Lachmann. It was explained to us in the twentieth century, thanks to William Wrede, James Hardy Ropes and Robert Henry Lightfoot and literary critics who came in to show us how to read a book, a thing that Christians had forgotten.

It is the best book for the twenty-first century because it is so utterly subversive. Western European culture will need some subversive people to do something about its capitalism and its love of self. The one character who is the model in Mark’s Gospel is the child and the child is there as represen­tative of people who are unskilled, nobodies; who have no status. The child appears twice, in chapter 9 and in chapter 10, and in both cases, Jesus hugs them. They are the only people that he does hug. The rich will find it hard to enter the kingdom of God. The first will be last and the last will be first. Life will be through death; death is the only way forward.This will be necessary for the twenty-first century, when what we will all be trying to do is to live as long as possible and be as rich as possible. But notice one thing about this rich man: he wants to know what he should do. He has kept the command­ments and Jesus says he lacks one thing – ‘Sell what you have and give to the poor’, and the man goes away sad. And it says there in Mark, ‘Jesus looked at him and loved him.’ It is the only instance of Jesus loving somebody.

On the Akedah and Calvary: We know that Mark had meditated on the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, a story that used to terrify us as children. Might my father do the same thing to me? In Genesis 22, three times God says, or an angel says, ‘Your son, your one and only son’ (verses 2, 12 and 16), ‘you’re to sacrifice him’. In Mark, also three times, Jesus is called ‘My one and only son’, huios agap&os, ho huios mou ho agapetos. ‘You are my one and only son’ (1.11). At the transfiguration, ‘This is my one and only son’ (9.7). And in the parable of the vineyard he had one left to send, his one and only son. There is another echo of Genesis 22 in Mark when Jesus says, ‘Sit here while I pray.’ This is the same as in Genesis 22.5, ‘Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go ahead.’ And Matthew, at the parallel point copying Mark, has made the parallel with Genesis 22 more exact by changing one word: instead of hack he has autou, an unusual use of the genitive to describe place.

The really terrifying verse in the Genesis story is when Isaac says to Abraham, ‘Father, here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for a sacrifice?’ (Genesis 22.7). And there is the terrible ambiguous and uncommunicative answer of Abraham, ‘God will provide himself with a sheep for a sacrifice, my son.’ We are left to wonder to ourselves, at what point did Isaac realize what was going to happen? He must have got there by the time he was bound and laid on the altar on top of the wood. According to Genesis he seldom spoke again. Only when he was old and blind, a pathetic old man longing for a dish of chilli con came, wanting to bless Esau, his older son, against God’s will, tricked by Jacob and Rebecca into blessing him instead, and then he speaks, sending Jacob away to get a wife in Paddan Aram. Isaac had been traumatized by the event on the mountain. Remember how he needed the wife Rebecca to comfort him after his mother Sarah had died. He is pathetic.

In Mark’s account, Jesus takes the place of Isaac. Jesus realizes this finally and most clearly in Gethsemane, where he says, ‘Father, Abba Father’. And like Isaac he seldom speaks after this. On Good Friday in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus only speaks twice, once to Pilate saying ‘It’s you who says so’, su legeis; once to God when he says ‘Why have you forsaken me?’Though they taunt him to prophesy he keeps silence and Pilate is amazed. Jesus is the new Isaac. Paul had seen it too in writing to the Romans, ‘God did not spare his own son’, compare Genesis 22.16, ‘because you did not spare your son’. So Jesus is the sheep that God has provided for sacrifice in Mark; but not only Jesus; his followers are to be sacrificed also. ‘Take up your cross and follow me’ (Mark 8.34). ‘Drink the cup that I drink, share in my baptism’ (Mark 10). Mark answers Isaac’s question, `Where is the sacrifice?’ It is Jesus. And it is you, my dear reader.

Mark has deliberately arranged his book in order to make fools of us. The distribution of the miracle stories in Mark shows this. Mark has 18 detailed miracles performed by Jesus — the highest rate of miracles per page in all four Gospels. And 15 of these 18 come in the first half of the book. Mark leads us to expect a miracle of salvation, ‘I shall not die but live’, like the healing of the sick, like peace to people who are disinte­grated, like food to the hungry, the end of the storm, life to the dead. That is how we feel in the first half of Mark’s book, but when we get to the second half, we are told straight off, `The son of man must suffer, and anyone who wants to be a follower must also suffer.’ Everyone will be salted with fire’ (Mark 9.49), a saying of Jesus in Mark that is not copied by Matthew and Luke. It is a parody of a saying in Leviticus 2.13, ‘Every sacrifice will be salted with salt.’ But now it is not sacrifices that have to be salted, but everybody. You are the sacrifice, and you are not to be salted with salt; you are to be salted with fire, that is, to be destroyed. Everyone will be made acceptable to God by destruction. This is Mark’s main theme, this is the point of his book, to get people ready for destruction.

Mark’s passion narrative: Mark realizes that the most painful and effective form of mocking is when one is ridiculed for what one is, and not for what one is not. The most powerful weapon of the torturer is the truth, for it is the words of our friends which hurt us most, because they have access to the truth about us. If it is the case that the truth will make you free, it is also the case that it may destroy you first. All the opponents of Jesus in Mark speak the truth and, in Greek, the questions put to him can be read as statements: the chief priest says, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the Blessed’; Pilate greets him with, ‘You are the king of the Jews’, and continues to refer to him by this title, which Mark reserves for the account of the passion; the soldiers dress Jesus in the emperor’s purple and put an imperial crown on his head and hail him as Caesar; the passers-by congratulate him as the one who destroys the temple and rebuilds it in three days; the chief priests say that he saved others but cannot save himself; and finally, when he is dead, the centurion declares him to be the Son of God. It is all true, and the readers know that Jesus knows it too. He had been addressed as God’s Son at the baptism, he was the Beloved on whom God’s favour rested. But how can he be this, when these things are happening to him? When Jesus cries out, `Eloi, Eloi’, some of the people present maliciously misinterpret Eloi as Elias, and say, ‘He is calling for Elijah’. Then one of them sets up the final experiment: he gives Jesus the vinegar to preserve him for long enough to allow Elijah time to come from heaven and take Jesus down from the cross. It was, in a way, fair enough, because had not Elijah himself submitted God to a similar experiment on Mount Carmel? But Jesus dies without any supernatural intervention, and when the centurion sees that the result of the test is negative, he dis­misses Jesus as a charlatan: ‘This fellow really was the Son of God!’

Jesus has been destroyed by the contradiction between who he believes himself to be, and what is happening to him. He is God’s Son, yet he is being put to death. The contradiction is driven into him by the mocking of his opponents. And the readers’ faith too is being tested: can they believe in a God who does not save by miracles, and provides no proof that the good news is true?

The darkness over the whole earth, and the tearing of the temple veil, are not signs that demonstrate the truth of Jesus indisputably. They are ambiguous; they declare God’s wrath, but leave open the question, With whom is God angry? With Jesus, or with those who are crucifying him? To Jesus, it seems that God has forsaken him. The darkness has entered his own soul. And this is the understanding of the other characters in the story. Only the evangelist has a different view, and this is what he wants to communicate to his readers….. They enact their destruc­tion of him, body and blood, by eating and drinking bread and wine. They are made to take on responsibility for his coming death. When Mark surrounds one story with two parts of another, it is always to throw light on the central story. So here the surrounding paragraphs that predict failure interpret the meaning of the eating and drinking: the disciples will be like those people in the Psalms who eat God’s people like bread, they are the enemies and foes who eat up the flesh. The same language of biting, devouring and consuming was still being used by Paul when he wrote to the Galatians. And there was the memorable story of David refusing to drink the water from the well at Bethlehem for which his companions had risked their lives because he said that it would have been to have drunk their blood. But Jesus makes his disciples drink, and thus be responsible for his death, and then he tells them what they have done. To be responsible for the death of Jesus is the obverse of the belief that Christ died for our sins: the disciples are the cause of his death, and liable for it. Jesus relates himself to them as food to him who eats it: just as the eater lives by the destruction of his food, so the disciples live by the death of Jesus.

The disciples must therefore be absent from the narrative, because Jesus dies for them. Their absence is part of the good news because it makes it clear that what is being done is being done by Jesus, alone, and it is being well done. He can only save others by not saving himself. He must go forward alone and be the single, isolated sufferer who stands in for all the rest. The name Barabbas means son of the father, and this is what everyone is — Jesus dies in order that Barabbas, Everyman, may be freed.

Mark’s abrupt ending: not speak (through him); instead, it speaks through his opponents, the chief priests, Pilate, the soldiers, those who pass by; they, ironically, declare the truth about him without intending to do so; they mock him with the truth. Jesus therefore dies with his mind and his faith destroyed; his exit-line from the book is: My God, my God, why have you deserted me? Having disposed of all the males, Mark brings on the women, but not to prove that they are superior to the men; only to show that they are no better. One of them is referred to as Mary the mother of James and Joses; we are left to think that Mark means by this the mother of Jesus (6.3). The women fear, instead of believing; their fear is the cause of their disobedience to the young man’s command, and the reason why they say nothing to anybody. So the book ends. It cannot go on, because there is no way that has yet been found of following Mark 16.8 with a further story that flows on from what has been said without hiatus, repetition or contradiction.

The end of the book was too good for the mind of the Church. It provoked two or three evangelists to improve on it, and two other writers to produce unsatisfactory endings — the longer and the shorter. It also caused some people to think that the original ending of the book had been lost. Only the scribes of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, minuscule 304, and some ancient versions, left the book as Mark had finished it; all the rest asked the prosaic and improper question, What happened next? The question they should have asked was, What will happen next? Mark had given his readers the answer: The Son of Man will come to gather together his elect; so stay awake and be ready; you will see him when he comes to judge the world.

2. It was not just the end of Mark’s Gospel that provoked others to write ‘better’ Gospels; it was also the apparent inability of Mark to answer so many questions: How are we to live? Is there a Christian community? Why are the Jews wrong? Is there no presence of Jesus, here and now? How can we go on, if all there is waiting and enduring?

Sometime later it may have been as long as twenty years

PROFESSOR C. F. EVANS said to me once that a good way to teach Mark’s Gospel was to begin with the end of the book, at 16.8. When it can be demonstrated that the evangelist does not tell his readers what happened next, but leaves them to make up their own minds whether they will believe what the young man has said, or not, it will then be easier to show what sort of book we are dealing with when we read Mark: a Gospel (whatever that is), not a collection of an apostle’s reminiscences.

In point of fact, it was the question of the ending of Mark’s Gospel that, historically speaking, opened up new ways of reading it. When R. H. Lightfoot’ was arguing that the evangelist meant to stop at 16.8, and that there never had been a lost ending or any intention of continuing the narrative further, the first objection that was always raised was: Surely he must have meant to include at least one account of an appearance of Jesus after the resurrection; this was the most important event in the life of Peter Mark could not have missed it out.2 And the answer that was given was: Mark is not that sort of a book; you are reading it with inappropriate expectations; you are repeating the mistake of the person who is told a joke and then asks, ‘What happened next?’ What used to be called ‘The Marcan Hypothesis’, the theory that in Mark’s ‘presentation of the life of Christ the facts of history are set down with a minimum of disarrangement, interpretation, and embellishment’, 3 fell to pieces as a result of the study of the ending of the Gospel: if it were that kind of book, it would not end in this way; since it did end at 16.8, it cannot be that kind of book. But is there any need to take up the question of the ending of Mark again, after so much has been written on the subject in the last fifty years? That the Gospel is complete cannot be regarded as one of the generally accepted results of biblical criticism. Three examples must suffice, arranged in chronological order.

First, in 1971 the United Bible Societies published A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, subtitled ‘A Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek  New Testament (third edition)’, by Bruce M. Metzger ‘on behalf of and in cooperation with the Editorial Committee of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament’: Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger and Allen Wikgren. The two volumes, the Greek New Testament and the Textual Commentary, are published in the same material and in the same colour, and the unwary reader might think the second had the same authority as the first. After discussing the textual evidence for the various endings of Mark, Metzger and his colleagues continue in a footnote: Three possibilities are open: (a) the evangelist intended to close his Gospel at this place; or (b) the Gospel was never finished; or, as seems most probable, (c) the Gospel accidentally lost its last leaf before it was multiplied by transcription4 One might dismiss this reference to the hypothesi5 of a lost ending of Mark as a suggestion made in a footnote twenty years ago; but as recently as 1992 it was still being said of Mark’s Gospel that it is ‘quite possibly truncated at both ends’.

Second, in 1989 the University Presses of Oxford and Cambridge published The Revised English Bible. After their translation of Mark 16.1—8, as if it were another paragraph but still part of verse 8, they printed what is known as the Shorter Ending, without any sign in the text to indicate that this was not in all manuscripts, etc. After a double space, there follows their translation of the Longer Ending, verses 9—2o and there are notes at the foot of the page that explain the problem. Anyone asked to read Mark 16.1—8, who had not studied the footnotes, would assume that the passage ended immediately before the beginning of verse 9, and would therefore include the Shorter Ending in the reading. Was this, however, simply a printer’s error that escaped the eye of the proof reader? There was a reprint of the book in the year of publication, but there was no correction of the text at this point.

Third, a major commentary on Mark was published in 1993, by Robert H. Gundry;6 his view is that Mark 16.8 is not the last verse of the paragraph that began at 16. 1, but the first verse of another paragraph that is incomplete. In this now mutilated paragraph the evangelist described how the disciples saw Jesus in Galilee in fulfilment of the prediction in Mark 14.28. Gundry provides twelve reasons for thinking that this is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended, together with further notes. He does not, however, explain how the disciples received the message to go to Galilee, which 16.7 implies they needed; or provide a satisfactory account of why Mark has told his readers about the visit of the women to the tomb, if it was to have no connection with the continuation of the narrative of the disciples.

The suggestion that Mark intended to end his Gospel at 16.8 was first made by Wellhausen in 1903, and in taking up the topic again, over ninety years later, I want to draw attention to an English writer, the first English writer, I suppose, to support Wellhausen on this matter.7 J. M. Creed’s article, ‘The Conclusion of the Gospel according to Saint Mark’, was published in 1 930, eight years before R. H. Lightfoot’s Locality and Doctrine in the Gospels, and as it has never been republished and is only available to those who have access to back numbers of the Journal of Theological Studies, I shall attempt to give a selective summary of the argument; but the reader should be warned that this is only a summary, and that the argument in the article is concise and, in some parts, obscure. Creed begins by stating the problem of the variant readings: (i) the ending at 16.8 in XB, the old Syriac, codex a;9 (ii) the Shorter Ending, in codex k; (iii) the last twelve verses of the received text. Neither (ii) nor (iii) is thought to be by Mark, but to end at 16.8 as in (i) would be very abrupt; hence ‘many scholars are inclined to conjecture that a further paragraph recounting at the least the appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples in Galilee, which the angel predicts in v. 7, has disappeared’. (Throughout the article, Creed refers to the young man in Mark 16.5—7 as an angel, though Mark himself does not describe him in this way.) Creed’s intention, he says, is to argue that ‘it is very improbable that the genuine Gospel was ever longer than it now is’; he refers to Wellhausen and E. Meyer, who both held the same view as Creed, but he believes that he is stating the argument in a different way from them.

He then notices briefly the hypotheses that have been framed to account for the supposed incompleteness of the Gospel, namely: (i) that the author died before finishing it; (ii) that the text was deliberately mutilated; and (iii) that it was mutilated by accident, and he finds them all inadequate as explanations of the conjecture that the text is incomplete, ‘unless we are compelled to do so by the document itself’. This is the main purpose of the article, and what makes it so significant: Creed is attending to Mark’s text, and enquiring whether there is anything in it that suggests incompleteness.

He then draws our attention to what he calls ‘a strange incoherence’ in the Marcan text; namely, the contradiction between what the women are commanded to do, in verse 7, and what they fail to do, in verse 8: they are charged to tell the disciples, but they remain silent. He says that this is ‘a very startling phenomenon’, which is not always remarked.

There is incoherence in the Marcan narrative significant incoherence — but it is latent. So long as we stop at v. 8 it does not really matter. But, on the theory of the lost conclusion, how are we to proceed? The latent incoherence will at once become intolerable. For we must suppose one of two things: either the lost conclusion was continuous with the story of the women, or else it made a fresh start with the disciples and their vision of the Lord in Galilee. It is hard to combine either supposition with verses 7 and 8 of chapter xvi. For v. 8 has effectively dismissed the women from further immediate participation in events, while v. 7 urgently demands their intervention.

He then considers the suggestion that had been made a few years earlier by C. H. Turner, that the lost ending related how Jesus appeared to the women and quieted their fears, so that they were able to tell the disciples; but he criticizes this, on the ground that ‘they said nothing to anybody’ must mean ‘they did not deliver the message’. ‘If the narrative of the women at the tomb is to be linked up with narratives of the appearances, it is essential that the women should deliver the message.’ Creed then draws our attention to the way in which Matthew and Luke have achieved this result: ‘by suppressing the telltale words, “they said nothing to anybody”; that was the only way in which they could make the story of the women lead on to the story of the disciples.

He then takes up the alternative hypothesis, that Mark made a fresh start with the journey of the disciples to Galilee, and refers to Kirsopp Lake’s suggestion that the disciples had already left Jerusalem; that was why the women were unable to tell them what the ‘angel’ had said. But Creed points out that there is a decisive objection to this: ‘The angel, on this theory, gives a message to the women which it was impossible for them to deliver. This ought not to be, and we may securely assume that it was not so.’

Creed then explains that what he is doing is asking how Mark could have proceeded, if he did; he must, Creed says, either have left ‘the angel’s message hanging in the air’, or else he must have explained why it was not delivered to the disciples. Neither of these two courses seems probable. ‘Internal evidence, therefore, as well as external probability, seems to point to the conclusion that the Marcan narrative never went beyond the words, “for they were afraid”.’

Creed makes one further point: he suggests an explanation of how it was that the ‘incoherence’ arose. Mark, he thinks, was working on traditions that were already in existence; one of them was the story of the women at the tomb, which might have ‘but recently come into circulation’. He follows E. Meyer in thinking that Mark inserted verse 7 into this traditional unit, without noticing that the silence of the women would make it impossible for the narrative to continue — but, in any case, he had no intention of continuing. The problem only arose when Matthew and Luke wanted to link the story of the women at the tomb to the account of appearances to disciples. ‘The absence of that link in Mark is an indication that in his Gospel no narrative followed.’

The strength of Creed’s argument that 16.8 was the intended conclusion to the Gospel lies in the method that he used: he paid attention to what Mark actually wrote; and he asks, Having written this, in these words, could he have written more? Creed challenges anyone who upholds the hypothesis of a lost ending to the Gospel to say how that ending could have followed on from verses 1—8, without hiatus, contradiction or redundancy. He observes the distinction, which is not always made, between what happened (to the women and the disciples, on Easter day) and what Mark wrote (when he composed his book); it is a method of studying a Gospel that has yielded rich results, but in 1930 it was novel, and Creed should be honoured as one of the earliest writers in England to approach a problem in the Gospels in this way.

I do not intend to go further and offer an explanation as to why Mark ended his Gospel thus. There has been no shortage of interpretations. Was it that the evangelist had an anti-Jerusalem bias — the apostles themselves (‘his disciples and Peter’) never received the message from the young man, therefore they did not believe in the resurrection, but were still in sin? Or was it that the evangelist was engaged in a controversy between followers of Paul and the sort of people he described as super-apostles (2 Corinthians 12.11) — he describes the disciples in Mark as failures, because he is attacking people who do not understand the cross or the resurrection? Or is the ending a literary device, whereby the audience is addressed over the shoulders of the women, and the question is left in the air, Was the young man right? Is Christ risen? One could compare the way in which the book of Jonah ends with a question.

I do not intend to comment on these or on any other interpretations of the end of Mark, because it seems to me that it is important to separate, as far as we possibly can, two kinds of question: What is the text? and, Why was it written? There were terms that described the distinction, but they are seldom used now: lower criticism and higher criticism.10 The end of Mark belongs more to the former than to the latter.

I suspect that the reason why there is still opposition to the view that 16.8 was the intended ending of the Gospel is because people do not want to buy any of the explanations that have been offered with it as a package deal. There is no need to attach the question of the ending to any particular explanation; it is a question on its own.

Nor, of course, is there any need to think that, if Mark meant to end there, it was because he did not believe in the resurrection. It would not follow that if he did not include resurrection appearances, he did not believe that Christ was risen. He refers to the resurrection directly or indirectly at the following points in his book: 8.31, 38; 9.9, 31; 10.34; 12.10—11, 18—27,35—7; 13.26—7; 14.28,58,62; 16.6.Did he need to say more? More about Mark J. Fenton (SPCK 2001) p. 15

(I did a bit of digging, prompted by a discussion on The Ship of Fools http://forum.ship-of-fools.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=15&t=002194#000015, and discovered that

John Lightfoot, in ‘The Gospel Message of Mark’ says that Mark also uses ‘gar’ in 11:18 and 16:4. However, neither is at the end of a sentence.

Mark isn’t the only one to end a sentence with ‘gar’.

See the Septuagint version of Genesis 18:15 and Genesis 45:3

Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew ends a paragraph with it.

To return to the home page, click on the header at the top of this page.