Thoughts on Mark 16

Today’s reading: Numbers 8; Mark 16

Mark 16 is an interesting chapter to me because of all the functional questions it brings up about the text itself. 

Most bibles will have a note after verse 8 saying that the earliest manuscripts don’t contain verses 9-20, but when you stop and think about it, that seems pretty odd. On the one hand, verse 8 seems like an incredibly abrupt place to end the gospel if you don’t have anything after it, but on the other hand, 12 verses seems like a long chunk of text to chalk up to being a scribal copying error or anything. So what’s going on with it? Plus, those last 12 verses don’t seem to fit entirely stylistically with the rest of Mark, and they include content not found anywhere else. The content issue is especially important because Mark was the first gospel account written and Matthew and Luke both seem to use it as a primary source, so while finding unique material in Mathew or Luke makes sense, finding unique material in Mark does not.

This has led to a lot of theories and speculations about what is happening with Mark 16 and whether the extra verses (or some subset of them) are authentic or not.

My personal take is that they are not original, and that the abrupt ending is intentional to try to mirror the similarly abrupt ending of the book of Chronicles in the Old Testament. If you’re interested in that theory you can read my full write up about it here: https://www.thoughtsontheword.com/2023/03/the-gospel-of-mark-as-the-sequel-to-chronicles.html

But I also thought I would point out a view that I had never considered before, and I’m not sure I fully agree with, but that I definitely think is worth consideration. In my write up on my theory for the abrupt ending of Mark, I link to Mike Winger’s video on the authenticity of the longer ending of Mark, which is long, but totally worth watching if you’re interested in the scholarly views in the debate: https://www.youtube.com/live/WJilpQsl4vc?feature=share

To give the quick summary of where Mike lands on the issue, he would say that the longer ending is pretty much assuredly not original, but that doesn’t mean it’s not authentic, so he still wants it in his bible.

While he lands on the shorter ending being most likely original, he thinks it is likely that it was left short to let eyewitnesses finish the story. Mark was written very early, probably only a decade or so after Jesus’ death, so there are still a ton of eyewitnesses to these events around, and there is evidently precedent for an ancient work leaving a gap for eyewitness testimony to fill in since that would be so much more powerful than written testimony. Eventually though, either as eye witnesses are dying off, or when the church has spread too broad and is going to places without eyewitnesses to fill in the story, its possible that church leaders (i.e. the Apostles who have authority to write Scripture), wrote down the eyewitness testimony that they would normally give in person and added it to the scroll so that the story was complete as it spread beyond their physical presence. This would explain why it is not in the earliest manuscripts, has a different writing style from the rest of the book, and includes content that Matthew and Luke don’t use, but would also explain why, when it does start appearing in manuscripts, the early church seemed to accept it as legitimate.

This is how you end up with scripture that is not original, but is authentic, if it is appended later by someone with authority to write Scripture.

Personally, I don’t really land where Mike does on it, but it is a really interesting perspective that accounts for all the data well and is entirely possible, so I wanted to share it here too in case anybody else found it interesting or compelling.