Mark 16 - My Thoughts

Chapter 16 of Mark is the last Chapter of Mark and in many ways the most confusing Chapter of Mark. As a matter of fact, I’d be prepared to say that in my opinion Mark 16 might be the most confusing Chapter in the entire Bible! There are really two separate pieces of writing included in Mark 16. In fact, you could say that there’s two and two thirds separate pieces of writing included in Mark 16 – and it’s arguable that each of those separate pieces of writing was written by a different author and has a very different message. So without getting into the content specifically for now let me just outline how Mark 16 is structured. The Chapter begins with an account of the resurrection – although, to be fair, it isn’t actually an account of the resurrection. It’s an account of the discovery of the empty tomb by the women who had gone to anoint Jesus’ body but there are no actual appearances by Jesus. Mark’s Gospel in its original form seems to have ended on a bit of a note of mystery. That’s verses 1-8 of Mark 16. It’s very bare bones, and just as Mark began his Gospel with no mention of Jesus’ birth, he really doesn’t have much to say at the end of his Gospel about Jesus’ resurrection. Verses 1-8 come across as a sort of epilogue to the story. Then you have verses 9-20 of Mark 16. This is usually called “The Longer Ending of Mark.” It seems to have been a later addition to the Gospel and it seems to have been written by a different author because the writing style is different. So if Mark 16:1-8 is “authentic” in the sense that it’s written by the same person who wrote the rest of the Gospel, verses 9-20 are not. They’re canonical – this is the ending of Mark 16, accepted by virtually all Christian traditions as the last 12 verses of Mark’s Gospel, but they seem to have been written by someone else and added later, presumably to fill in some details of the story of the resurrected Jesus. Some of the stories here are familiar (there are more detailed versions of many of them in Luke and Matthew) and some are very strange and even problematic. But what we take from this “Longer Ending of Mark” is that the Christian community was dissatisfied with the mysterious kind of ending found in the original version of the Gospel and demanded more, which some unknown author was willing to provide and add on to the end of the Gospel as a sort of appendix to the story. Those are two pieces of Mark 16, but I said there were two and a two thirds pieces. So – where’s the rest? (Or, what’s the rest?) Verses 9-20, as I said, are called “The Longer Ending of Mark” – which begs the question of what the shorter ending of Mark is. Many people assume that the shorter ending of Mark is verses 1-8, and some Bible translators even say that. But that really isn’t true. The “Shorter Ending of Mark” was an addition to the text inserted by some unknown author at some point after the original (and probably before verses 9-20.) It is not considered canonical – the Christian community doesn’t consider it part of the Bible. Some translations of the Bible, though, include it in a footnote, and if you go to the New Revised Standard Version of Mark 16 on the Bible Gateway online, you’ll find that it’s included in squared brackets right after v.8 and before v.9. Obviously there was early dissatisfaction with how the Gospel had ended, and these words were added immediately after v.8 in which the women “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” even though their instructions had been to tell Peter. Complete silence was obviously an inconsistency with what the women had actually been instructed to do, and so someone added these words: “And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” It’s still pretty barebones, but it’s a very early attempt to tie up a loose end that was created by the women being silent and not passing on the message they were given for Peter and the apostles. The church in the end accepted the “Longer Ending of Mark” as canonical and not that addendum known as the “Shorter Ending of Mark,” but the editorial work that was clearly done over time on how to end this Gospel probably demonstrates that the earliest Christian community wasn’t sure what to make of the resurrection or even how central the resurrection was to the story of Jesus. As I’ve pointed out several times, Mark’s priority was clearly the crucifixion and the immediate events leading up to the crucifixion. The “Longer Ending of Mark” (along with the endings of the other three Gospels, each of which include far more description of the resurrected Jesus) suggests that ultimately the Christian community wanted to know more about the resurrection than was originally considered necessary, just as the inclusion in Matthew and Luke of the stories of Jesus’ birth (and in John of the story of Jesus’ pre-existence) show that the early Christian community wanted to know more about the incarnation than was originally considered necessary. There’s also an addition to verse 14 that I’ll speak about later which is basically about Satan. So this is a very confusing Chapter just in terms of trying to trace how it developed and was edited over time.

 

Mark starts Chapter 16 by offering us a bit of a timeline. You might remember that at the end of Chapter 15 he had made the point that “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.” Obviously the reason for that was to make sure that the reader understood when Chapter 16 begins that the women knew exactly where they were going, because they had been there before. Chapter 16 identifies Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James (who is also the mother of Joses according to 15:40 – there’s no real explanation as to why Mark identifies her a little differently in each of his three references to her) as two of the women who go to the tomb – again, they had seen the tomb, they knew where it was, they weren’t going to go to the wrong tomb and claim that Jesus was gone by mistake! Mark also adds Salome to the list of women going to the tomb. They bought spices “when the Sabbath was over” – the Sabbath would have ended on Saturday night – but only “when the sun had risen” – Sunday morning – did they actually go to the tomb. The question they had discussed – ““Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” – was an interesting one, because it suggests that although they were going to the tomb they had no idea of how they would even get into the tomb. There’s almost an expression of faith in this – rather than a lament that they might not be able to get in to the tomb, there’s a hopefulness that somehow the tomb will be opened. It is important to understand, though, that the women clearly understood what they thought their mission was: as much as Jesus had said that he would die and be raised, they were expecting to anoint a dead body. That’s what they believed they would find.

 

Mark notes that the stone had already been rolled away when they arrived, but the women don’t actually enter the tomb. They encounter a “young man, dressed in a white robe …” He’s the one who tells them that Jesus has been raised. Mark doesn’t identify this “young man” as an angel, although the “white robe” he’s said to be dressed in probably is meant to identify him as some sort of heavenly messenger. His instructions are that the women are tell to Peter that the risen Jesus is “going ahead of you to Galilee” – implicitly, then, instructing Peter to go to Galilee. The fact that the instructions are to go to Peter affirm Peter’s place as the leader of the group of apostles. But Mark makes clear that the women simply fled (out of “terror and amazement”) and “said nothing to anyone.” Both fear and amazement are understandable enough reactions to what they had experienced, but it’s an entirely anti-climactic ending to the story and it raises more questions than it answers: most importantly, if these three women were the ones who had gone to the tomb and had this experience, and if they then didn’t tell anyone, wouldn’t the story of the resurrection have ended with them and never been passed on? Why Mark would have chosen to end his Gospel on that note is impossible to say. What we do know, as I suggested above, is that it raised a question that virtually demanded an answer and invited editors to take on that project.

 

So let’s take a brief look at the “Shorter Ending of Mark” – a brief look, because it isn’t considered canonical and therefore really falls outside a normal Bible Study, but it’s interesting because it helps trace the evolution of the “Longer Ending of Mark” that we’ll move on to. So here, again, is what it says: “And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” Obviously, somebody wanted to clean up the unsatisfying ending to Mark’s Gospel we had seen in verse 8, and so they added verse 8.5. Basically, it establishes (a bit awkwardly I would say) a handful of things. First, the women didn’t stay silent – they actually told those around Peter what they had discovered. Second, Jesus really was raised from the dead (Mark had only said that indirectly through the young man in white, but here Jesus does something – he gives the disciples a mission.) Third, the mission of the church is identified – it’s to “share the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” That, however, is still obviously considered too vague and barebones (and, I would say in today’s language, a bit “jargon-y” – as in “the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”) Clearly, this addition didn’t satisfy the Christian community, and eventually another ending to Mark’s Gospel was composed that the church, in its wisdom, chose to accept as canonical – the “Longer Ending of Mark.” That’s what we’ll look at now.

 

The “Longer Ending of Mark” is actually a really strange piece of writing – made even stranger by the fact that as I said earlier there’s actually even a later editorial addition to the “Longer Ending of Mark.” One of the most interesting things about the “Longer Ending of Mark” is that it reverses the relationship between Mark and the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark is almost universally acknowledged as the earliest of those three Gospels – but it’s also almost universally accepted that the “Longer Ending of Mark” is much (MUCH!) later than Matthew and Luke. In fact, both Clement of Alexandria and Origen (3^rd century theologians) wrote commentaries on the New Testament that make absolutely no mention of verses 9-20. So they seem to have been added sometimes later than that. Some suggest that they were added by the Council of Nicea, which recognized that a major issue with Mark’s Gospel was that it included no references to the risen Jesus actually having been seen by anyone, but we don’t know for sure who added them or exactly when. There’s a kind of knee jerk reaction among many people that whenever anything from the early church is a mystery the default answer is “the Council of Nicea did it!” But we honestly don’t know. But since we do know that they were a very late addition, we also can easily look at most of the stories included and see that they were condensed versions of stories found in Matthew and Luke that really don’t add much to the story of Jesus but that do add some appearances of Jesus to Mark’s story. But there are two things that need some special attention.

 

The first is the signs that are supposed to accompany the disciples of Jesus: “And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” Casting out demons and laying hands on the sick fits with the overall pattern of Mark’s Gospel – as we’ve seen Mark writes a lot about the exorcism of demons and the sick being healed. The mention of speaking in new tongues is interesting. The first Christian reference we have to that phenomenon is probably in 1 Corinthians when Paul lists the gifts of the Spirit, which would have been written a few years after Mark, and then the story of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. And the idea that the handling of poisonous snakes and the drinking of poison won’t harm a disciple is simply weird. The reference to the snakes is probably derived from a story in the first 5 verses of Acts 28 in which Paul is bitten by a snake and simply shakes it off, amazing those who saw it by not dying. But there was no suggestion that this was to be normative for Christians. And there are no recorded instances in the Bible or other early Christian literature of Christians drinking poison and surviving. Of course, these latter two signs have spawned an entire movement within what you might call hyper-charismatic Christianity: the so-called snake handling churches that started in the Appalachian region of the United States in the early 20^th century.

 

The other interesting later addition to Mark 16 is a passage added on (in some ancient texts) to the end of verse 14. In verse 14 the risen Jesus admonishes his disciples for their lack of faith for not believing the story of the two disciples mentioned in verses 12-13 who had encountered the risen Jesus while they were out walking (which is obviously a much condensed version of the story of Cleopas and an unnamed disciple in Luke’s Gospel.) Whoever chose to make the addition obviously felt the need to either excuse or defend the eleven who didn’t believe the story, as well as to tie up a loose end regarding Satan, and he does so by adding these words at the end of verse 14:

 

“And they excused themselves, saying, “This age of lawlessness and unbelief is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to prevail over the unclean things of the spirits. Therefore reveal your righteousness now” - thus they spoke to Christ. And Christ replied to them, “The term of years of Satan’s power has been fulfilled, but other terrible things draw near. And for those who have sinned I was handed over to death, that they may return to the truth and sin no more, that they may inherit the spiritual and imperishable glory of righteousness that is in heaven.”

 

If you’re interested, this addition isn’t actually given a verse number. It’s called the “Freer Logion” by scholars. It seems to have been written in the 5^th century and it serves two basic purposes: it explains the lack of faith of the disciples that Mark has commented on throughout the Gospel as we’ve seen – so, really, the devil made them do it! It’s also believed to be a way to close the book on Satan’s power, so to speak. Satan and satanic power is a big part of Mark’s Gospel, and someone at some point thought it was appropriate to formally acknowledge the end of his power.