By Caleb Jenkins – Executive Pastor – Leawood Campus
This week as we end our preaching series of the Gospel according to Mark, you might notice that we end the Scripture reading at chapter 16, verse 8. “They (the women) went out and ran from the tomb, because trembling and astonishment overwhelmed them. And they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid.” What a weird and anticlimactic ending to a book!
You may see some extra verses (16:9–20) bracketed off in your Bible with a heading like “The Longer Ending of Mark”, which contains the more “normal” gospel ending with Jesus appearing to and commissioning his disciples, plus some weird snake-handling stuff. Even though this seems like it should be the ending of the gospel (apart from the serpent stuff!), we will not be preaching from it. Let me explain why by first giving some background about Scripture, and why we have confidence in the Bible as God’s word.
What is the Bible?
Christ Community Church and the Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA), the broader association of churches to which we belong, believes that God inspired the words human authors wrote that have been gathered together into the Bible. According to our statement of faith, “We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings….”
We believe this because Jesus, as the truest revelation of God (John 1:14–18; Hebrews 1:1–3), endorsed the entire Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) as God’s word that will never become void (Matthew 5:17–18; John 10:34–35). He even identifies the voice of the human author in Scripture as God’s own voice (Matthew 19:4–6; Mark 12:36). Jesus also authorized his disciples to produce authoritative teaching in line with his message that became our New Testament (John 10:27, 14:26).
His earliest followers agreed in identifying all Scripture as originating in God and containing absolute truth (1 Timothy 3:15–17; 2 Peter 1:20–21). These biblical writings demonstrate themselves to be God’s word. They were received as such by the earliest Christians, even as early as Peter viewing Paul’s writings to be as authoritative as the Hebrew Bible (1 Peter 3:15–16). From the beginning, to be a follower of Jesus is to build your life on God’s word as found in the Bible. This book becomes the center of our gathered worship experience as we hear it read, sung, prayed, and preached over all of us together.
How do we know what are the true biblical writings and what are not? This is why the original writings are so important. Mark’s Gospel is viewed as Scripture because it was written by an apostle (or under an apostle’s direction, as Mark wrote Peter’s recollections of Jesus), showed itself to be God’s word, and was received by the early church as authoritative. If I added my own thoughts to the end of Mark’s Gospel, or any other book of the Bible, those words would not be seen as part of the Bible and would not be viewed as God’s word, no matter how insightful I might think they are! In a similar way, if people, even with good intentions, added extra stories or comments to a part of Scripture after it was already written and received by the church, those sections should not be considered as Scripture. Otherwise, the Bible wouldn’t distinctly be God’s word.
How do we know what the original writings are?
We do not have Mark’s or any other biblical author’s original manuscript. That does not mean we have no clue about what their original writings included. We have many copies made by Christians throughout history that can be used to determine this. There is an entire field of scholarly study called “textual criticism”, and people in this field of study use their God-given talents to serve the broader church by comparing these manuscripts to determine which readings are more likely to be the original.
To make a really complex discipline way too simple, when discrepancies between different copies are found, the reading that is found in the majority of the older copies is more likely to be the original reading.
When this comparison is done, it becomes apparent which changes were done, either accidentally or intentionally. Even many of the intentional changes can be seen as misguided instead of malicious; a copyist simply wanting to add a brief explanation to help readers better understand or including something they mistakenly believed was originally in Scripture.
But before you start getting uneasy about whether we can still trust Scripture if there have been so many errors in copying it down throughout history, know this: after a few hundred years of serious scholarly criticism and discoveries of thousands of new manuscripts from centuries earlier and closer to the time of the early church, the changes to the Bible have been minuscule.
There are only a handful of places (this passage in Mark, 1 John 5:6–7, and John 7:53–8:11) where a new discovery has substantially changed how a passage is read, and not a single Christian doctrine has been affected by these discoveries.
So, we can be reasonably confident that the Bible we have is a trustworthy reflection of the original writings. Far from this scholarly inquiry and reason harming our faith, it has actually bolstered it, with the Bible displaying a much more reliable transmission history than any other ancient text.
So what about “The Longer Ending of Mark”?
Looking back at Mark 16:9–20, it is clear this story was not in Mark’s original gospel. Your Bible likely has brackets around this story with a note that says something like “The earliest manuscripts end at verse 8.”
While this passage is found in most later Greek manuscripts, the earliest omit it, notably the two earliest complete copies of the New Testament: Codex Sinaiticus (c. 325 AD) and Codex Vaticanus (300–350 AD). Two of the earliest translations of the Greek New Testament (Syriac and Armenian) do not include it either. Furthermore, two early church fathers writing on Mark, Clement of Alexandria (150–215 AD) and Origen (185–253), assume the Gospel ends at 16:8. Finally, two early Christian scholars, Eusebius (260–339 AD) and Jerome (345–420 AD), state that the best and earliest Markan manuscripts available to them end at 16:8, and dismiss the longer ending as inauthentic.
In addition to the manuscript evidence, you have to also ask yourself which seems more likely. Did multiple Christian scribes who believed in the resurrection of Jesus intentionally or accidentally omit a dozen verses at the end of Mark’s gospel? Did well-meaning Christian scribes feel bad that Mark didn’t finish his gospel properly by not having an appearance of the risen Jesus? Or was it assumed the ending had been lost, and so they added an account that is a harmonization of the stories in Matthew, John, and Luke? Since we have various endings of Mark after verse 8, and even some manuscripts that include multiple endings in them, the latter is much more likely.
Why does Mark end his gospel the way he does?
Some have suggested that Mark’s original gospel ending was lost, which is why some manuscripts don’t have it and others made up a plausible ending. But I think we have Mark’s Gospel the way we are meant to have it, and his literary skill is showing.
If Mark ended his gospel with “they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid” what is he trying to say? Mark has been a master of irony throughout his entire gospel. He tells us that Jesus is the Son of God in chapter 1, verse 1, and even has demons and Roman oppressors proclaim this truth (Mark 1:23–26, 15:39). Yet we see people over and over again question who this man is. Even after his disciples get it right, they clearly don’t understand that Jesus’ messianic mission is to suffer and die to save God’s people, so much so that Jesus claims Peter is satanic in this thinking (Mark 8:27–33). In story after story, Jesus heals people and then tells them “Don’t say anything to anyone”, so that Jesus’ messianic mission won’t be misunderstood. Each and every time, they go right out and tell people and Jesus’ popularity only grows (e.g. Mark 1:45).
Only two times in Mark is someone commanded to proclaim what miracle they have seen, and both occur in a graveyard. In Mark 5, Jesus casts out a legion of demons from someone who had come out of living in the tombs. Afterward he is commanded to tell everyone what the Lord did for him, and he does go out proclaiming what Jesus had done for him. This foreshadows Jesus’ ultimate victory over evil spiritual forces of death so that we can all be free. In Mark 16, once again in a graveyard right after someone had come out of a tomb, the women who observed the miracle of the empty tomb are commanded to go and tell, and instead of doing so they are silent and afraid.
This beautiful irony leaves us asking ourselves what will we do? Will we be afraid and allow that fear to silence us from proclaiming the liberation we have found through Jesus? Or will we have courage like the formerly demon-possessed man (and the women as well since we know their story), and go proclaim how much Jesus has done for us, despite our fears?
As Eugene Peterson writes in his book, Under the Unpredictable Plant,
“[Mark] doesn’t presume to write our conclusion for us. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t push. He has just brought a completely new genre of literature into being, a ‘gospel,’ but instead of wrapping it up as a finished product so we can admire his genius, at the last minute he steps aside… hands us the pen and says, ‘Here, you write it, write a resurrection conclusion with your life.’”
What should we do with the “Longer Ending”?
There are so many stories of God working in the world that encourage, challenge, and inspire us. These include writings by the Jewish people between the Old and New Testament, early Christian writings, church history, and experiences that you and I have today. There is nothing wrong with cherishing and learning from these stories. Most of them are probably true! According to the best evidence we have, “The Longer Ending of Mark” fits into this category.
Jesus really did rise from the dead and appear to his disciples, and the “Longer Ending” appears to harmonize and summarize the other three gospel accounts. While mostly true, we also must be cautious and discerning about applying them to our lives. We shouldn’t handle venomous snakes or drink poison as a means to prove our faith (Mark 16:18). That passage should be seen as an allusion to God’s general protection of his chosen messengers (for example, Paul surviving a snake bite in Acts 28:3–6), rather than promises we should claim.
However, as disciples of Jesus, we make a distinction between these stories, which may contain errors, and God’s word that is without error in its original writings. The former stories certainly can be read privately and even referenced in public teaching, but they should not be read and affirmed as God’s word by Christians. They are not a part of the Bible we build our life on, that is uniquely “to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”
Further Reading
Evangelical Convictions: a Theological Exposition of the Statement of Faith of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Minneapolis, MN: Free Church Publications, 2011.
Blomberg, Craig. “The Reliability of the New Testament”. The Gospel Coalition. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/reliability-new-testament/
A Case against the Longer Ending of Mark
Hill, Charles. Who Chose the New Testament Books?. Deerfield, IL: Christ on Campus Initiative, 2018. https://www.christoncampuscci.org/ntbooks/
