The “Strange” Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Why It Makes All the Difference
James Tabor presents a fresh look at the original text of the earliest Gospel
This article about the Gospel of Mark was originally published on Dr. James Tabor’s popular TaborBlog, a site that discusses and reports on “‘All things biblical’ from the Hebrew Bible to Early Christianity in the Roman World and Beyond.” Bible History Daily first republished the article with consent of the author in April 2013. Visit TaborBlog today, or scroll down to read a brief bio of James Tabor below.
Holy Women at Christ’s Tomb, by Annibale Carracci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing.
Most general Bible readers have the mistaken impression that Matthew, the opening book of the New Testament, must be our first and earliest Gospel, with Mark, Luke and John following. The assumption is that this order of the Gospels is a chronological one, when in fact it is a theological one. Scholars and historians are almost universally agreed that Mark is our earliest Gospel–by several decades, and this insight turns out to have profound implications for our understanding of the “Jesus story” and how it was passed down to us in our New Testament Gospel traditions.
The problem with the Gospel of Mark for the final editors of the New Testament was that it was grossly deficient. First it is significantly shorter than the other Gospels–with only 16 chapters compared to Matthew (28), Luke (24) and John (21). But more important is how Mark begins his Gospel and how he ends it.
He has no account of the virgin birth of Jesus–or for that matter, any birth of Jesus at all. In fact, Joseph, husband of Mary, is never named in Mark’s Gospel at all–and Jesus is called a “son of Mary,” see my previous post on this here. But even more significant is Mark’s strange ending. He has no appearances of Jesus following the visit of the women on Easter morning to the empty tomb!
Like the other three Gospels Mark recounts the visit of Mary Magdalene and her companions to the tomb of Jesus early Sunday morning. Upon arriving they find the blocking stone at the entrance of the tomb removed and a young man–notice–not an angel–tells them:
“Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing (Mark 16:6-8)
And there the Gospel simply ends!
Mark gives no accounts of anyone seeing Jesus as Matthew, Luke, and John later report. In fact, according to Mark, any future epiphanies or “sightings” of Jesus will be in the north, in Galilee, not in Jerusalem.
This original ending of Mark was viewed by later Christians as so deficient that not only was Mark placed second in order in the New Testament, but various endings were added by editors and copyists in some manuscripts to try to remedy things. The longest concocted ending, which became Mark 16:9-19, became so treasured that it was included in the King James Version of the Bible, favored for the past 500 years by Protestants, as well as translations of the Latin Vulgate, used by Catholics. This meant that for countless millions of Christians it became sacred scripture–but it is patently bogus. You might check whatever Bible you use and see if the following verses are included–the chances are good they they will be, since the Church, by and large, found Mark’s original ending so lacking. Here is that forged ending of Mark:
Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it. After these things he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them. Afterward he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were reclining at table, and he rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover. So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs.
Even though this ending is patently false, people loved it, and to this day conservative Christians regularly denounce “liberal” scholars who point out this forgery, claiming that they are trying to destroy “God’s word.”
The evidence is clear. This ending is not found in our earliest and most reliable Greek copies of Mark. In A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger writes: “Clement of Alexandria and Origen [early third century] show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them.”1 The language and style of the Greek is clearly not Markan, and it is pretty evident that what the forger did was take sections of the endings of Matthew, Luke and John (marked respectively in red, green, and blue above) and simply create a “proper” ending.
Even though this longer ending became the preferred one, there are two other endings, one short and the second an expansion of the longer ending, that also show up in various manuscripts:
[I] But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after these things Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.
[II] 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 [or, does not allow what lies under the unclean spirits to understand the truth and power of God]. 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, in order that they may inherit the spiritual and incorruptible glory of righteousness that is in heaven.
I trust that the self-evident spuriousness of these additions is obvious to even the most pious readers. One might in fact hope that Christians who are zealous for the “inspired Word of God” would insist that all three of these bogus endings be recognized for what they are–forgeries.
Interested in the Gospels’ authors? Check out the Bible History Daily post “Gospel of John Commentary: Who Wrote the Gospel of John and How Historical is It?”
That said, what about the original ending of Mark? Its implications are rather astounding for Christian origins. I have dealt with this issue more generally in my post, “What Really Happened on Easter Morning,” that sets the stage for the following implications.
- Since Mark is our earliest Gospel, written according to most scholars around the time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE, or perhaps in the decade before, we have strong textual evidence that the first generation of Jesus followers were perfectly fine with a Gospel account that recounted no appearances of Jesus. We have to assume that the author of Mark’s Gospel did not consider his account deficient in the least and he was either passing on, or faithfully promoting, what he considered to be the authentic Gospel. What most Christians do when they think about Easter is ignore Mark. Since Mark knows nothing of any appearances of Jesus as a resuscitated corpse in Jerusalem, walking about, eating and showing his wounds, as recounted by Matthew, Luke and John, those stories are simply allowed to “fill in” for his assumed deficiency. In other words, no one allows Mark to have a voice. What he lacks, ironically, serves to marginalize and mute him!
- Alternatively, if we decide to listen to Mark, who is our first gospel witness, what we learn is rather amazing. In Mark, on the last night of Jesus’ life, he told his intimate followers following their meal, “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee” (Mark 14:28). What Mark believes is that Jesus has been “lifted up” or “raised up” to the right hand of God and that the disciples would “see” him in Galilee. Mark knows of no accounts of people encountering the revived corpse of Jesus, wounds and all, walking around Jerusalem. His tradition is that the disciples experienced their epiphanies of Jesus once they returned to Galilee after the eight-day Passover festival and had returned to their fishing in despair. This is precisely what we find in the Gospel of Peter, where Peter says:
Now it was the final day of the Unleavened Bread; and many went out returning to their home since the feast was over. But we twelve disciples of the Lord were weeping and sorrowful; and each one, sorrowful because of what had come to pass, departed to his home. But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, having taken our nets, went off to the sea. And there was with us Levi of Alphaeus whom the Lord …
You can read more about this fascinating “lost” Gospel of Peter at earlychristianwritings.com/gospelpeter.html, but this ending, where the text happens to break off, is most revealing. What we see here is precisely parallel to Mark. The disciples returned to their homes in Galilee in despair, resuming their occupations, and only then did they experience “sightings” of Jesus. Strangely, this tradition shows up in an appended ending to the Gospel of John–chapter 21, where a group of disciples are back to their fishing, and Matthew knows the tradition of a strange encounter on a designated mountain in Galilee, where some of the eleven apostles even doubt what they are seeing (Matthew 28:16-17).
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The faith that Mark reflects, namely that Jesus has been “raised up” or lifted up to heaven, is precisely parallel to that of Paul–who is the earliest witness to this understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. Paul notably parallels his own visionary experience to that of Peter, James, and the rest of the apostles. What this means is that when Paul wrote, in the 50s CE, this was the resurrection faith of the early followers of Jesus! Since Matthew, Luke, and John come so much later, and clearly reflect the period after 70 CE when all of the first witnesses were dead–including Peter, Paul, and James the brother of Jesus, they are clearly 2nd generation traditions and should not be given priority.
Mark begins his account with the line “The Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). Clearly for him, what he subsequently writes is that “Gospel,” not a deficient version that needs to be supplemented or “fixed” with later alternative traditions about Jesus appearing in a resuscitated body Easter weekend in Jerusalem.
Finally, what we recently discovered in the Talpiot tomb under the condominium building, not 200 feet from the “Jesus family” tomb, offers a powerful testimony to this same kind of early Christian faith in Jesus’ resurrection. On one of the ossuaries, or bone boxes in this tomb, is a four-line Greek inscription which I have translated as: I Wondrous Yehovah lift up–lift up! And this is next to a second ossuary representing the “sign of Jonah” with a large fish expelling the head of a human stick figure, recalling the story of Jonah. In that text Jonah sees himself as having passed into the gates of Sheol or death, from which he utters a prayer of salvation from the belly of the fish: “O Yehovah my God, you lifted up my life from the Pit!” (Jonah 2:6).
It is a rare thing when our textual evidence seems to either reflect or correspond to the material evidence and I believe in the case of the two Talpiot tombs, and the early resurrection faith reflected in Paul and Mark, that is precisely what we have.2 That this latest archaeological evidence corresponds so closely to Mark and Paul, our first witnesses to the earliest Christian understanding of Jesus’ resurrection, I find to be most striking.
Dr. James Tabor is a professor of Christian origins and ancient Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Since earning his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1981, Tabor has combined his work on ancient texts with extensive field work in archaeology in Israel and Jordan, including work at Qumran, Sepphoris, Masada and Wadi el-Yabis in Jordan. Over the past decade he has teamed up with with Shimon Gibson to excavate the “John the Baptist” cave at Suba, the “Tomb of the Shroud” discovered in 2000, Mt Zion and, along with Rami Arav, he has been involved in the re-exploration of two tombs in East Talpiot including the controversial “Jesus tomb.” Tabor is the author of the popular TaborBlog, and several of his recent posts have been featured in Bible History Daily as well as the Huffington Post. His book, Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity became immediately popular with specialists and non-specialists alike. You can find links to all of Dr. Tabor’s web pages, books, and projects at jamestabor.com.
Correction: In the original publication of this article, Bruce Metzger’s statement “Clement of Alexandria and Origen show no knowledge of the existence of these verses; furthermore Eusebius and Jerome attest that the passage was absent from almost all Greek copies of Mark known to them” (Metzger, 2005, p.123) was not appropriately referenced as a quotation from Metzger. We thank our careful reader James Snapp, Jr., of Curtisville Christian Church in Indiana, for bringing this to our attention. —Ed.
Notes
1. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition, (Hendrickson Publishers, 2005), 123. Metzger also states: “The last twelve verses of the commonly received text of Mark are absent from the two oldest Greek manuscripts (? and B), 20 from the Old Latin codex Bobiensis, the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript, about one hundred Armenian manuscripts, 21 and the two oldest Georgian manuscripts (written a.d. 897 and a.d. 913).”
2. We offer a full exposition of these important discoveries in our book, The Jesus Discovery. The book is a complete discussion of both Talpiot tombs with full documentation, with full chapters on Mary Magdalene, Paul, the James ossuary, DNA tests, and much more. You can read my preliminary report on these latest “Jonah” related findings at the website The Bible and Interpretation, bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/tab368003. During March and April, 2012 I also wrote a dozen or more posts on this blog responding to the academic discussions, see below under “Archives” and you can browse the posts by month.
Related reading in Bible History Daily
Does the Gospel of Mark Reveal Jesus’ Anger or His Compassion?
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These thoughts about eating bread as divine flesh and wine as divine blood are clearly not Jewish concepts. Its becoming more clear to me that these are some of the reasons why the Jews of that time (as today) rejected these strange pagan ideas! Its interesting that this cannabalistic idea has been attributed historically to Jews through the disgusting accusation of the blood libel when it is clearly a pagan-christian concept and has nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism. Yet Jews have been massacred throughout Christian history during easter for this atrocious and weird belief held by Christians. Yet, the christian movement ultimately has the capacity to serve as an educational transition for pagan cultures to embrace a life of morality in acknowledgment of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Creator who-alone- gives us life.
False accusations of this sort circulated about the ancient Greco-Roman world among pagans, as early as the 2nd century BCE. They were not prominent in the mutual propaganda campaigns waged by Jews and Christians against one another. It was in the 12th century CE that they became important. Historians nowadays tend to see the simultaneous beginning of the Crusades as more than a coincidence. When the feudal system arose, land was considered to be a grant ultimately from the king, but in a hierarchical order where every land holder had his estate as a grant from some land lord, to whom he owed certain duties. The tenant therefore had to swear an oath to fulful this obligation, and the legal form of this oath was couched in Christian terms that Jews could not sign. So the Jews of Europe, formerly mostly farmers, were forced off the land and had to move to cities. The same Papal reform movement that launched the Crusades also decreed that Christians could not lend money on interest, which prevented Christians from becoming bankers. But the economy had grown to need banks. So for a time it was primarily Jews, who of course were not under papal authority in such matters, were the principal bankers in Europe. This situation spawned the “Shylock” stereotype. Crusades are expensive, and those who organized them had to borrow funds, and the only lenders were Jewish bankers. It was not long before some of them realized that if the lender were subsequently wiped out, they would be relieved of the need to repay the debt. Blood libel tales now served as one of the pretexts for pogroms. (Their were others: when the Crusaders, who had seized control of Jerusalem, were subsequently driven out by the Muslims, Jews were blamed; when the Black Plague killed a huge number of Europeans, Jews were accused of causing it by poisoning the wells, &c.) It has not been “throughout history” that the blood libel fable motivated Christians to persecute Jews, but rather at particular times and places. By the nineteenth century, the ways in which were persecuted in Western Europe had become more subtle. There were no pogroms, and the blood libel was not cited to justify persecution. Unsurprisingly, the Nazis revived the blood libel. It had retained currency in much of eastern Europe, especially in the Russian Empire, where it was accepted by the government, which also winked at violent persecution of Jewish communities ; “pogrom” is a Russian word. Jews were certainly persecuted in the USSR, but not in the same way as formerly. They were formally recognized as a legitimate ethnic group among the citizens. Zionism was not tolerated, and to counter it Jews were given their own Soviet “homeland” (a frozen swamp in Siberia). Blood libel was not officially countenanced. Many to this day accept the phony _Protocols of the Elders of Zion_ as a real document of a vast Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Nowadays the blood libel accusation is most prominent in some Muslim anti-Israel statements.
If one believes in God, and that He is powerful enough to keep His word accurately preserved, then you have to take Mark 16:9-20 as part of the inspired word of God. The supposed “best manuscripts” that people like Tabor champion actually have a space where these verses would have been–the only such space in the entire codex!
Of course, if you don’t believe in the inspiration of the Bible (which Tabor obviously doesn’t), and don’t believe in the power of God (again, which Tabor obviously doesn’t), then you will have no problem rejecting any part of the Bible that you want to.
I happen to believe that God has the power to accurately preserve His word throughout the centuries. That includes Mark 16:9-20.
Not to be combative, but a theological supposition, built on top of another theological supposition based upon a hypothesis, an passed off as self-evident or fact leaves a lot to be desired.
Assumptions affect our lives and spoken and written words create realities whether they are true or not. Did the ante-Nicene writers draw the same conclusion as Dr. Tabor?
Are Matthew and Luke really just cut and paste jobs? What about the people that believe Lukan Priority or the priority of Matthew?
One assumption that has to be addressed is whether the writings are strictly historical records or are also supernatural and inspired as well – thousands of tangents we could go down but it has to be considered.
What do extant biblical writings say concerning priority? This has to be considered as well.
And Dr Tabor says “the evidence is clear” because the earliest and most reliable copies show no knowledge . . . This supposition only works if Markan Priority and the Q document hypothesis
I remember when scholarship also said Yeshua (Jesus) probably read from the Greek and called God Theos or Lord Kurios then we found Fouad 266 which had nestled among all that Greek the ashuri Hebrew script YHVH. We found this in Qumran too.
Maybe I am out of my league here, but passing a supposition off as an undisputable fact has led to more error over the years – remember when the church was sure that the sun revolved around the earth? I realize Dr Tabor might be taking the stance that he is Galileo or Copernicus in this instance, but for that to be true, proof needs to be offered instead of supposition and hypothesis.
Dear Mr. Shanks,
I have been away from BAR for awhile and upon my return this is the first article I read (actually from your twitter post). I feel very relieved to not have purchased as subscription. Furthermore, I feel very relived that none of my money went to support sophomoric and secular contemptuousness such as this. I’m breathing a sigh of relief.
I don’t seem to remember the articles associated with BAR sometime back being this bad. Overlooking for a moment this man’s contempt for the Holy Spirit, his contempt for the authors of the cannon of scripture, and his contempt for Christians, his arguments based on logic do not stand up to scrutiny…on logic alone he fails.
What I would like to know is: 1) Did you personally approve of this article? 2) Do you agree with what is being said by him? 3) Do you plan on running more articles of this nature in the future?
I will be perusing the BAR websites a little more to see if other articles like this are here. If this is indeed the direction you are heading Mr. Shanks, I would respectfully request that you remove the “B” from the BAR.
Thank you.
For those Christians who believe in inerrant inspiration of the ORIGINAL documents, given that even multiple copies made AT THE SAME TIME (e.g. Paul making 10 copies of a letter before distributing them to different couriers) inevitably have errors, and there are more discrepancies (most minor but some significant) between individual copies than the total word count of the New Testament, they must admit that we DO NOT HAVE the originals, only copies of copies of … for dozens or hundreds of copy generations. There are good technical readings for deciding which of two copies of a book is earlier and “better” which can be studied in detail by a curious reader, which is why, absent a determination not to let facts influence a preconceived theology, we can be sure that the ending of Mark was added by later scribes.
I am not aware of any good, scholarly evidence that Mark is NOT the earliest Gospel of which copies still exist, but in any event, the presence of CONTRADICTORY Nativity stories in Luke and Matthew and NONE in Mark is problematical. Matthew says Joseph and Mary started out living in Bethlehem, Jesus was born there, and they were probably planning to stay in Bethlehem for life, but divine warning of Herod’s slaughter led them to Egypt until Herod died, then to Nazareth rather than back to Bethlehem. Luke, in contradiction, says they started out living in Nazareth, then took a short trip to Bethlehem (under dangerous conditions) where Jesus was born, and after 40 days (the presentation in the Temple), not being bothered by Herod, went back home to Nazareth, with no need to detour to Egypt. But Mark, written perhaps 20 years BEFORE these two, has no nativity story, and even in the one place where he could have corrected the assumption of Jesus being born in Nazareth with a parenthetical comment (Nathaniel’s initial remark about nothing good coming out of Nazareth), he lets that assumption stand.
If the first generation of Christians CARED (theologically) about the Lord’s birthplace, that would have been mentioned (at least briefly) in at least ONE place in the pre-Markan epistles, i.e. mostly Paul’s, and in Mark itself. Perhaps there WAS a Nativity introduction in Mark, which stopped being copied sometime before Matthew and Luke? IF there was, and it corroborated Matthew’s story, it would have been kept in Mark and copied by Luke (since both of them did copy Mark’s material). IF it corroborated Luke’s story, likewise, it would have been kept in Mark and copied by Matthew. In either case, Matthew and Luke would have written stories that agree more closely with each other and with Mark. IF there was a third version of a Nativity story in Mark, which showed a Bethlehem birth, that would have been kept, and Matthew and Luke would have used THAT story rather than the versions they did use. BUT if there was a Nativity in Mark which DID NOT say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, then by the time Matthew and Luke were writing, rather than leave a story that interfered with then-growing theological beliefs in place, scribes would have started to omit that beginning of Mark (before the oldest known copy of ANY N.T. book that is known to be still extant), which would have the same effect as Mark never having written those words.
So the most reasonable conclusion is that for the original Apostles, and for Paul, and for the first 20-30 years AP (after Pentecost), Jesus was divine REGARDLESS of the place of birth, lineage or manner of conception, so they did not mention it, and they were STILL not mentioning it when Mark wrote his Gospel. But sometime in the NEXT 20 years a need to justify the divinity of Jesus to Jewish prospects with a Bethlehem birth and Davidic lineage, and to Gentiles (and Hellenistic Jews who only knew the Greek translation of the Scripture and were unaware of the mistranslation of ALMAH, young woman, to PARTHENOS, young woman who is a VIRGIN) arose, and the original story of a NAZARENE Savior would no longer win converts. So Matthew and Luke followed oral traditions that “guessed” at how the Bethlehem-or-Nazareth question could be resolved, and they followed different traditions. If there had been a reliable tradition supporting EITHER Matthew or Luke, both would have followed that tradition.
None of this is to take away from the DEVOTIONAL value of both books, but it seems that historically, the most reasonable assumption (Occam’s Razor) is: born in Nazareth but divine ANYWAY, and two different born-in-Bethlehem stories created later to satisfy unnecessary theological premises.
Additionally, AFTER the Christian Church became dominant, Jewish girls continued to hope that they would be blessed to give birth to the Messiah, even though the vast majority of them did NOT know for sure whether they (or their future husbands) were of the lineage of David, and did NOT live in Bethlehem or have any future prospect of moving or visiting there, and did NOT expect to conceive the Messiah before their weddings; therefore, none of these conditions was, except possibly in the first century, considered necessary by Jews for Messiahship. So, if those who are still waiting for the Messiah do not consider these conditions essential, why should the Messiah, whom we believe has already come, have had to fulfill them?
Why even mention the Gospel of Peter? It is rife with historical errors and came about much later. There are plenty of reasons it was rejected, as well it should have been. Luke wrote Acts after his Gospel, and Acts was most likely written around 62 AD or prior, since the deaths of James or Paul do not even come into view.
I very much appreciate Williams comments as being worth serious consideration. I would refer interested readers to http://truthceeker.wordpress.com/tag/lukan-priority/ for an excellent discussion of issues raised here. I found it enlightening and worth reading…much more so than the writings of scholars overstating their suppositions as “clearly” established by a lack of awareness of contrary evidence. It is our tendency to allow our beliefs (or lack thereof) to fill our horizons, to the exclusion of contrary evidence. We also tend to treat our lack of awareness of evidence, as evidence. Lack of evidence proves nothing. To say or write “clearly” often undermines our credibility. In the case of synoptic priority I think the evidence for Luke is compelling…but there’s too much evidence supporting other views for me to ever say it’s “clearly” so, even if I am personally convinced.
Mark 16:9-20
D. A. Carson (et al) have agreed that Mk. 16:9-20 is an amendment to the Gospel of Mark (“An Introduction to the New Testament”, 1992). They have pointed out that the text under consideration is missing from what are generally considered the two most important Manuscripts (MSS) ( uncials X and B) as well as others.They also said that Jerome and Eusebius both state that the best MSS available to them did not contain Mk. 16:9-20).
Carson (et al) have asked an impertinent question: If the Mk. 16:9-20 is not the original ending, what was? They have provided us with three possibilities:
i. Mark had the intention to include the information in Mk. 16:9-20 but was prevented from doing so due arrest or death by the Roman authorities.
ii. Mark may have written a longer ending to his Gospel, but it may have gotten misplaced in the course of transmission. Mk. 16:9-20 may have been torn off at some point in time.
iii. Mark’s Gospel is typified by a degree of secrecy and understatement. That is,as the first gospel to have been written, it was not made public immediately (because of fear of persecution from Rome) during which Mk. 16:9-20 was displaced.
The question we need to ask is: By amending the Gospel of Mark at the very end, was it illegal to have done so?
First, the information in Mk. 16:9-20 was in the public domain by the time the amendment took place. The information was well attested by the time the amendment was attached. Second, it was not illegal to supply the information at the end since it was not an embellishment – it was historical and factual. Third, quite likely the early believers did it for preservation, so that wherever Mark’s Gospel was read, the audience would have the full detail of the post-resurrection events as provided in Matthew, Luke and John.The ending of Mark’s Gospel is a bit truncated without the amendment. The amendment probably took place in the late 1st century or sometime in the 2nd century.
Conclusion. The amendment should not be referred to as forgery or false information. The early believers simply supplied the information that was already known throughout the Christian community – hence, we believe the amendment was done for the preservation of salvation-history; it was not done to mislead the public.
Cute theory regarding the spiritual resurrection and ascension of Christ and not the bodily one. I notice sometimes how easily some scholars sail through objections because their theory is more ‘enlightened’ (i.e. more skeptical and dismissive of tradtional Christianity) What happened to the source Q? It pre-dates Mark or is contemporary to Mark–and is a major source for Luke and Matthew? How about the church’s earliest preaching represented in Acts, written probably before the fall of Jerusalem since there is no mention of this fall. Jesus often spoke of being raise on the third day. The young man in Mark at the tomb is clearly an angel, and appears as angels always appear in the Bible when on earthly assignment, not with wings! but as young men (an angel appearing as a woman migth meet some resistance as a messenger of God in that culture) The ‘young man’ clearly had supernatural perspective. The gospel of Peter written in the 2nd or 3rd century supplies a missing puzzle piece for him? Paul is somehow a preacher of the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, really? Have you read the Pauline books, particularly 1 Cor? Have you seen the scorn Paul was given by the Athenians and others in the Greek world when he spoke of the bodily resurrection of Jesus?? Paul’s encounter with Jesus is somehow a refelction of the other Apostles encounters? Paul said he was like one born out of time, or literally in the Greek ‘like one who gestated too long’ so he missed the bodily encounter that the others had, before the ascension. Listen to Mark’s voice? Have you–heard what he says about Jesus doing only what God could do–command nature, command death, demons, etc? And Mark not interested in the birth of Jesus? Its clear the birth of Jesus was obscure, clearly localized event forgotten by the time of his baptism. Luke clearly consulted Mary his mother, and Matthew other sources. The early church proclaim him Lord and Messiah without knowning in the earliest years–about his exact origins. Matthew and Luke go back to fill in the gap. I could go on and on with the problems with this cute theory–but there’s no use. A scholar with a cute theory that undermines historica CHristianity gets a pass that no one else would get and call themselves careful scholars.
New Scientist, 1955 issue 6 I think, published an analysis of NT books as written down at dictation to professional scribes on standard sheets, folded, bought eight sheets at a time, lined and written at standard spacings. Author concluded that Mark’s amanuensis wrote tighter than standard, and the next or subsequent copyist got to the end of his sixteen or whatever pages with a bit left over, which he copied onto a single sheet which he gummed on, and which got detached and lost. The non-Markan endings reflect belief and practice of believers at the times and in the places where subsequent copies were made.
Jesus appears to credible witnesses, who are not in an ecstatic state, in various ways, but mostly as solid, and sometimes in gardening clothes!