Gospel Women and the Long Ending of Mark

Kara Lyons-Pardue

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780567702135
• eBook ISBN: 9780567692436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Kara Lyons-Pardue examines the issue of the ending of the gospel of Mark, showing how the later additions to the text function as early receptions of the original gospel tradition providing an ancient "fix" to the problem of the ending in which the women flee the tomb in terror and silence. Lyons-Pardue suggests that the long ending functions canonically, smoothing out the "problem" of 16: 8 in ways that support the nascent four-gospel canon. Lyons-Pardue argues that the long ending represents an ancient reception of the preceding gospel that continues to the unique portrait of discipleship that is characteristically Markan. Mary Magdalene forms the renewed paradigm of an unlikely person or outsider, here a woman, being the one to "go and tell" the good news. This pattern is then projected onto all disciples who are called to proclaim the news to the entire created order (16: 15).

1

Scholarly Inquiry into the Long Ending as a Conclusion to Mark’s Gospel

In a maze of brackets and footnotes, nestled between the Gospels According to Mark and Luke, most English versions of the New Testament (NT) have an array of endings for the Second Gospel. Typically included are the “Shorter”¹ and “Longer”² endings, as well as the “Freer Logion.”³ Modern readers are free either to ignore anything beyond 16:8 or proceed in a “choose-your-own-adventure” fashion, selecting their preferred ending.

From the earliest centuries of Christianity, readers of Mark have asked questions about how the Gospel should end.⁴ However, due to the proliferation of the Majority Text⁵ and widespread use of Latin and other translated versions, the church came to an effective—if not intentional—decision that 16:20 constituted the proper conclusion to the Second Gospel. The discovery of ancient codices with a briefer, more abrupt finale at 16:8 led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars to suggest that the widely accepted and more conventionally satisfying termination of Mark in v. 20—with Jesus’s ascension and the successful transmission of the gospel—might have been the work of a later interpolator. Thus began the unresolved controversy over the ending of Mark’s Gospel.

Mark is widely considered the first written Gospel, a major source for at least two other canonical Gospels, Matthew and Luke, and perhaps the inventor of a new genre, “gospel.”⁶ It is of consequence, then, that there is significant uncertainty concerning how this landmark text originally ended.

For much of Christian history, the standard Greek and Latin copies of the NT used in churches contained the text of Mark from 1:1 through the account of Christ’s ascension and the confirmation of the disciples’ message with signs in 16:19-20. Access to and the eventual publication of the great fourth-century majuscule Codex Vaticanus (B) after 1845 catalyzed widespread doubts about Mark’s ending at 16:20. In Vaticanus, unlike the wording in the so-called Majority Text, Mark 16 ends with the women’s silence: ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ in v. 8.⁷ But the recovery of Vaticanus did not introduce questions about the Markan ending.⁸ Skepticism about the ending had emerged in learned circles in the last decades of the eighteenth century.⁹ Once the contents of the great majuscule Vaticanus became known, the inquiry took on renewed fervor.

The first modern text critic to posit formally that the last twelve verses of Mark may not have been original to the Gospel on the basis of manuscript evidence was the Danish scholar Andreas Birch.¹⁰ Doubts regarding Mk 16:9-20, however, were more widely disseminated through the second critical edition of the Greek text edited by J. J. Griesbach a few years later.¹¹ The scholarly furor that followed has been well documented in the thorough, though not exhaustive, review of scholarly work on the LE undertaken by James Kelhoffer.¹² His tracing of developments and shifts in research trends on Mk 16:9-20, surveying works in English, French, and German, is unnecessary to replicate here.¹³ Instead, I present some paradigmatic approaches and otherwise consider only treatments of the LE that have appeared since the publication of Kelhoffer’s study.¹⁴

Kelhoffer’s study examined a neglected issue in the LE—the function of the snake-handling and poison-drinking signs of Mk 16:18 as authentication of the second-century Christian mission—and alerted us to others.¹⁵ A nearly exclusive focus on establishing the origins of Mk 16:9-20, whether original to Mark or a later addition, has diverted scholarly attention from many aspects of the narrative content of these verses.¹⁶ With few exceptions over the past two hundred years, scholars have employed the same evidence—manuscript attestation, patristic attestation, and internal lexical and theological coherence (or incoherence) in relation to Mk 1:1–16:8—to argue for or against Mk 16:9-20 as the original ending of the Second Gospel. It seems clear that, without further manuscript discoveries, there is no definitive proof to which both sides can assent. Recent trends in scholarship, however, have opened avenues for inquiry despite the “standstill.”¹⁷ There is more to be said about the LE than the unending battle over the polarizing options of “authentic” versus “spurious.”

The way the debate over Mark’s ending developed historically seems to have excused defenders of the LE from considering how it brings conclusion to the Second Gospel. While some scholars were interested in overturning the incursion of the new discipline of textual criticism, which dared to call into question the long-accepted NT passage, others used text-critical findings to defend the LE’s authenticity (as the vast majority of manuscripts conclude Mark at 16:20). In either perspective, for defenders of the LE, seeing 16:20 as the conclusion to Mark was historical fact, not a new proposal in need of defense or explanation. Those who advocated the shortest ending—“they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid [ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ]” (16:8b)—however, expended considerable effort explaining how the women’s fear and silence at the tomb function in light of the whole Gospel. They took up the challenge to show that the earliest and best ending could make sense as an ending of Mark. Arguments on this side of the debate seldom remain confined to Mk 16:1-8 or rehash only that ending’s manuscript attestation.

The supposition that 16:8 forms an intentional conclusion to the Second Gospel is rarely taken as established fact, without exegetical defense; however, explanations of how the abrupt, shortest ending fits with the Markan author’s aims vary widely. Some scholars have argued that a reading of the whole Gospel of Mark indicates that the original conclusion was lost.¹⁸ Others have suggested that, although v. 8 appears to be the earliest recoverable ending, it was not the ending with which Mark intended to conclude.¹⁹ Even those interpreters of Mark who doubt that the ending of Mark at 16:8 was the conclusion he intended for his Gospel make their arguments based on thematic trajectories within the whole Gospel. Those who think 16:8 was originally and intentionally Mark’s conclusion go to even greater lengths to connect the ending with the narrative and theology of the Second Gospel as a whole.²⁰

When the LE is connected to the rest of Mark, it is usually to enforce the view that Mark expects a resurrection appearance (14:28; 16:7), missing in 16:8, but present in 16:9-20. Whether the LE presents the kind of appearance narrative the Gospel prepares readers to expect seldom enters the discussion.²¹ That is so, I think, because there exists the perception that the LE merely contains a generic conglomeration of resurrection appearances. By contrast, I shall attempt to demonstrate that the way the LE describes Jesus’s appearances to Mary Magdalene, the two on the road, and the Eleven constitutes a deliberate collection of specific interactions. Although they are recounted in sparse prose, these episodes highlight a contrast between faithful and faithless response to the resurrection. The resurrection accounts privilege markers of belief (e.g., telling by Mary Magdalene and the two in vv. 10-11, 13; baptism as concomitant with faith in v. 16; signs that indicate belief in vv. 17-18), rather than simply authenticating that Jesus was raised. Peter’s witness—which one might expect to be prominent, based on 16:7—is only implied.

My selective exegesis of 16:9-20 and comparison to other Gospel traditions is, in some ways, an attempt to highlight what should be obvious: Mary is the first witness to the resurrection and the Eleven disbelieve. Yet, as the survey of representative treatments of the LE illustrates, the characterization of Mary Magdalene and the male disciples within the spectrum of faith has not been an object of attention in studies of Mk 16:9-20. Few interpreters have explored the way that the LE functions as an early “reading” of Mark, supplying narrative closure to trajectories that were of interest to ancient readers (which both align with and differ from modern readers’ concerns).

This chapter’s survey of scholarship seeks to illustrate this deficit, while showing how arguments for an ending—even a secondary one—can be enriched by investigating it in light of its relationship to the literary whole. Finally, this survey of scholarship will conclude by summarizing a few recent studies of Mark and its endings that do discuss the implications of the LE, or of each ending, on the reading of the whole Gospel, and vice versa.

1. In Defense of Mark’s Ending at 16:20: Burgon as Paradigm

Dean John William Burgon is undoubtedly history’s staunchest defender of the authenticity of 16:20 as Mark’s rightful ending. His impassioned apology f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Tables
• Abbreviations
• Abbreviations of Ancient Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Scholarly Inquiry into the Long Ending as a Conclusion to Mark’s Gospel
• 2 Mary Magdalene in the Long Ending and Mark
• 3 Unfaithful Disciples in the Long Ending and Mark
• 4 Being Disciples Like Mary Magdalene: Implications of the Long Ending’s Reading of Mark
• Appendix The Many Endings to Mark’s Gospel: Introductions, Text, and Translations
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Ancient Index
• Subject Index
• Copyright Page