Wrapping Up Our Study in Mark
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On Easter Sunday, we wrapped up our study in the Gospel of Mark by looking together at the first eight verses of chapter sixteen. I mentioned that we were going to leave the remaining verses in the chapter unaddressed and that I’d send along an explanation for this via The Insider. I’m actually going to let the pastor and theologian, Sinclair Ferguson, give the explanation from his commentary on the book of Mark. He and others have been a great help to me in studying Mark and I appreciate his thoughtful brevity related to the concluding verses. I hope this is as helpful for you as it was for me.
Warmest Regards,
Matt
Excerpted from Let's Study Mark, by Sinclair Ferguson
A Later Postscript
The Christian church does not possess the original manuscript of the Gospel which John Mark wrote. We have only copies. Sometimes those copies contain slight differences from one another. A word may be different, occasionally even an entire verse, as modern translations sometimes indicate. Here, in Mark 16:9-20, however, we encounter an unusual problem, as the New International Version text indicates. The oldest reliable manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel do not contain these verses!
Hand-Written Gospels
How could such differences occur? We need to remember that the Gospels were written long before the invention of printing. Mark was not able to take his manuscript along to the local printing press, ask them to typeset it, then read the proofs and have thousands of copies all exactly the same printed for distribution. If anyone wanted a “Mark’s Gospel” they had to sit down with what Mark had written and laboriously copy it out by hand. If, by any chance, they copied a word wrongly, or missed something out, then that mistake would probably be repeated when someone else took a copy of their copy of Mark!
When we remember that for fifteen hundred years people were copying the Gospel by hand, it is not surprising to learn that many small discrepancies crept into later manuscript copies.
How then can we be sure that we have the genuine text which Mark wrote? Only by trying to trace the copies back to their originals, by placing them in “families” as experts do, and eventually locating the earliest copies of the Gospels and trying to work out, if mistakes were made in copying, where and how they took place.
A Summary Of Other Gospels
It is not difficult to see how, for example, some verses might be added to Mark’s Gospel. If someone had copied out the text, and realized that it had (as Mark’s Gospel does) a rather sudden ending, they might well add an appendix, summarizing some of the relevant teaching of the other Gospels, or the different traditions of the church.
It seems like that this happened in the case of Mark, since the two most reliable early manuscripts of the end of Mark’s Gospel conclude at verse 8 with the words “because they were afraid.” They do not include verses 9-20.
Of course, it is possible that the ending is missing in these manuscripts. Perhaps other manuscripts which are not so old are copies of even earlier manuscripts.
An Addition
But most New Testament experts are convinced that Mark 16:9-20 did not belong to the original text of the Gospel. Why?
For one thing, these verses are not written in the same style as the rest of the Gospel. For another, they read more like a summary of early church tradition than the material we have in the other Gospels. Their contents do not quite fit with the testimony of the four Gospels. For example, Mark 16:12-13 seems to be a summary of Luke 24:13-34, but it does not really seem consistent with it. Again, the promises given in Mark 16:17-18 read like a summary of some of the amazing things which took place in the early church. Nowhere else did Jesus seem to promise the kind of physical immunity which is spoken of here.
So, for these and other reasons (but especially because these verses do not seem to appear in our earliest copies of Mark’s Gospel), it seems likely they are additional material which somehow crept in at a later date.
A Strange Ending?
Why then does Mark’s Gospel end on such a different note from the other Gospels?
It may be - as some have thought - that he was interrupted before he could finish his Gospel, or that the original ending of the Gospel has been lost. But these explanations seem unlikely. Certainly there is no hint in the records of the church that this is what happened.
The true answer is likely to be quite simply that Mark intended to finish his Gospel just as he did. He wanted to convey to his readers that the disciples (despite all that Jesus had taught them) had not expected his resurrection. It was no piece of wish-fulfillment. They were stunned by it. And they were stunned by the implications of the resurrection. Jesus really was the Son of God! He really would be with them forever! They could scarcely take it in. Mark could not have expressed this more forcefully than he did.
The closing verses of Mark’s Gospel leave us with some fundamental questions about Jesus and our relationship to him. That is exactly what the Gospel was intended to do!