Musings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
I’ve added a new page in the side-bar:
IN DEPTH ARCHIVES, Annotated
This is the start of an attempt to gradually go over old Vridar posts and get them organized in some useful manner. We’ll see how it goes. It won’t be completed overnight, though. I’ll keep updating the “updated date” notice each time I add something new. The following post is now in the archives. Continue reading “Ending of the Gospel of Mark (16:8) — ANNOTATED INDEX”
Compare the seemingly inconclusive ending of Mark 16:8 with the following discussion by Sara Mandell and David Freedman on the Histories by Herodotus:
Neither Herodotus nor his implied narrator has to depict the catastrophe, only the exemplar that demands it. (The Relationship Between Herodotus’ History and Primary History, 1993, p.55)
Mandell and Freedman are here observing that Herodotus leaves the catastrophic ending that his plot demands up to the reader’s imagination. What Herodotus has done is depict many examples of cities and persons rising, falling victim to hubris (proudly thinking too highly or exclusively of oneself) and being brought low by the gods or fate as a consequence. These are enough to inform the reader that when the book concludes at the point of Greece’s exalted victory over Persia, the reader knows what is to follow.
The message to readers is to humble themselves to avoid that inevitable fate.
Herodotus thus leaves his Histories hanging at the end. Nothing dramatic or rounded seems to happen at the end. The Persians go home and there is a seemingly irrelevant comment on how they once loved the simple life and were advised by Cyrus not to seek a life of ease.
In the final chapters leading towards this ending that seems to flat to modern readers, Herodotus changed his style to present the illusion that he was dispassionately narrating a strictly historical-factual account of the war between Greece and Persia. But in fact, the tale of Greece’s victories in the way, especially at the Battle of Marathon, are not intended as genuine history by modern standards. The events are a religious paradigm. They are constructed to teach a religious moral. What these final chapters depict in graphic detail, in anecdote after anecdote, is Greece going the way of the nations before her. The Greeks, too, are on the cusp of falling into their own destruction.
Herodotus probably considered the initial rounds of the Peloponnesian Wars as the imploding calamity of the Greeks. He finished off his Histories with Greece at its height as it expelled the Persians. And height means hubris. The gods must cut them back down to size.
Quite apart from the difficulties with both the internal and the external evidence for Mark 16:9-20 being original to the gospel, questions would be raised about its authenticity purely on narrative grounds.
In verse 8 all the women, apparently led by Mary Magdalene (16:1), fled in such fear that they could say nothing to anyone about their experience.
Then in verse 9 the narrative awkwardly doubles back to pick up the time setting (we are told a second time both the time of the day and the day of the week) from the beginning of the chapter to continue a narrative that immediately contradicts the previous verse. Suddenly, without explanation, Mary Magdalene is mysteriously separated from her companions (did the three women helter skelter screaming blindly in 3 different directions in verse 8?), sees Jesus, and rushes off to tell the disciples after all.
Silly excursis:
At this point I keep imagining a Monty Python ending if Life of Brian had another ten minutes to run — Mary and/or Mary cattily scold a look-alike they mistake for a resurrected Jesus/Brian for having them go and waste all that money on buying spices for his corpse when he goes and pulls a thoughtless stunt like that on them, . . . . . yeh, well, with the Monty Python crew it could have had potential.
Why didn’t the author simply say in verse 8 that Mary (the mother of James or Joseph or both) and Salome ran off never to be heard from again while Mary Magdalene etc etc . . . ? That would be a much more natural narrative flow. As it stands it sounds as if the author took a very long spell before adding these verses and came back to finish it having forgotten the details of what he had composed long before.
Then there is the unexplained reference to “the eleven” in verse 14. Why only eleven? It is clear in Matthew and Luke who used Mark why there would be only eleven disciples at this juncture — Matthew had Judas hang himself and Luke had Satan possess him — but in Mark’s gospel there is little to narrative reason to put such a huge gulf between Peter and Judas, or between Judas and the rest of the disciples. Peter’s last appearance was suffering anguish over having denied his Lord before men, and therefore presumably knowing his fate was thence to have the Son of Man being ashamed of him at his coming (8:38). (Other early gospel “traditions”, as known from Justin Martyr and the Gospel of Peter among others, iirc, did not appear to know of any of the twelve missing after the resurrection.)
Verses 9-20 only make narrative sense if read through what we know of the other synoptic gospels. They can scarcely be indigenous to the first gospel.
The shorter ending (see the Wikipedia article) suffers the same narrative incongruities as the longer ending.
And they reported all the instructions briefly to Peter’s companions. Afterwards Jesus himself, through them, sent forth from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.
Here Peter looks as lost from view as Judas in Matthew and Luke. This would seem to flow against the earlier narrative point that the women were told specifically to tell Peter. It also, of course, flies against the previous verse that announces the women did the exact opposite — kept quiet and said nothing to anyone. (Maybe the author was self-consciously writing what he planned to be known as “the shorter ending”, hence omitting Peter and noting the women spoke “briefly”.)
John 21 (Luke 5), which is another proposed original ending, also runs into narrative anomalies if tagged on to Mark 16. If we had been reading a conclusion to Mark where Jesus appeared to his disciples again on the shore of the “sea” of Galilee, we would forever be wondering what on earth happened to the poor women.
Would not this ending condemn the gospel as the most sexist of all with salvation for men only, with women condemned forever to keep silence in the churches as hopeless witnesses. Not that modern values has anything to do with the question of authenticity, but the point remains that any happy ending would surely be expected to toss in some lifeline to redeem the women, too.
Another point that a John 21 ending fails to reconcile is the young man’s message to the women — at least as I understand it in the English translation.
But go and tell his disciples — and Peter — that he is going before you into Galilee, there you will see him as he said to you.
Is the young man saying here that Jesus is to appear to an inclusive “you” — inclusive of the disciples and the women?
If so, it would seem none of the proposed endings resolve this statement.
If any of the above endings were original to the gospel of Mark we would be left with an additional perplexity — Why would any of the above have been detached from the original in the first place? None of them appears to be in violation of proto-orthodoxy. But if the gospel did indeed originally conclude with 16:8 then we do have a gospel that is arguably in opposition to the emerging orthodoxy.
Such a gospel would demand the fabrication of a catholicizing conclusion.
If Matthew and Luke represent branches of that emerging orthodoxy, it is surely a significant point that they both do not simply tag a narrative on to where Mark left off. They both change his last line, that presumably offensive or embarrassing verse 8. Both Matthew and Luke insist the women ran off to tell the disciples. They both change — not simply add to — the Marcan narrative-ending that we do have.
If Mark 1:1-16:8 declares a non-orthodox Jesus and a tragic tale of failed discipleship, it appears that there were a number of early attempts to re-write this gospel. The re-writing touched on the character of Jesus, his teachings, his miraculous performances, and the status of the disciples. By the time the dust had settled it appears that two of the variant endings were stitched in part from Luke and Matthew, and another may have been cast out like an orphan till it found a home, with a few redactions, in the back room of the Gospel of John.
It hurts, but having caught up with old news about Mark posted by David Ross (which I should have followed up long before now since it was referenced by Michael Turton in his commentary on Mark), I have to consider (again) revising my view about the ending of Mark. I think it’s time I gave up the question and left it on the shelf as “awaiting more evidence” before a definitive conclusion can ever be reached.
I recently expressed my view that the 16:8 ending of Mark is balanced neatly with the beginning of the gospel by common and inverted motifs. But the same argument of motif inversion and balance applies equally well if the original ending included a story currently found in both John 21 and Luke 5.
In both we have:
Not that I am arguing that this was the original ending of Mark. Still many unresolved questions. But will have to be less confident about my view of Mark as based on the OT template of failure of Israel, and more. Now that hurts a bit. Wish I had more time to investigate this, but maybe it’s better I don’t — maybe one could die mad trying to resolve some questions.
Mark’s penchant for ironic reversals is well-known. We run into difficulties, however, when we stop short and fail to see irony in his account of Peter, the twelve, and even the nature of the work itself as a “gospel”. Mark loves paradoxes: the cross is both a shame and a glory; life is only found through death; honour through dishonour; Peter’s confession is both the high point and low of his career; and on an on — enough to fill an entire book like Jerry Camery-Hoggatt’s Irony in Mark’s Gospel. So it need not be surprising that his gospel would, ironically, embody a tragedy.
The good news (gospel) of Jesus Christ is also the tragedy of his disciples. Jesus is “good news” for the gospeller’s audience, but the narrative is also a tragic warning to that same audience. The disciples in Mark serve the same function as the Israel (the many Israel’s really, generation after generation) in the Jewish scriptures. They are a warning and spiritual lesson to whatever the audience of the day who were to see themselves as the “new Israel”. (I have shown in an earlier post that the evidence for the historicity of the Twelve — especially as argued by John P. Meier — is so thin as to be virtually nonexistent.)
Tragedies, whether Latin, Greek, Jewish or Mesopotamian, very often had a conclusion that indicated a final horrific reversal of themes and images found in their beginnings. These conclusions could also be abrupt. Too abrupt for modern tastes.
I touched on these points in one of the first posts I ever composed for this blog — Those Strange NT Endings (Mark, John, Acts).
I was recently reminded of the thematic and literary correpondences between the Histories of the Greek historian, Herodotus, and Israel’s Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) and once again I could not help comparing the Gospel of Mark. It’s original ending — at 16:8 — is a perfectly coherent one when the tragic side of the gospel is recognized. (Mark 16:9-20 is not found in the earliest manuscripts or evidence for this gospel, and can be shown to be a later addition by a scribe conflating elements of the endings of Matthew and Luke.)
Note the allusions to the beginnings, and their tragic reversals . . . . Continue reading “The classical ending of the tragedy of “the Gospel” of Mark”
I’m restricting this question to a study in the Gospel of Mark, and to its ending at 16:8 with the women fleeing in dumbstruck fear and after the young man told them to:
Go and tell his disciples, and Peter: He is going before (προαγει) you into Galilee: there you will see him, as he said to you. (16:7)
Why the rush? Why did the author want to write story where Jesus leaves the disciples behind?
I’ve no doubt someone has discussed this before much more competently somewhere in the lit, but this being my turn to notice it too, here goes.
The last time we saw Peter in Mark’s gospel he was caught “following Jesus” but “from afar (απο μακροθεν)” (14:54). But from this distance he was cornered into a situation where he felt his only escape was to deny Jesus who by this time was on his way to the cross.
Before that, all the disciples had “forsaken Jesus and fled” (14:50).
Earlier the author had even linked the denial of Peter and failure of all the disciples with Jesus saying he “would go before them” to Galilee. Will return to that link near later in this discussion.
The forsaking and denying of Jesus is a complete turn around from their first encounter with Jesus. So back to the beginning:
The beginning is a mysteriously immediate following the moment Jesus — who was passing or walking by — called them.
And as he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew . . . Then Jesus said to them, “Come after me . . .” (Ditto as he walked a little farther and saw James and John.)
And as he passed by, he saw Levi . . . and said to him, “Follow me . . .”
In each case those called immediately responded and followed.
The starkness of the call, and particularly the equal starkness of the immediate response following, registers in the reader’s mind, right through to the end and beyond.
Later there is another incident where one person wants to follow Jesus, but is forbidden to do so. The one possessed by Legion (the multitude of demons) had spent time among the tombs, an outcast among the dead. Having restored him, Jesus authorizes him to go back and preach among his people.
But back to those called to follow him. Continue reading “Why did Jesus not wait for his disciples at his tomb? — Or, Why did the disciples not follow Jesus on water? — same question”
Despite the obvious symmetrical neatness of the idea that John 21 is a redaction of what was originally the ending of Mark (John 21 appearing as a double ending added to John and Mark appearing to lack a coherent ending) I am stuck on several questions that this raises.
If John 21 were originally the ending of Mark (minus the johnanninisms) then must we reject the fundamental interpretations of Mark treatment of the disciples by Weeden, Kelber, Tolbert, Fowler…? In other words, would not the hypothesis that John 21 is the original ending of Mark determine how we interpret the very meaning of Mark itself? What is the role of analytic literary criticism here in the interpretation of the texts as opposed to a “naive” reading of the texts as face-value “reports”?
Is it possible to hold both to Mark being a Pauline gospel (with its anti-Petrine position) and to John 21 being the original ending (with its pro-Petrine conclusion)?
If John 21 were the ending of Mark then how did it fit, exactly? What do we do with the women who are told to speak to Peter and the disciples about what they had seen at the tomb? Does not John 21 indicate that Peter had NOT heard? If we think the original said something like “but they believed not the women”, then don’t we also have to add another hypothesis that John edited out some reference to this (“and he upbraided them for their lack of belief”). If so, then aren’t we setting out on the road to finding that ‘the John 21 being the ending of Mark hypothesis’ is going to raise more questions than it answers?
Have studies of the endings of John and Mark been made in the broader context of ancient literature? My previous entry here addresses some of the “strange” endings in classical literature discussed in “Classical Closure” edited by Roberts, Dunn and Fowler.
Has anyone raised a possibility of John 21 having in some way some sort of relationship with another missing ending that we read in the noncanonical Gospel of Peter (No, I’m not presuming GPeter preceded GJohn or anything…. completely open re where and to/from what the evidence points) — but the gospel of Peter as we have it ends with an account of the disciples breaking up and going their various ways, with Peter and 2 others taking their nets and going back to the sea. Now that just on the surface of it would seem a most natural lead in to John 21, would it not? If so, why do we default to thinking John 21 might relate to Mark and not some other gospel which we see surviving in GPeter?
Apart from the original words and phrases (markan vs johannine) used in John 21, does it not seem that John 21 is far more rich in the detail and colour of its narration than anything we find in the generally terse style of Mark? If so, has any study been done on these richer details in John to see if there is any “Markan” language in those vs Johannine? Has anyone thought through whether the story in John 21 would coherently hold together without loss of meaning if that (unmarkan) richness of detail were absent?
Has anyone compared John 21 with Mark’s and/or John’s account of the feeding of the 5000? There seems to me to be strong ties between John 21 and John’s Feeding of the 5000 that are not found in a comparison with Mark’s Feeding story. If so, would this change our perspectives on the integrity of John 21 being original to John?
Similarities:
Has anyone raised the possibility that John 21 was an early attempt by someone who did not like the Mark 16:8 ending to compose a more happy conclusion for Mark? And that this could explain why it was not accepted widely enough to have survived as a secure ending of that gospel, and also why some did not want to lose it altogether and managed to salvage it with John? (“Classical Closure” reminds us that there were other ancient attempts to write a more satisfying (for many) conclusion to Virgil’s Aeneid, none of which finally “stuck” to the original.)
I’m not “arguing” that John 21 could not have been an original ending of Mark — who knows what redactions have been done to both gospels or what scripts we may uncover in the future. But these are the sorts of questions I’d like discussed before deciding to go too far with thinking John 21 “probably” was the Markan ending.
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It is widely assumed that the endings we know of Mark (16:8), John and Acts cannot have been the ones originally intended but after reading “Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature” edited by Deborah H. Roberts, Francis M. Dunn, and Don Fowler (1997) I have less confidence in that assumption. Nowhere are Mark, Acts and John discussed in the book and the extrapolations below are entirely my own.
In the book Carolyn Dewald discussion of “Strategies of Meaning at the End of Herodotus’s Histories” struck me as raising the same sorts of questions over Herodotus’s ending as are raised over the present endings of Mark and Acts. Herodotus leaves his work in mid-air too. This could only have been intentional since Herodotus throughout his work manages to consistently draw many satisfying conclusions to his many story sections. The question that arises then is what Herodotus was wanting to achieve by way of response from his audience by not framing a formal final conclusion to his work. ‘Histories’ can be read more accurately as a kind of theological tragedy than as a history in a modern sense. It is about the fate of Athenians and their lot within the common destinies of mankind, and their future is left in doubt. The mid-air ending of Histories inevitably left the questions about how one understood the present and future as uncertain and as issues to be questioned in the light of all that had just been read.
Francis M. Dunn discusses the ending of Euripides’ Heracles is tormentingly ambiguous and incomplete, so much so that there have long been many attempts rearrange the text or re-write the ending. The ending is indecisive and the audience has no way of knowing if it is meant to see Heracles as a failure or a hero let alone what sort of future is in store for him. Again, it appears that the author was by this means seeking to provoke a certain type of response in the audience to the deeper questions raised in the play.
Philip Hardie has much to say about the Virgil’s Aeneid and hellenistic fiction in general that is also reminiscent of issues that arise in the scholarship relating to the endings of Mark, John and Acts. He writes: “Ancient novels use many paratextual devices, usually to give a sense of (historiographic) authenticity to the fiction …” By paratextual devices he means those sorts of intrusive authorial comments we find in John 20:30-31. With this consideration the disputed ending of John can then be read as something like: “I can’t possibly write about everything but I have to add just one more thing before I close…. ”
The Aeneid is another case of an abrupt “improper” ending leaving the reader on the point of lurching in mid-air. Hardie says the more appropriate ending has been already written and is tucked away in Book 8 with its prophecies of the future history of Rome and Augustus. Deaths always need a resolution of some kind, a new treaty or funeral etc. but in the Aeneid we have the treaty of peace being made near the beginning of the story and the death it is meant to follow is at the end. Not only so, but there are many textual allusions in the final scenes that echo those found in the opening scenes thus reassuring the reader/listener that this ending really is as intended however unconventional it is. So Mark was by no means the first to create an unconventional story with suitable endings in the middle and an ending that leaves readers hanging, and wondering, and scrambling back over all they have read before to find its meaning.
The obvious objection is that Mark is alone in ending his work with that conjunction ‘gar’. Maybe so, but “Classical Closures” leaves less assurance that the endings we find problematic in Mark, John and Acts were not originally intended to be just as they are.
It is widely assumed that the endings we know of Mark (16:8), John and Acts cannot have been the ones originally intended but after reading “Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature” edited by Deborah H. Roberts, Francis M. Dunn, and Don Fowler (1997) I have less confidence in that assumption. Nowhere are Mark, Acts and John discussed in the book and the extrapolations below are entirely my own.
In the book Carolyn Dewald discussion of “Strategies of Meaning at the End of Herodotus’s Histories” struck me as raising the same sorts of questions over Herodotus’s ending as are raised over the present endings of Mark and Acts. Herodotus leaves his work in mid-air too. This could only have been intentional since Herodotus throughout his work manages to consistently draw many satisfying conclusions to his many story sections. The question that arises then is what Herodotus was wanting to achieve by way of response from his audience by not framing a formal final conclusion to his work. ‘Histories’ can be read more accurately as a kind of theological tragedy than as a history in a modern sense. It is about the fate of Athenians and their lot within the common destinies of mankind, and their future is left in doubt. The mid-air ending of Histories inevitably left the questions about how one understood the present and future as uncertain and as issues to be questioned in the light of all that had just been read.
Francis M. Dunn discusses the ending of Euripides’ Heracles is tormentingly ambiguous and incomplete, so much so that there have long been many attempts rearrange the text or re-write the ending. The ending is indecisive and the audience has no way of knowing if it is meant to see Heracles as a failure or a hero let alone what sort of future is in store for him. Again, it appears that the author was by this means seeking to provoke a certain type of response in the audience to the deeper questions raised in the play.
Philip Hardie has much to say about the Virgil’s Aeneid and hellenistic fiction in general that is also reminiscent of issues that arise in the scholarship relating to the endings of Mark, John and Acts. He writes: “Ancient novels use many paratextual devices, usually to give a sense of (historiographic) authenticity to the fiction …” By paratextual devices he means those sorts of intrusive authorial comments we find in John 20:30-31. With this consideration the disputed ending of John can then be read as something like: “I can’t possibly write about everything but I have to add just one more thing before I close…. ”
The Aeneid is another case of an abrupt “improper” ending leaving the reader on the point of lurching in mid-air. Hardie says the more appropriate ending has been already written and is tucked away in Book 8 with its prophecies of the future history of Rome and Augustus. Deaths always need a resolution of some kind, a new treaty or funeral etc. but in the Aeneid we have the treaty of peace being made near the beginning of the story and the death it is meant to follow is at the end. Not only so, but there are many textual allusions in the final scenes that echo those found in the opening scenes thus reassuring the reader/listener that this ending really is as intended however unconventional it is. So Mark was by no means the first to create an unconventional story with suitable endings in the middle and an ending that leaves readers hanging, and wondering, and scrambling back over all they have read before to find its meaning.
The obvious objection is that Mark is alone in ending his work with that conjunction ‘gar’. Maybe so, but “Classical Closures” leaves less assurance that the endings we find problematic in Mark, John and Acts were not originally intended to be just as they are.
Neil