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 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. Discover what they say about the story of the resurrection, the location of Biblical Emmaus, Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, the ancient Jewish roots of bodily resurrection, and the possible endings of the Gospel of Mark.
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In our free eBook Easter: Exploring the Resurrection of Jesus, expert Bible scholars and archaeologists offer in-depth research and reflections on this important event. In fact, according to Mark, any future epiphanies or “sightings” of Jesus will be in the north, in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. Mark gives no accounts of anyone seeing Jesus as Matthew, Luke, and John later report. 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) But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. Upon arriving they find the blocking stone at the entrance of the tomb removed and a young man–notice– not an angel–tells them: Like the other three Gospels Mark recounts the visit of Mary Magdalene and her companions to the tomb of Jesus early Sunday morning. He has no appearances of Jesus following the visit of the women on Easter morning to the empty tomb! But even more significant is Mark’s strange ending. 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. He has no account of the virgin birth of Jesus–or for that matter, any birth of Jesus at all. But more important is how Mark begins his Gospel and how he ends it. First it is significantly shorter than the other Gospels–with only 16 chapters compared to Matthew (28), Luke (24) and John (21).
The problem with the Gospel of Mark for the final editors of the New Testament was that it was grossly deficient. 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 assumption is that this order of the Gospels is a chronological one, when in fact it is a theological one. 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.
Visit TaborBlog today, or scroll down to read a brief bio of James Tabor below.Īnd they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing.
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. This article was originally published on Dr.
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