On the Various Endings of the Gospel of Mark (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Textual Criticism)

A couple posts ago I mentioned that the Gospel of Mark has three different endings. There I talked a bit about truth and stuff...

Well, since I'm going to be mentioning the earlier and later endings in the Gospel of Mark tomorrow morning in my sermon, but I'm really not goint to unpack in it in real detail, so I thought I'd do just a bit of exploring of the subject here.

The earliest Gospel (that would be the one from the author's hand) may or may not have ended at 16:8. It is possible that a longer ending was planned, but the author never finished it. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but the page was lost from the rest of the manuscript. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but it was intentionally excised by someone early because it disagreed in some ways with the other three canonical Gospels. It is possible that a longer ending was written, but it contained something heretical so it was cut. It is possible that there was no longer ending intended or ever written. And probably a million other possibilities that I can't think of right now.

What seems likely to me is that the shorter and the longer endings both seem to be additions in some other hand, with some other agenda. I think they are very early additions - and that they are canon. I have no problem with the possibility that they may be in someone else's hand, someone else's thought. Heck, we have no idea who wrote Hebrews, and we don't have any trouble accepting that...

So, here's a few links for anybody who's interested in thinking about this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
Yeah, it's wikipedia - but you gotta start somewhere...

http://www.bible-researcher.com/endmark.html
Some good, some bad...

http://www.textexcavation.com/marcanendings.html
Interesting...

http://www.tektonics.org/lp/markend.html
More detail than I can deal with...

http://www.amazon.com/Perspectives-Ending-Mark-Four-Views/dp/0805447628
A book I gotta get...

So, if you have better links, go ahead and share them in the comments section.

Comments

James Snapp Jr said…
Okay:

http://www.curtisvillechristian.org/MarkOne.html

http://www.curtisvillechristian.org/Evidence.html

And you can download my research paper about Mark 16:9-20 at the Textexcavation site, to which you already have a link. (You might have to search the site for "Snapp" and scroll down the page a bit to find the link to the PDF.)

Yours in Christ,

James Snapp, Jr.
8:36 PM
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