Rethinking Mark

Last updated on: February 1, 2022 at 1:49 am by Ben Witherington

Rethinking Mark 2022-01-09T13:28:57-05:00 Ben Witherington

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I was having a chat with my old Cambridge friend Richard Bauckham and he mentioned he was entertaining the notion of this Gospel originating in the 40s A.D. That would probably make it the earliest one by a lot. In favor of such a theory would be that if John Mark is the author, and Papias was right that he was basing his Gospel on the memory and testimony of Peter, it would appear Peter was definitely still in the Holy Land for a good bit of the 40s, to judge from Acts. What matters more than the date is the substance of this Gospel— does it reflect the authentic substance of an account of the words and deeds of Jesus? I believe it does, but the study of this shortest of Gospels reflects a creative Gospel writer, who has arranged his material according to his theological and not just his chronological concerns, and he has done so following the genre of an ancient biography, and at the same time, the emphases and interests of ancient Jewish apocalyptic.

I am still not among those who think that either Mark 16.8, or Codex Washingtonius or the Long Ending reflect the original ending of Mark. Ancient scrolls were often not rewound, which means that the end of the document was the one exposed to the elements, to fraying, to dampness and the like (see Clayton Croy’s study on the end of Mark). I think the original ending is lost, but there is a good chance we can find it if we edit down the Matthean account of Easter, omitting the guards at the tomb story, the great commission, and a few other details. The Markan ending then would look something like Mt. 28.1,5-10, and vs. 16 perhaps in some form. One has to remember that Matthew follows Mark ‘religiously’ by which I mean he takes over 95% of the substance of Mark’s Gospel with over a 50% verbatim rate. There is no reason to think this suddenly stopped before Mark 16.1-8. We also know for a fact that Matthew’s Gospel became the most popular, most copied Gospel already in the second century, and if there was a choice between copying Matthew and copying Mark, Matthew with its birth narratives and lots of extra teaching material would have gotten preference. I think we likely see the popularity of Matthew already in bits of the Didache. The Didache cites Matthew’s rather than Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.

Furthermore, it is a very hard sell to suggest that ‘ephobounto gar.…’ literally ‘for they were afraid…..’ is even a proper ending to a final sentence of Mark 16, never mind the proper ending to a sentence or paragraph in general. Fright and flight from angels by the women is not in any way the good news of Easter about the risen Jesus. The arguments for Mk. 16.8 being the original ending are weak at best, and reflect the sort of ending one might encounter in a modern work of fiction, absolutely not in an ancient biography where there was indeed a convention to round the story out without leaving the reader wondering about a major thing like the appearances of Jesus.

Notice that the earliest tradition about all this from the A.D. 50s in 1 Cor. 15.1ff. does not end with a statement about the fact of Jesus’ resurrection but rather with a list of those to whom he appeared, with the implication that without the appearances, there was no concrete proof Jesus had risen from the dead, and alternate explanations like grave robbing were possible. Notice that the later Gospel, Matthew’s, is very concerned about the grave robbing theory. And notice that the appearance of angels at the tomb to female disciples and their testimony about it doesn’t count as solid evidence of what happened to Jesus to judge not only from the Gospels, but also from 1 Cor. 15. Indeed, notice Lk. 24 where the male disciples think the women were dreaming when they reported seeing angels who said Jesus was risen.. I do not believe this Gospel could possibly have ended without at least one or two appearance stories about the risen Jesus.

It seems very clear indeed that the later composers of the long ending of Mark (which unfortunately was included in the original KJV as if it were original) thought no Gospel should end without the risen Jesus appearing to someone, though equally clearly, that long ending reflects a Greek, and a series of ideas that are not Markan, and do not likely come from the first century Jewish followers of Jesus any more than the shorter ending or Codex Washingtonius show us how Mark originally concluded.

There is more of all this in my Eerdmans Mark commentary, including the way Mark uses rhetorical chreia to shape the narratives in his Gospel, just as Papias suggested. It will be fun to teach Mark again this semester starting this week in the doctoral seminar. It is a rich first glimpse of story-telling about Jesus.

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