Mark has two endings. How come?
It is pretty much agreed by centuries of scholarship that Mark’s gospel has two endings. The shorter ending (16:1-8) was supplemented later by the longer ending (16:9-20) to bring it into conformity with the other gospels that by the end of the first century were being regarded as authoritative for the Church.
The appearance to Mary Magdalene (16:9) echoes a similar appearance in John 20:11-18. That Mary had been healed of “seven demons” recalls Luke 8:2, the appearance of Jesus “in another form to two of them, as they were walking in the country” (16:12) is told at greater length as the Emmaus Road account in Luke 24:13-35, and the call to universal witness (16:15) parallels the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18-20.
So, what was going on in the earliest Church that we have this longer ending in the way that we have it? And why does it matter?
The author of the second ending of Mark clearly had access to Matthew, Luke and John. What this means is that well before the end of the first Christian century written accounts of the life and work of Jesus were becoming available. People independent of each other were writing their accounts down and circulating them. Not only that, but decisions were being made about which of the various accounts in circulation were most authoritative. There were other gospels around that didn’t make the cut. That means that there were people who were believed to have the authority to make such decisions. That they were making these particular decisions, ruling on which texts were reliable and which were not, means that it was understood that churches needed resources to do their work of witness, and these written gospels were those resources.
What is also evident from the existence of the New Testament is that some places had written resources that others did not, in the form of letters written specifically to churches there – places like Rome, Corinth, Thessalonica, and Ephesus. There were other letters that were written to groups of churches, and over time these letters came to be called “Catholic” because they were written for everyone.
What all of this indicates is a movement that was completely serious about the integrity of its teaching, a movement that had a leadership structure competent to scrutinize new resources as they appeared, and authoritative enough to include some resources and exclude others.
The seriousness of the Church about the integrity of its written resources was not lost on the Church’s enemies. When the Roman government got involved in regulating and then persecuting the early church in the mid-second century, one of the first things they did was compel the churches to give up their Bibles. Yet even after more than a century of persecution and Bible burning, thousands of Bibles survived. Today we have over 5000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, some of them dating to the early second century. There is far more manuscript evidence for the person and work of Jesus Christ than for any other person of antiquity. Based on manuscripts alone, we have much more reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter than that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
The Church that survived withering persecution to form the culture of the West, the Church that created and still creates the intellectual foundations for modern science, the Church that created and still creates the possibility of democracy, human dignity and human rights, is the Church that spent its formative centuries being completely serious about the integrity of its teaching. The same Church, and hundreds of Christian denominations, risk their lives today by not being serious enough.
We have two endings for the Gospel of Mark as a sign of that seriousness.
Seriousness about our teaching matters.
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