Perspectives on the Ending of Mark

Maurice Robinson, Darrell L. Bock, Keith Elliott, Daniel Wallace, David Alan Black, David Alan Black

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781433669019
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Because it is conspicuously absent from more than one early Greek manuscript, the final section of the gospel of Mark (16: 9-20) that details Christ's resurrection remains a constant source of debate among serious students of the New Testament.

Perspectives on the Ending of Mark presents in counterpoint form the split opinions about this difficult passage with a goal of determining which is more likely. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary professors Maurice Robinson and David Alan Black argue for the verses' authenticity. Keith Elliott (University of Leeds) and Daniel Wallace (Dallas Theological Seminary) contend that they are not original to Mark's gospel. Darrell Bock (Dallas Theological Seminary) responds to each view and summarizes the state of current research on the entire issue.

CHAPTER 1

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Mark 16:8 as the
Conclusion to the
Second Gospel

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DANIEL B. WALLACE

Comedian George Burns once pontificated on the key to homiletical success: “The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.” This essay will abysmally fail at least that third criterion, but I suspect that Mark's Gospel might have succeeded on all three fronts.

The question we are entertaining at this symposium is this: When does Mark's Gospel end? For those who have studied the issue at all, there is an ancillary, though equally relevant question: When does the debate over the ending of Mark's Gospel end? This particular debate will be over tomorrow, but that won't be the end of the story. This conference, in fact, is intended to stimulate your thinking about the issues, getting you to wrestle with the questions far beyond tomorrow. Perhaps that is what Mark intended for his Gospel, too.

Introduction: Presuppositions

Before I get into the details of this notorious textual problem, I need to address the issue of presuppositions for a few minutes. Two of mine are that, of the four Gospels, Mark wrote first and John wrote last. As well, I hold to the Doddian school that John was not at all dependent on the Synoptic Gospels; in fact, he was most likely unaware of their specific contents, possibly even of their existence. This means that both Mark and John were writing, in a sense, a new literary genre that would later be called Gospel. Yet, they are radically different.

There are several ironies here: If Mark wrote first, he created a genre ¹ that would be followed by Matthew and Luke, thus giving some vindication to what he had done—since mimicry is a high form of flattery. Yet, Mark's Gospel was the least copied of the four, perhaps because it was almost entirely swallowed up by Matthew, with only the less appetizing parts left out. John, on the other hand, had no real literary followers, yet his is by far the most copied of the Gospels in early Christianity. The irony doesn't stop there. If Mark intended to end his Gospel at 16:8, as I will argue, it's a Gospel that leaves the reader hanging, wanting more. John, on the other hand, not only finishes his Gospel, he keeps on writing after he finished it. He finishes his Gospel twice! After his conclusion in chapter 20, he goes on with an appendix. It's almost as if John is a Baptist preacher who wants to add one more chorus of “Just As I Am” before he can conclude the service. Mark is rather more like a Methodist preacher who cuts his sermon short—giving a sermonette that contains deep thoughts, to be sure, but leaves his congregation with as many questions as answers.

Now, back to presuppositions. All of us have come with a set of them. Some have such strong presuppositions in one area that, regardless of the evidence in another, they are unwilling, or unable, to allow the second realm to cast doubt on the first. I want to bring to the conscious level some of the presuppositions that may be driving your view of this lengthy and difficult textual problem. I hope that you will think through these related disciplines as you wrestle with the question about Mark's ending. There are at least three important presuppositions to address.

First, one's view on source criticism plays a large role in deciding this particular issue. Let me put this plainly: If you hold to the Griesbach Hypothesis, or Matthean priority, you may have some trouble believing that Mark's Gospel ended at 16:8. The reason is not that the textual evidence is compelling for the Long Ending (LE), but a prior commitment about the synoptic problem is. If Matthew wrote first and Mark wrote last, would Mark really reject the rich material in Matthew 28 or Luke 24, and write a truncated Gospel that has no resurrection appearances by Jesus? It's much easier to believe that if Mark is last, he combined snippets from the other Gospels and wrote 16:9–20 than that he decided to excise the post-Resurrection narratives that were in Matthew and Luke.²

Perhaps the most scholarly defense of the LE of Mark was written by William Farmer, a man who was already committed to Matthean priority when he wrote The Last Twelve Verses of Mark in 1974.³ In that monograph, he mentions with approbation the textcritical work of Harry Sturz in a lengthy footnote. Sturz considered the major texttypes to have all originated in the second century, and all independently of one another. His view is known as “the independent texttypes theory.” His method was to determine the archetypal reading of each texttype by examining the best witnesses and determine the wording of the original based on a majority of texttypes—or, more exactly, a majority of the reconstructed archetypes of those texttypes. So, for Sturz, it wasn't a majority of manuscripts that had priority, but a majority of archetypes. Practically, though not theoretically, his views looked very much like the majority text theory. That is why he was one of the editors of the first published Majority Text.⁴

Farmer does not say that he is following Sturz's method in his book, but one gets the distinct impression that he was heavily influenced by it. And in the draft for the second edition of The Last Twelve Verses of Mark,⁵ in his conclusion of the external evidence Farmer explicitly speaks against the “text critical tradition of … Westcott and Hort.”⁶ In short, Farmer started with the Griesbach Hypothesis—in fact, he was the world's leading Matthean prioritist of the twentieth century—but he recognized that the Short Ending of Mark was a roadblock. So he sought out a text-critical method that would allow him to continue to maintain Matthean priority. At first, this method was most likely not clearly formulated in his mind, but twenty-six years later, he had more consciously and explicitly rejected reasoned eclecticism. Does this mean he had fully embraced Sturz's views? Ironically, the answer is no, because if he had, it would weaken his argument for the LE of Mark.⁷ In short, Farmer's source-critical views seemed to drive his text-critical decisions.

A second presupposition that may influence your view of Mark's ending is the whole field of textual criticism. Some of you have already become convinced of a particular text-critical theory, even though you may be uncertain about source criticism. If your views of the text are settled, you may be here simply to get more arguments for your conclusions about this textual problem. The proposed solutions to Mark's ending will probably not alter your theory, but your theory may dictate—or at least heavily influence—your solution to this textual conundrum.

Third, one's presuppositions about bibliology could have a large impact on how he or she views this particular problem. For example, if you believe in the doctrine of preservation—that God has preserved the Scriptures so that there must always be manuscript testimony to the original text—then you will not be open to the view that the original ending of Mark was lost. Now, it is possible that you would be open to the Gospel intentionally ending at v. 8, 7 but if that interpretation is not rock solid, you just might opt for the LE because it puts you on safer bibliological ground.

Note, for example, what Dr. Wilbur Pickering said, when he was the president of the Majority Text Society, concerning the possibility that the ending of Mark was lost:

Are we to say that God was unable to protect the text of Mark or that He just couldn't be bothered? I see no other alternative—either He didn't care or He was helpless. And either option is fatal to the claim that Mark's Gospel is “God-breathed.” … If God was powerless to protect His Word then He wouldn't really be God and it wouldn't make all that much difference what He said…. If God permitted the original ending of Mark to be lost then in fact we do not have an inspired text.⁸

Nearly a century before Pickering made his statement, John Burgon, the famous antagonist to Westcott and Hort, wrote: “I am utterly unable to believe … that God's promise has so entirely failed…. ”⁹ He articulated two presuppositions in this one sentence that are relevant for the ending of Mark. First, his belief in divine preservation—and of a peculiar kind¹⁰—prevented him from even entertaining the possibility that the LE was not authentic. Second, he assumed that there actually are explicit promises in the Bible about its preservation—in spite of the likelihood that none of the texts that are so used are speaking about the preservation of the written word.¹¹

If, however, the doctrine of preservation is not part of your credo, you would be more open to all the textual options. I, for one, do not think that the real ending to Mark was lost, but I have no theological agenda in this matter because I don't hold to the doctrine of preservation. That doctrine, first formulated in the Westminster Confession (1646), has a poor biblical base. I do not think that the doctrine is defensible—either exegetically or empirically.¹² As Bruce Metzger was fond of saying, it's neither wise nor safe to hold to doctrines that are not taught in Scripture. I may be wrong in my view of preservation, but this presupposition at least keeps an open door for me for all the options in Mark 16.

My point in this preliminary treatment is to underscore the fact that we all bring a lot of presuppositions to the table that influence how we hear the evidence being presented; indeed, such presuppositions may even keep us from hearing the evidence.

Let me illustrate this point with a personal anecdote. I've mentioned Harry Sturz already. He was my first Greek professor at Biola University. At the time, he was teaching the only year-long college-level course on NT textual criticism offered in the country. As a young impressionable student, I came to embrace his views heartily. And I took several courses from him. When I came to Dallas Seminary, I studied under Harold Hoehner. He taught the Griesbach Hypothesis—that Matthew had written first. That view fit into my preunderstanding of textual criticism well. I also studied with Zane Hodges and learned the majority text position from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Name Index