Some thoughts on the “Longer Ending of Mark:”
1. It doesn’t matter whether or not Mark wrote it, its still scripture.
2. It seems that, of the whole ending, the only part that seems strange to our ears is vss. 17-18. while reading this today , I found it less strange than I had before. Although I’m not sure that I recommend drinking poison, I think that this passage fits in the general framework of the gospel story. If we read Jesus as ushering in the Kingdom - the era when God rules righteously over his people, a kingdom characterized by peace (free of the fracturing of the fall), then the things described in this passage wouldn’t be a big deal for the citizens of Jesus’ Kingdom.
2a. It must be said that the disjunction between the vision of Mark 16:17-18 and the reality that we experience is likely the impetus for much of Paul’s writings. That and the fact that the Messiah of the Old Testament came, then died and then left.
Entries (RSS)
March 30th, 2007 at 10:26 am
“1. It doesn’t matter whether or not Mark wrote it, its still scripture.”
I disagree.
1)I think I understand your reasoning, and I believe it certainly applies in scenarios like, say the Pentateuch, or Isaiah, where there formal reason to assume that this was meant to be understood as the work of one author. In Mark, however, we have the perspective of an eye-witness account (albeit, if as tradition holds this is Mark’s report of Peter’s account, with a somewhat layered delivery).
2)If we do not take “original authorship” or “earliest form” as our guideline or goal, what will we use? Mark has no less than five alternate endings. How will we distinguish between the “longer ending” and, say, the bizarre “Freer Logion” ending? Is it just a matter of what was ultimately adopted by the church as the orthodox reading? I’m not comfortable with this. The church is wrong, all the time. The word must stand over and critique the church, a dictum which I probably heard first from you yourself. How can the church really be critiqued by a word that it has the freedom to append when its message is found scandalous, like, say, an ending of the gospel with an empty tomb and an un-preached Christ?