Ben C. Smith wrote:3. A sabotaged ending.
I have seen Mark 16.8 called a "suspended ending" (Lee Magness, for example, in
Sense and Absence) and then compared to other examples of this phenomenon, none of which seem to me to match up with what we find in Mark. (If you have one that you think is similar, I would like to see it.) Suspended endings generally amount to the writer letting the reader fill in unnarrated details; one thinks of TV procedurals, for example, in which the entire show is about identifying and catching the criminal, but the trial and conviction are not narrated; the viewer is invited to fill in that blank on his or her own. But that is not what we find in Mark. Instead, we find what I call a sabotaged ending.
The moment has come to discuss Mark 14.28 and 16.7, two obviously interrelated verses which I deliberately left out of my thread about the restoration of the disciples because they merit separate treatment. Posters on this forum have written about these two verses before, and this present discussion presumes knowledge of all of the following:
- Joe has a discussion of Mark 14.28 here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2134&p=47785.
- Bernard has a discussion of both Mark 14.28 and 16.7 on his web page: http://historical-jesus.info/hjes3.html#emptyt (you have to scroll down a bit to the end of the section in gray).
- Andrew discusses the Fayyum fragment here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2429.
- I lay out the Fayyum fragment here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1863.
It might be a good idea to set forth these Marcan verses themselves, along with their Matthean parallels (Luke lacks both, though 24.6b seems to have transformed Mark 16.7 into something quite different). I have included the main textual variants, but excluded those variants which are of spelling only:
Matthew 26.32: μετὰ δὲ τὸ ἐγερθῆναί με προάξω ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν.
~ No major textual variants.
Mark 14.28: ἀλλὰ μετὰ τὸ ἐγερθῆναί με προάξω ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν.
~ W adds ἐκ νεκρῶν after ἐγερθῆναί με.
~ The Fayyum fragment omits this entire verse.
Second, Matthew 28.7 = Mark 16.7:
Matthew 28.7: Καὶ ταχὺ πορευθεῖσαι εἴπατε τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ ὅτι ἠγέρθη ἀπὸ τῶν νεκρῶν, καὶ ἰδοὺ προάγει ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν, ἐκεῖ αὐτὸν ὄψεσθε· ἰδοὺ εἶπον ὑμῖν.
~ D lacks ἀπὸ τῶν νεκρῶν and ἰδοὺ.
Mark 16.7: Ἀλλὰ ὑπάγετε εἴπατε τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ Πέτρῳ ὅτι προάγει ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν· ἐκεῖ αὐτὸν ὄψεσθε, καθὼς εἶπεν ὑμῖν.
~ D has ὑπάγεται for ὑπάγετε, and both D and W add καὶ after this word.
~ Both D and W add ἰδοὺ after καὶ τῷ Πέτρῳ ὅτι.
~ Both D and W have προάγω instead of προάγει.
~ D has ἐκεῖ με instead of ἐκεῖ αὐτὸν.
~ A, D, and W have ὄψεσθαι instead of ὄψεσθε.
~ D has εἴρηκα instead of εἶπεν.
And here are synopses of the verses in question:
Matthew 26.32 | Mark 14.28 |
[/tr]
Μετὰ δὲ τὸ ἐγερθῆναί με
προάξω ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν. |
Ἀλλὰ μετὰ τὸ ἐγερθῆναί με
προάξω ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν. |
And after I have been raised
I shall proceed before you into Galilee. |
But after I have been raised
I shall proceed before you into Galilee. |
Matthew 28.7 | Mark 16.7 |
[/tr]
Καὶ ταχὺ πορευθεῖσαι
εἴπατε τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ
ὅτι
ἠγέρθη ἀπὸ τῶν νεκρῶν,
καὶ ἰδοὺ,
προάγει ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν·
ἐκεῖ αὐτὸν ὄψεσθε·
ἰδοὺ εἶπον ὑμῖν. |
Ἀλλὰ ὑπάγετε
εἴπατε τοῖς μαθηταῖς αὐτοῦ
καὶ τῷ Πέτρῳ ὅτι
προάγει ὑμᾶς εἰς τὴν Γαλιλαίαν·
ἐκεῖ αὐτὸν ὄψεσθε,
καθὼς εἶπεν ὑμῖν. |
And having journeyed quickly
tell his disciples
that
he has been raised from among the dead,
and behold,
he shall proceed before you into Galilee;
there you shall see him;
behold, I have told you. |
But go on,
tell his disciples
and Peter that
he shall proceed before you into Galilee;
there you shall see him,
just as he has told you. |
Mark 14.28 and 16.7 jointly promise the disciples a rendezvous with a risen Jesus, but the only messengers entrusted with passing this information on to the disciples themselves, the women at the tomb, say nothing to anyone, for they are afraid. So how are the disciples supposed to meet up with Jesus? This question does not find itself a natural answer already suggested in the course of the narrative; to the contrary, 16.8 has, barring further information, sabotaged 16.7. The extent of this sabotage may be seen in the confusion of modern exegetes, some of whom opine that Mark intended to keep the disciples in the dark, others of whom assume that they reunite with Jesus and are restored. Even exegetes on the same side of the overall issue of the originality of the abrupt ending cannot find agreement; they offer different answers to the question of whether the reader ought to assume that the disciples reunite with Jesus (examples are, again, from Stein's article):
Yea: “From these words [16.7] the reader understands that at the time of the young man’s speech Jesus is already on his way to Galilee where he expects to encounter Peter and the other disciples.” — Norman R. Petersen, “When Is the End Not the End? Literary Reflections on the Ending of Mark’s Narrative,” Int 34, page 153.
Nay: “Mark is assiduously involved in a vendetta against the disciples. He is intent on totally discrediting them. . . . As the coup de grace, Mark closes his Gospel without rehabilitating the disciples.” — Theodore J. Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict, pages 50-51.
Among those who suppose that Jesus does rehabilitate his disciples there is a further divide of opinion regarding how they actually come to reunite with Jesus, with some supposing that the women's silence was temporary and others imagining that it was permanent, but Jesus met with the disciples anyway, on his own terms, and surprised them. This kind of confusion does not happen when people read the other gospels:
any of the other gospels, and I do not think that Mark intended to confuse the reader so badly. If he wished to make it clear (as per 16.7) that the disciples were going to meet Jesus, why make it unclear (as per 16.8) that this was going to happen after all? Conversely, if he wished to make it plain that the disciples were
not going to reunite with Jesus, why include the prediction in the first place?
I trust you understand that I find most unconvincing those few attempts to make the young man at the tomb an unreliable predictor of events, though I readily admit that I do not really know what exactly is going on with this fellow. It is Jesus himself promising to "proceed before" the disciples himself in 14.28, and that has to mean
something. (This opens up yet another possible outcome for those who suppose that Jesus reunites with his disciples: perhaps the disciples remember this prediction from Jesus himself and go to Galilee without the women't instructions; but the more possibilities there are, the more bizarre it becomes that Mark did not take greater care to tell the reader which one is correct.) It is true that the young man says in 16.7 that Jesus has already told them that they would see him in Galilee, and that is a little bit further than what Jesus literally says in 14.28, but that problem is not as big, in my opinion, as the problems that start to pile up once one begins to suggest that the combination of 14.28 and 16.7 do not imply a reunion with Jesus; and I think that 14.28 can easily be taken as implying a reunion (after all, Jesus says that he will proceed before
the disciples into Galilee, thus predicting that they would go there, as well, which is not the same as simply saying that he himself would go to Galilee, full stop). If you have a reconstruction that makes sense along those lines, then I am more than happy to hear it.
Now, there is always the possibility that Mark 14.28 and 16.7 are interpolations. And I am actually very sympathetic to this view. But, just as with my first major argument above, adhering to this option actually creates a new argument for a lost ending in place of the one already laid out here. For we would have to imagine an interpolator who was willing and able to insert these predictions of a meeting with Jesus
without actually inserting the meeting itself. (Such a scenario is similar to the view that Mark intended to end his gospel but was unable to do so for some reason.) If it was just a scribe harmonizing Mark to Matthew (which happened
a lot over the centuries), then again, that scribe evidently took care to insert these two verses from Matthew, but apparently did
not bother to insert Matthew's ending, the most important thing, complete with a resurrection appearance in Galilee! I will agree that this is possible, but I see it as less likely than the alternative: the scribe or interpolator was working with a gospel text of Mark that contained an ending, including a meeting in Galilee, and wanted to foreshadow that meeting and turn it into yet another fulfilled dominical prediction (of which there are many in the gospel of Mark), either on his own or with inspiration from the gospel of Matthew. Just to be clear, I think it is more likely that an interpolator would include the predictions without the event itself than that the author would, but I also consider it even more likely that there was an ending already in place to occasion those verses, interpolations or not, in the first place.