A terminal Mark 16:8 is analogous to a modern "end card"

[Paul the Uncertain]

Mark 16:8 : They went out, they fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them. They said nothing to anyone; for they were afraid.

An immediate objection to the hypothesis that GMark should end at verse 16:8 is aesthetic. The ending is "abrupt."

Aesthetics weighs little in guildly deliberation compared with the fruits of text criticism which assure us that 200 or more years after the gospel was composed, verse 16:8 appears in all the complete ancient manuscripts, while the witnesses disagree among themselves about what, if anything, may have followed 16:8. Text criticism is also the discipline where all bugs can be spun as features: the very fact that 16:8 is so unappealing as an ending supposedly reinforces the conclusion that it is the proper ending.

Another perspective on the question is to reason from anology.

Like Mark's gospel, the 2004 Oliver Stone film Alexander is framed by a narrator. In the film, he's dictating his memoirs to a scribe. (* Spoiler Alert *) Toward the end, the narrator confesses to his part in a plot by Alexander the Great's generals to murder him. The betrayed hero dies. That's the end of the main story. The narrator directs that his memoirs be placed in the Library of Alexandria. That's the end of the narrator's framing story.

But there is one more thing revealed: an "end card" that says that those memoirs vanished along with so much else in the ill-fated library.



Wait - if the memoirs vanished, then how could Oliver Stone know what was in them?
Wait - if the women never told anybody, then how can Mark know what they would have said?

It's a bit more complicated than that in both cases, but the net effect, IMO, is much the same. Alexander openly admits (or reminds us) that it isn't strictly historical. If Mark ended with the women's silence, its "end card," then it too openly admits (or ...?) that it isn't strictly historical.

That explicit divorce of the story world from the real world is a different problem from aesthetics and the problem of tardy textual witnesses. If you fancy reading more about it, more is here:

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/202 ... pt-ending/

[andrewcriddle]

This is probably irrelevant to your main point, but although the Memoirs of Ptolemy have been lost they were used as a main source by Arrian in his life of Alexander.

Andrew Criddle

[rgprice]

See my presentation on History Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srDvhXanXHg

I argue that Mark ends abruptly because it is intended to be followed by the Pauline letter collection, starting with Galatians. The relationship of Mark to Paul is identified in the introductory title of Mark, "The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ". Mark is just the first part of a two part collection, with the Pauline letters announcing the "revelation" of Jesus to Paul. This is why the women flee adn tell no one, because it is left for Jesus to be revealed by Paul in Galatians 1.

[Paul the Uncertain]

This is probably irrelevant to your main point, but although the Memoirs of Ptolemy have been lost they were used as a main source by Arrian in his life of Alexander.

I think that is relevant. Stone credits Robin Lane Fox's Alexander the Great, which suggests that Stone (or the relevant staff in his production company) were generally aware of things like the ancient use of memoirs of Ptolemy and their subsequent loss. Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander includes speculation about poisoning as Alexander's cause of death.

The end card's divorce between the real world and the story world seems more "final" than it "needed" to be in that context, IMO. Thank you for raising the point.

I argue that Mark ends abruptly because it is intended to be followed by the Pauline letter collection, starting with Galatians. The relationship of Mark to Paul is identified in the introductory title of Mark, "The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ". Mark is just the first part of a two part collection, with the Pauline letters announcing the "revelation" of Jesus to Paul. This is why the women flee adn tell no one, because it is left for Jesus to be revealed by Paul in Galatians 1.

Ending at 16:8 isn't quite what puzzles. What puzzles is not ending at 16:7, but continuing to 16:8 and then stopping there. Strictly speaking, those are two ways of saying the same thing, but they highlight different features of the difficulty.

If GMark had ended at 16:7, how would that conflict with your reading of 1:1? If instead, GMark had continued through 16:11, how would that conflict with your reading of 1:1? (Actually, it's not clear how the entire canonical GMark would conflict with the work being the beginning or a prequel of Paul's gospel, but very few people around here take verses 16:15-20 seriously.)