The Last 12 Verses of Mark
...usion to the inspired story.” Attempts have been made to recover the “lost ending” of Mark in the remaining sections of Matthew or Luke, or even John or Acts; but none of these has been generally approved, and it is doubtful if Luke’s and Matthew’s copies of Mark went beyond 16:8. One of the oldest attempts to supplement and finish Mark is the so-called “longer ending.” This is not found in the best MSS and dates probably from the second century; it was compiled out of the data of the other Gospels, and even of Acts, and may have been an originally independent list of resurrecton appearances. The author was probably, as Burkitt and Conybeare held, the second-century presbyter Aristion. There is also the so-called “shorter ending,” found in certain MSS. It probably arose in Egypt in the fourth century, and is found in some MSS after vss.9-20, in others directly after vs. 8. But according to Abingdon and Cokesbury, neither of these endings is in Mark’s style. Klostermann gives a list of the non-Marcan words in the longer ending, and notes the absence of peculiar Marcan idiom in it, such as Mark’s favorite “immediately,” “again,” and so forth. As for the shorter ending, any reader can tell for himself that it is non-Marcan. That Mark ended at verse 8, with the words, “for they were afraid,” thus breaking off with a strange anti-climax and leaving the resurrection finale patently incomplete, is unthinkable; the more so on grammatical grounds, i.e. (in the Greek) the final word is the little conjunction “for.” This is a statement from Explore the Book, by J. Sidlow Baxter. I added it to this paper because of the evidence of common sense in his deduction of the question at hand. The “Scofield” note in loco rightly says: “The passage from verse 9 to the end is not found in the two most ancient manuscripts, the Sinaitic and Vatican, and others have it with partial omissions and variations. But it is quoted by Irenaeus and Hypposlytus in the second or third century.” It might have been added that the Vatican manuscript does have a space left after our verse 8, indicating a known absence of some compl...