The Endings of Mark

How does the Gospel of Mark end? The question is one of the most famous textual problems in the New Testament. The two oldest complete Greek manuscripts close the Gospel at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in fear; the majority of manuscripts and the received text continue with the “longer ending” (16:9–20); and a few witnesses preserve a “shorter ending.” Meanwhile the Church reads the longer ending liturgically as the third of the eleven Matins Resurrection Gospels. This file sets out the manuscript evidence and the scholarly positions as a structured dispute.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Problem Stated

The Gospel of Mark, as printed in the received and liturgical text, ends with twelve verses (16:9–20) recounting appearances of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene, to two disciples, and to the Eleven, the great commission (“Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,” 16:15, KJV), the signs that will follow believers (16:17–18), the Ascension, and the apostles’ preaching. Yet the textual evidence shows that these verses are absent from the earliest and weightiest Greek manuscripts, which end at 16:8: “and they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8, KJV). An ending on the word ephobounto gar (“for they were afraid”) is abrupt — abrupt even in the Greek, where it is unusual (though not impossible) for a sentence, let alone a book, to end on the particle gar. The textual problem is therefore twofold: whether the Gospel originally ended at 16:8, and where the additional endings came from.

The Forms of the Ending

The manuscript tradition preserves several different endings:

The abrupt ending at 16:8. The Gospel concludes with the women’s flight and fear. This is the reading of the two oldest complete Greek codices, Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ) and Codex Vaticanus (B), both of the fourth century, as well as the Sinaitic Syriac, the oldest Armenian and Georgian manuscripts, and other witnesses (Metzger, A Textual Commentary, 1994, on Mark 16:9–20).
The longer ending (16:9–20). The twelve familiar verses. This is the reading of the great majority of Greek manuscripts, including Codex Alexandrinus (A) and the later Byzantine tradition, and it is attested already in the second century by Irenaeus, who quotes Mark 16:19 as Mark’s (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.10.5–6; cited in Metzger, 1994). It is the text received in the Vulgate and in the Byzantine liturgical books.
The shorter ending. A brief conclusion (“But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation”) found in a handful of manuscripts, sometimes alone, sometimes inserted between 16:8 and the longer ending (Metzger, 1994).
Other forms, including the longer ending with an additional interpolation (the “Freer Logion”) found in Codex Washingtonianus (W).

This variety — an abrupt ending, a short ending, a long ending, and combinations — is itself strong evidence that the early Church found the ending at 16:8 unsatisfying and supplied conclusions, rather than that scribes deleted an original longer ending (Metzger and Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament, 4th ed., 2005).

The Patristic Witnesses

The ancient writers were aware of the problem. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Ad Marinum (Questions to Marinus), addressing a difficulty about the resurrection accounts, states that “the accurate copies” end the Gospel at 16:8 and that the verses following are found in “some but not all” copies — clear fourth-century testimony that the longer ending was already known to be textually doubtful (Eusebius, Ad Marinum 1; cited in Metzger, 1994). Jerome likewise remarks that almost all the Greek copies lack the final section (Jerome, Letter 120, to Hedibia, question 3). On the other side, Irenaeus in the second century already cites 16:19 as part of Mark’s Gospel (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.10.5), showing the longer ending was in circulation very early. The patristic evidence thus brackets the problem: the longer ending was known by c. 180, but its absence from the best copies was acknowledged by the great scholars of the fourth and fifth centuries.

The Scholarly Positions

The critical question — what stood in the autograph — is genuinely contested, and the positions should be named:

[Disputed: (1) The dominant text-critical view (Metzger 1994; Metzger and Ehrman 2005; the UBS/Nestle-Aland editions, which double-bracket 16:9–20) holds that the longer ending is not original to Mark — it is absent from ℵ and B, doubted by Eusebius and Jerome, differs in vocabulary and style from the rest of Mark, and joins awkwardly to 16:8 — and that the Gospel as we have it ends, deliberately or by accident, at 16:8. (2) A minority view (e.g., William R. Farmer, *The Last Twelve Verses of Mark*, 1974; the defenders of the Byzantine text) argues that the longer ending is original or at least very early and apostolic, citing its near-universal presence in the manuscript tradition and the second-century witness of Irenaeus. (3) A further question divides those who accept the loss of an original ending: some hold Mark *intended* to end at 16:8 (the abrupt ending as a deliberate, open-ended device leaving the reader in awe), others that the original ending was lost — the last leaf of an early codex torn away — and never recovered.]

The stylistic arguments against the longer ending are substantial: 16:9–20 contains numerous words found nowhere else in Mark, reintroduces Mary Magdalene as if for the first time (16:9, though she has just appeared at 16:1), and reads as a summary compiled from the other Gospels and Acts. Yet the case is not closed, and the Church has never treated the verses as spurious in the sense of being expunged.

The Church’s Liturgical Reception

For the Orthodox reader the decisive point is that the longer ending is received and read in the Church’s worship. The eleven Eothina — the eleven Matins Resurrection Gospels read in rotation at Sunday Orthros, each narrating a resurrection appearance — include the longer ending of Mark: Mark 16:9–20 is the third Resurrection Gospel (the third Eothinon) in the fixed cycle. The verses are thus not a textual curiosity but part of the living liturgical Scripture of the Orthodox Church, proclaimed from the ambo and expounded in the Resurrection canon. The distinction the tradition holds is the distinction this guide observes: between the question of the earliest recoverable text of the autograph (where the evidence points toward 16:8) and the question of the canonical and liturgical text received by the Church (which includes 16:9–20). The two questions are different, and the Orthodox Church answers the second by reading the longer ending as Scripture, while the honest scholar acknowledges the first. There is no contradiction in holding both: the Church receives the longer ending as canonical Gospel even as it knows, with Eusebius and Jerome, that the best ancient copies ended at 16:8.

References

The Gospel according to Mark 16:1–20. Greek New Testament (NA28), with 16:9–20 in double brackets; King James Version for the received text.
Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994 (the entry on Mark 16:9–20, the shorter ending, and the Freer Logion).
Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ad Marinum (Quaestiones evangelicae ad Marinum) 1.
Jerome. Letter 120, to Hedibia, question 3.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.10.5–6. Trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1 (citing Mark 16:19).
Farmer, William R. The Last Twelve Verses of Mark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
The Orthodox Matins Gospels (the eleven Eothina; Mark 16:9–20 as the third Resurrection Gospel).