Footnotes

1.

The chapter divisions in use today were introduced by Stephen Langton (famous for wrestling the Magna Carta from King John) in the early 13th century.

2.

On the stone that sealed Jesus’ tomb, see Amos Kloner, “Did a Rolling Stone Close Jesus’ Tomb?” BAR 25:05.

3.

In the Jewish tradition of counting days, both the beginning and ending day are included in the count. Thus, the resurrection (on Sunday) is said to occur on the third day after the crucifixion (on Friday).

4.

For more on this character, see Jane Schaberg, “How Mary Magdalene Became a Whore,” BR 08:05.

5.

For a summary of the most important New Testament manuscripts, see “Glossary: New Testament Manuscripts—Uncials, Minuscules, Palimpsests and All That Stuff,” BR 06:01.

6.

Coptic was the language spoken by the native population of Egypt from about the third to the tenth century C.E. (after which Arabic began to supplant it). Sahidic and Bohairic were the most important of its many dialects. Syriac, a branch of the Aramaic language, was spoken in Syria and Mesopotamia from just before the beginning of the Christian era until it was eventually displaced by Arabic. Latin, the language of the Roman imperial system, was also the spoken language of many people throughout the western part of the Roman empire, especially in Italy and North Africa. Armenian was the spoken language of the ancient kingdom of Armenia; a 36-letter alphabet was created for it in about 406 C.E.

7.

For an another example of a text critic at work, see Steve Mason, “Where Was Jesus Born? O Little Town of…Nazareth?” BR 1601.

8.

The discovery of papyrus copies of the Gospels of Luke and John dating from c. 200 C.E. or a bit earlier that preserve a text very similar to the text of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus demonstrates that these two fourth-century manuscripts in fact preserve a textual tradition that dates back at least to around the time of Irenaeus. These papyri, known as P66 and P75, are both in the Bodmer collection in Geneva.

Endnotes

1.

On the possibility that these are two of the 50 manuscripts that the Emperor Constantine requested from Eusebius of Caesarea, see T.C. Skeat, “The Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Vaticanus, and Constantine,” Journal of Theological Studies 50:2 (1999), pp. 583–625.

2.

Manuscript 304. There are two other manuscripts, 1420 and 2386, which appear to end at 16:8, but in each case it seems that the last leaf of these two copies of Mark is missing.

3.

From Gospel Questions and Solutions Addressed to Marinus, a lost work of which only a few excerpts, preserved in a manuscript in the Vatican Library, are known. See J. Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, The Golden Age of Patristic Literature (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1960; reprint, Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1983), p. 337.

4.

Jerome, Letter 120.3 (to Hedibia).

5.

Justin Martyr, Apology 1.45, where he uses five words that also occur (in a different order) in 16:20.

6.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.10.6.

7.

Jerome, Against Pelagius 2.15.

8.

This variant appears in the eighth-century Codex Regius, in two unnamed Greek manuscripts dating to the seventh and eighth centuries and in one Sahidic Coptic translation.

9.

The tension between Mark 16:8 and the addition is relieved somewhat in Codex Bobbiensis by the omission of the phrase “they said nothing to anyone.”

10.

For this argument see William R. Farmer, The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 70–72.

11.

See Mark 16:9: cf. Luke 8:2; Mark 16:9–11: cf. John 20:11–18, Luke 24:10–11; Mark 16:12–13: cf. Luke 24:13–35; Mark 16:14–16: cf. Matthew 28:16–20, Luke 24:36–38; Mark 16:17–18: cf. Luke 10:17–20; Mark 16:19: cf. Luke 24:50–53.

As James A. Kelhoffer has recently demonstrated, “The numerous allusions to Matthew, Luke and John—especially to the ends of these writings—demonstrate…that the author of Mark 16:9–20 wrote in conscious dependence on one or more MSS [manuscripts] of the NT [New Testament] Gospels” (Kelhoffer, Miracle and Mission: The Authentication of Missionaries and Their Message in the Longer Ending of Mark [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000], p. 150). In this regard, it should also be noticed that whereas Matthew and Luke, in passages where they parallel Mark 1:1–16:8, consistently abridge Mark, it is the other way around in 16:9–20: The long form of Mark offers an abridgement of material from the other gospels.

12.

For a detailed discussion see J.K. Elliott, “The Text and Language of the Endings to Mark’s Gospel,” Theologische Zeitschrift 27 (1971), pp. 255–262; reprinted in Elliott, ed., The Language and Style of the Gospel of Mark (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 203–211.

13.

For a detailed and sophisticated presentation, see Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), pp. 1009–1021.

14.

Although the grammatically unusual ending is rare, it is not unparalleled. For the evidence and details, see Andrew T. Lincoln, “The Promise and the Failure—Mark 16:7, 8, ” Journal of Biblical Literature 108 (1989), pp. 283–300.

15.

Donald H. Juel, A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), p. 107.

16.

See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 3–31, 58–59.