Open Mark 16 in almost any modern Bible and you will find something unusual after verse 8: a line, a heading, a bracket or a note saying that the oldest manuscripts end here. Then the text goes on anyway. Some Bibles give one more paragraph of two sentences, then the familiar twelve verses about Mary Magdalene, the eleven, and signs that will follow those who believe. Some give only the twelve.
No other book of the Bible has this problem in quite this form. The question is not about a word or a phrase but about how the whole Gospel ends. This article sets out the evidence, the main ways scholars read it, and what Open Word Bible does with the chapter. For the general method behind decisions like this, see When the manuscripts disagree and How textual criticism recovers the text.
The women at the tomb
Mark 16 begins on the first day of the week. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome come to anoint the body of Jesus. The stone has been rolled away. A young man in a white robe tells them that Jesus has been raised, and gives them a message: tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of them to Galilee, and there they will see him, just as he told them (16:7, recalling 14:28).
Then comes verse 8. In Open Word Bible’s Balanced English:
They went out and ran from the tomb, trembling and beside themselves. And they told no one anything, for they were afraid.
The last two words of the Greek are ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ, ephobounto gar, “they were afraid, for”. Greek often puts the little word gar, “for”, second in its clause, so the sentence itself is grammatical. But a whole book that ends on it is very strange. The record for this verse has a grammar decision that says exactly this: a Greek sentence may end with “for”, but no other book is known to end that way. Scholars have searched ancient literature for parallels, and the few they have found are debated.
Every level of the translation keeps “afraid” as the last word, as the Greek ends with fear. A rendering decision records that choice.
Ending one: nothing more
The two oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both copied in the fourth century, end Mark at this verse. See Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus for their stories. In Vaticanus the scribe left an unusual blank space after “for they were afraid” before beginning Luke. Some think he knew that other copies went on and left room for it. Others think the space means less than that. Either way, his text stops at verse 8.
They are not alone. An old Syriac Gospel manuscript, the Sinaitic Syriac, also stops here, and so do some manuscripts of the Armenian and Georgian translations. Early Christian writers knew about the problem too. In the early fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, answered a question about how Mark’s account of the resurrection fits with Matthew’s. He said that one answer was that the more accurate copies of Mark end at “for they were afraid”, and that what follows is missing in most of them. Jerome, writing later in the same century, passed on much the same remark.
So by the fourth century there were copies of Mark that ended at 16:8, and well-read Christians knew it.
Ending two: the short ending
A small group of manuscripts adds two sentences after verse 8. Open Word Bible translates them, and prints them inside square brackets:
[They gave Peter and those with him a short report of all they had been told.
After this Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.
The record calls this the short ending. One Latin manuscript, Codex Bobbiensis, copied around AD 400, has it on its own. A handful of later Greek manuscripts, and some in other languages, have it followed by the longer ending, sometimes with a note between the two saying that this ending is also found.
The record gives three reasons for not taking it as Mark’s own. Its words and style are not Mark’s. It seems to have been written to round off a Gospel that ended at 16:8. And it contradicts 16:8, where the women say nothing to anyone. A theology decision on the second sentence adds a smaller sign: “eternal salvation” is a phrase found in Hebrews 5:9, not one Mark uses.
One detail of the data is worth knowing. The short ending has no verse number of its own. In the Greek data Open Word Bible pins, its words are counted as part of verse 8, after “for they were afraid”. That is why its sentences carry the reference 16:8.
Ending three: the longer ending
Most manuscripts of Mark, nearly all of them later than the fourth century, go on with the twelve verses traditionally numbered 16:9–20. This is the ending most readers know, because it is the one the King James Version printed without comment:
[After he had risen, early in the morning of the first day of the week, he showed himself first to Mary Magdalene. It was from her that he had thrown out seven demons.
In twelve verses the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then to two disciples walking in the country, then to the eleven at table. He rebukes their unbelief, sends them to preach the good news to all creation, and promises signs: driving out demons, new tongues, picking up snakes, surviving poison, healing the sick. Then he is taken up into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, and the disciples go out and preach everywhere.
The longer ending is old. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, quotes 16:19 and says that Mark wrote it at the end of his Gospel. The ending is usually thought to have been part of Tatian’s harmony of the four Gospels, made a little earlier, and it may be echoed earlier still by Justin Martyr. So these verses were being read with Mark well before Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were copied. Age alone does not settle the question, because two fourth-century codices can preserve a text much older than themselves.
The record for 16:9 sets out why most scholars do not think Mark wrote these verses:
- Vocabulary and style. Many of its words occur nowhere else in Mark, and its sentences do not read like his.
- Mary Magdalene is introduced again. Verse 9 describes her as the woman from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons, as if she were new to the story. She was named in 16:1, a few lines earlier.
- It reads like a summary of the other Gospels. The appearance to Mary resembles John 20, the two on the road recall Luke 24, the commission recalls Matthew 28 and Luke 24, and each of the signs is told of the apostles in Acts. A separate decision on 16:17–18 lists the parallels: demons cast out in Acts 16, tongues in Acts 2 and 10, Paul bitten by a snake and unharmed in Acts 28, the sick healed by the laying on of hands in Acts 28. There is no story of drinking poison anywhere in the New Testament.
- The join is rough. Verse 8 ends with the women; verse 9 begins with Jesus, without naming him, as if starting a new account.
A meaning decision on 16:19 notes another sign: Mark’s own narrative never calls Jesus “the Lord Jesus”, a title that belongs to the preaching of the early church.
Not everyone agrees. In the nineteenth century John William Burgon wrote a long defence of the twelve verses, and in later generations William Farmer and Nicholas Lunn have argued again that they belong to Mark, pointing to their wide spread and their early attestation. Most textual critics remain unpersuaded, though many would agree that the longer ending is a very early and valuable witness to how the first Christians told the resurrection.
A fourth voice: the Freer logion
One manuscript adds something more. Codex Washingtonianus, a fifth-century copy of the Gospels bought by the collector Charles Lang Freer in 1906 and now in Washington, has the longer ending with an extra passage after 16:14. Scholars call it the Freer logion, from the Greek word for a saying.
In it, the disciples answer Jesus’s rebuke by excusing themselves: this age of lawlessness and unbelief, they say, is under Satan, who does not allow the truth and power of God to be grasped. Jesus replies that the limit of Satan’s years of power has been reached, though other terrible things draw near, and that he was handed over to death for sinners so that they might return to the truth and inherit the glory of righteousness in heaven. Jerome knew part of this passage from some copies in his day, so it is older than Washingtonianus itself. But no other surviving Greek manuscript has it.
Open Word Bible’s record for 16:14 notes it in a text variant decision with a footnote: one fifth-century manuscript adds a passage after this verse in which the disciples excuse their unbelief and Jesus answers them, and it is found nowhere else. The translation does not include it, because the SBL Greek New Testament does not.
The Freer logion is a small window into how the end of Mark grew. Copyists who felt that the Gospel needed a fuller close supplied one, and once there was a fuller close, some felt it needed filling out in turn.
Did Mark mean to stop?
Here the textual question turns into a literary one. If Mark’s own Gospel ended at 16:8, was that the ending he intended? There are two main answers.
The ending was lost or never finished. On this view Mark wrote, or meant to write, an account of the meeting in Galilee promised in 16:7 and 14:28. The last page of the earliest copy may have been torn off, as outer leaves of books often were, or the author may have been prevented from finishing. Those who hold this point out that every promise in Mark is otherwise kept, that Matthew and Luke both go on to appearances, and that ending a book on “for” is almost without parallel.
Mark ended there on purpose. On this view the abrupt ending is a deliberate and powerful close. Mark opens just as suddenly, with no birth story and no introduction. Fear and amazement are the usual response to God’s power in this Gospel, as when the disciples see the storm stilled (4:41). The promise of 16:7 stands, and the reader knows that the message was in fact told, or there would be no Gospel. The silence of the women hands the story over to the reader, who is left at the empty tomb with a word to carry to Galilee. Many recent commentators find this reading persuasive.
The record for 16:8 gives both views in a decision of its own and does not choose. It is marked uncertain, and its reason ends: “The manuscripts cannot settle the question.” It adds one observation that both sides accept: the later endings show that early copyists felt the Gospel needed a fuller close.
It is worth separating two questions that are easily blurred. One is whether 16:9–20 was written by Mark. On that, the evidence points fairly clearly to no. The other is whether Mark meant to end at 16:8. On that, the evidence is genuinely open. A reader can hold that the longer ending is a later addition and still think that Mark’s real ending is lost.
What Open Word Bible prints
The translation follows the SBL Greek New Testament, edited by Michael Holmes. That edition prints both the short ending and the longer ending after 16:8, in double brackets, which in its system mark a passage that was not part of the original text but is old and widely read.
Open Word Bible does the same in English. The record for the short ending explains how: an opening square bracket at the start of the short ending, and a closing bracket after its “Amen”. The longer ending gets its own pair, opening at the start of 16:9 and closing at the end of 16:20. At the Literal level square brackets also mark words supplied in English, so the records say that inside the passage they keep that use and only the outer pair marks the passage itself.
Each ending has a footnote, and the text variant decisions behind them are open to read at every sentence. The translation of the endings is as careful as the rest of Mark. The records for 16:9–20 have the same meaning and rendering decisions as any other passage: what “new tongues” may mean (marked uncertain, since the verse does not say), why “if they drink anything deadly” is a promise of protection and not a command to test God, why “sat at the right hand of God” is the language of Psalm 110:1. Printing the endings in brackets is not a way of treating them carelessly. They have been read in the church for most of its history, and readers deserve to understand them.
The reader settings do not touch any of this. Settings change wording, never meaning, and whether these verses belong to Mark is a question about the text, not a matter of taste. So it is handled by meaning decisions and footnotes, the same at every level. See Settings change wording, never meaning.
Why it matters, and why it does not
For some readers the ending of Mark matters practically. In a few churches, 16:17–18 has been taken as a command to handle snakes or drink poison as a test of faith. A reader who knows that these verses are a later addition, and who reads the record’s note that the sentence is a condition and not an instruction, has two good reasons to hesitate.
For most readers, though, the main point is reassuring. Nothing in the longer ending teaches anything not found elsewhere in the New Testament. The appearances of the risen Jesus, the commission to preach, the ascension: all of these are told in Matthew, Luke, John and Acts, which is exactly why the longer ending looks like a summary of them. If Mark stopped at 16:8, the Christian account of the resurrection loses nothing. It only gains a Gospel that ends with a question.
And the question is a good one. Mark’s first readers already knew how the story went on. What they had to decide was what they would do with the message of the empty tomb. A Gospel that stops with the women silent and afraid leaves that decision with whoever is reading it.
For the other long passage that most Bibles now set apart, see The woman caught in adultery, and for shorter verses that have dropped out of modern Bibles, Verses missing from modern Bibles.
Open Mark 16 to read the chapter with its endings and the reasoning behind them.
Sources
- Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010).
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).
- David Alan Black, ed., Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: Four Views (B&H Academic, 2008).
- James A. Kelhoffer, Miracle and Mission: The Authentication of Missionaries and Their Message in the Longer Ending of Mark (Mohr Siebeck, 2000).
- Nicholas P. Lunn, The Original Ending of Mark: A New Case for the Authenticity of Mark 16:9–20 (Pickwick, 2014).