Read Mark and Learn: Following Mark’s Jesus

By Derek Tovey

Mark's Gospel ends in an open-ended manner that puzzles many readers. This is part of the evangelist's strategy, so this book maintains; it raises questions about who Jesus is and what it means to follow Jesus. The Gospel writer addresses these two themes as he develops his story of Jesus. Readers are drawn in to consider these themes for themselves. Although there is an open end to the story of the disciples' discipleship, there is an ending to their story embedded in the narrative. Read Mark and Learn aims to help readers engage with this Gospel's intriguing story and to learn from it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781630872885

Derek Tovey

Derek Tovey is lecturer in New Testament at the College of St. John the Evangelist, Auckland, New Zealand, and an honorary lecturer in the School of Theology, University of Auckland. He is the author of Jesus, Story of God: John's Story of Jesus (2007).

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Read Mark and Learn

Following Mark’s Jesus

Derek Tovey

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Read Mark and Learn

Following Mark’s Jesus

Copyright © 2014 Derek Tovey. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-138-0

eISBN 13: 978-1-63087-288-5

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments and thanks to the following for use of quoted material:

To Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. for permission to use the Collect for Advent 2, pp. 426–27 of The Alternative Service Book 1980 (© The Central Board of Finance of the Church of England, 1980).

Extract from The Hollow Men taken from Collected Poems 1909–1962 © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Extract from The Hollow Men from Collected Poems 1909–1962, by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Making Sense of Mark’s Ending

Chapter 2: Who Is Jesus?

Chapter 3: Following Jesus on the Way

Chapter 4: Mark 13

Epilogue: Reading Mark’s Gospel

Some Suggested Reading on Mark's Gospel

Bibliography

For my mother, Marjorie, and my daughter, Anna,

two who have followed and served Jesus.

Preface

The title of this book, Read Mark and Learn, is, first of all, an invitation to do just that: to read the Gospel of Mark. My hope in what follows is to show that the Gospel is a connected story. So, even before you read this book, you may wish to read the whole of the Gospel at one sitting. It is about the length of a short novel or a longish short story. In an epilogue, I supply five studies which look at the Gospel under a series of thematic headings. There I provide readings from the Gospel along with questions. You might like to work through these studies first (after you have read the Gospel through!) before you read the book’s four chapters.

This book comes out of some previous study done years ago, and also after teaching the Gospel in formal academic settings, and to groups of people in church-related study days, workshops and, in one case, a series of Holy Week talks. I am grateful to students and participants in these classes and study days for the stimulation and insights they provided: and for the opportunity to try some of this material out on them first.

The title of this book was inspired by a prayer in The Alternative Service Book

1980

of the Church of England. The prayer reads thus:

Blessed Lord,

who caused all holy Scriptures

to be written for our learning:

help us so to hear them,

to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them

that, through patience, and the comfort

of your holy word,

we may embrace and for ever hold fast

the hope of everlasting life,

which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.¹

I hope that my book may stimulate and enliven your reading of Mark’s Gospel, so that you may learn from it.

1. The collect for Advent

2

, in the Church of England, Alternative Service Book

1980

,

426

–

27

, emphasis mine. Some Anglicans and Episcopalians may be familiar with this prayer in its original form in the

1662

Book of Common Prayer.

Acknowledgments

This book was begun while on sabbatical leave in 2010. I want to acknowledge here the support and help given by the St. John’s College leadership and the Trust Board in enabling this writing project. Thanks are also due to Professor Elaine Wainwright, the Head of the School of Theology in the University of Auckland. I wish also to acknowledge and thank the School of Theology, University of Auckland and the College of St. John the Evangelist for the financial assistance provided in bringing this book to publication. My daughter, Anna, did some work on the manuscript in preparing it for publication. She also made some suggestions for its improvement. For her help and her advice, I thank her.

1

Making Sense

of Mark’s Ending

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.¹ So wrote T. S. Eliot, concluding his poem, The Hollow Men. Mark’s Gospel begins with a bang, and ends, not with a whimper, but with silence. The first verse of the Gospel reads: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.² At the conclusion of the Gospel, the reader learns how three women go to the tomb where Jesus is buried early on the first day of the week. When they get there, they find the stone rolled away from the tomb and inside the tomb a young man who tells them that Jesus’ body is not there because he has been raised. The women are to go to the disciples and tell them that Jesus has gone ahead of them to Galilee; they will see the risen Jesus there. Then comes this statement (Mark 16:8): So they [the women] fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

There is good reason to think that this was the original ending of the Gospel. But, if so, it has left generations of readers feeling puzzled or dissatisfied. Why should the Gospel have concluded on this note of silence and fear? Should it end here? Can it really have ended here? These last two questions will be addressed first, as it will be seen that many readers and scholars of the Gospel have concluded that it did not end at 16:8, and certainly should not. If you look at your Bible, you will see that, in fact, the Gospel does not end at verse 8. There are a further twelve verses, in which Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, and two other disciples, and finally the eleven, whom he upbraids for not believing the reports of his resurrection. Then Jesus ascends to heaven, while the disciples go out and proclaim the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it (16:20).

The problem is that it would seem that these verses were added to the Gospel later. They are not part of the Gospel as originally written. You may find that your Bible has a heading such as The Longer Ending of Mark above verses 9 to 20. You will probably find another heading reading, The Shorter Ending of Mark, with some such text as: And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.

The evidence of the ancient manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel is that Mark 16:9–20 are missing from two of the oldest Greek manuscripts (called Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus), and from numerous other manuscripts. Moreover a number of early church fathers (such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen) do not appear to be aware of the existence of these verses, and others such as Eusebius and Jerome indicate that the verses are not in copies of Mark known to them.³ Other manuscripts that include them also include the shorter ending; and yet others include the verses with notes and marks in the margins of the manuscripts which indicate that the copyist is aware that these verses are not original to the Gospel. One old manuscript has only the shorter ending of the Gospel.

Hence, the manuscript evidence is mixed but suggests to scholars that the Longer Ending and the Shorter Ending have been added to the Gospel later. They stand as testimony to the fact that early readers also found that the conclusion of the Gospel at 16:8 was unsatisfactory. There is also a grammatical reason for considering that 16:8 should not be the conclusion of the Gospel. In the Greek the verse concludes with the conjunction, gar, translated into English as for. While it is possible to conclude a sentence or a paragraph with the word gar, for a long time the argument went that a whole book could not end in this manner. This presupposes that there must have been something to follow the gar. We may get a sense of this expectation if we translate the last clause not as for they were afraid, but they were afraid for . . .

A number of scholars have brought forward evidence and arguments to show that it was indeed possible to end a lengthy piece of writing, or a book, with a final gar. The objections of an earlier generation of scholars to such an ending have, therefore, been somewhat set aside, though the issue has not been finally settled. Nevertheless, this grammatical issue, together with the strange, open-ended conclusion that 16:8 brings to the Gospel, has led many scholars to believe that the ending is unfinished, or perhaps lost.

How can this have happened? It has been suggested that the author of the Gospel was unable to finish because he fell ill, or died, or was arrested. Alternatively, some have suggested that the end was deliberately cut or torn away. A more plausible suggestion is that the ending of the Gospel has been accidentally lost. This is especially possible if the Gospel first appeared in codex form as this is more like our modern book than the papyrus scroll: in this case, it is conceivable that the final page (or pages) became detached and lost.⁴

The difficulty with accepting that the ending was lost is that the loss must have happened early, that is, before other copies that retained the ending as it had been, were made. No manuscripts containing the supposed lost ending have ever been found. Both the Longer and the Shorter endings found in the manuscripts, or versions of the Bible, strike readers and scholars as attempts to patch up the ending that has supposedly been lost; or, of course, simply to supply another ending.

There is a further consideration. It is difficult to continue smoothly beyond the end of 16:8. The little phrase they said nothing to anyone provides a road block that is difficult to get around. One either has to ignore it, or alter it in some way, in order to proceed. Scholars generally accept that both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke depend upon Mark as one of their sources. It is interesting to see how they each deal with the problem. Both ignore the statement they said nothing to anyone, but Matthew retains the idea of fear: So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples (Matt 28:8). Luke, changing the messenger who delivers the news of the resurrection to two men in dazzling clothes, moves directly from their words (also changed from Mark’s version) to the response of the women, which is to remember Jesus’ prophecy of his resurrection (see, e.g., Luke 9:22), and go from the tomb to tell all this to the eleven and all the rest (Luke 24:8–9).

These, and other, considerations have caused many readers, certainly an increasing number of scholars in recent years, to conclude that the writer of Mark’s Gospel intended to end his account of the good news at chapter 16, verse 8. This is the position I adopt in this book. I invite you to read this book, and the Gospel with that assumption in mind. The writer deliberately and intentionally ended this Gospel with an