2.1 The Same Doubts about the Long Ending

Both commentaries manifest the same doubts about the long ending. The only difference between the two statements is that Cajetan refers to Jerome's testimony, while the Zondervan commentators favour reference to the manuscripts. The discrepancy is largely explained by the knowledge that each century has of witnesses to the shorter ending.

At the time of Cajetan, only the Regius (L^e) preserved in the Royal Library in Paris was known. As for the patristic sources, Cajetan indicates, shortly before the quotation, the doubts expressed by Jerome in the Epistle to Hedibia (Ep 120 ad Hedibiam 3) and in the Dialogue against the Pelagians (II, 15).Footnote ⁸ He does not mention a text known in the West since the Council of Florence, that of a twelfth-century Byzantine monk, Euthymius Zigabene, but one has the impression that he paraphrases it: ‘Some interpreters say that the Gospel of Mark ends here and that what follows is a later addition. However, it must also be explained because it contains nothing against the truth.’Footnote ⁹

Modern commentators, by contrast, are familiar with the alternative readings to the long ending provided by the Sinaiticus (א) discovered in the 1850s and edited in 1863, as well as the Sinaiticus syriacus identified by Agnes Smith Lewis in 1892. They can also refer to the codex minuscule 304, which appears in the seventeenth century in the collection of Charles de Montchal (archbishop of Toulouse 1628–1651), the Washingtonensis, acquired by Charles Lang Freer in 1906, and the Armenian manuscript of Etchmiadzin known since the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, they can corroborate Jerome's assertions on the short ending with the Codex of Bobbio (Bobbiensis), published by Tischendorf in the Jahrbücher der Literatur (1847–1849).

As for the content, although separated by 500 years, the two commentaries more or less voice the same doubts. They both give the same impression of being confronted with a sort of patchwork of disparate elements (an ‘epitome’ according to Lohmeyer's expression).Footnote ¹⁰ Contemporary exegetes such as Camille Focant have identified all the similarities and borrowings from the various pre-existing gospel accounts.Footnote ¹¹

In particular, one passage raises suspicions: verses 17–18, which Cajetan incriminates directly in the previous quotation, and to which Zondervan's commentators devote a long paragraph beginning with ‘a word of caution is in order here’.Footnote ¹²

We can understand their surprise. As Joseph Hug has shown, while the exorcism in the name of Jesus, the glossolalia, and the healing of the sick have counterparts in the Gospels or in Paul, while the taking of snakes with the full hand comes perhaps from Luke 10.19 and from Paul's Maltese viper (Acts 28.2–6), the harmless poison is without parallel.Footnote ¹³ There is hardly any connection with the anecdote of the poison drunk by Justus Barsabbas recounted by Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. Eccl. III, 39, 9) or with the appearance of John before Nero narrated by the Acts of John in Rome 9–10, during which the apostle made a deadly poison innocuous by his prayers.Footnote ¹⁴ The late dating of these testimonies (and of a few others that he cites) has led James Kelhoffer to assign this final date to the second century.Footnote ¹⁵

Besides, both Cajetan and contemporary commentators question another verse, verse 14, which rebukes the disciples for their unbelief (ἀπιστία) and hardening of the heart (σκληροκαρδία). Cajetan invokes John's gospel at this point, voicing surprise that the reprimands are directed at all the apostles, even though they are expressed explicitly only to Thomas and that John has already been exempted from them (since he had come to faith by looking at the linen cloths); Zondervan's commentary emphasises the narrator's extreme generalisation of the disciples’ unbelief here.Footnote ¹⁶ The recent work on the ending by Kara Lyons-Pardue confirms this analysis. She shows that the writer does not simply compile the gospel sources to provide a satisfactory ending by trying to align it with what the first writer had written, but seeks to define what the right attitude for discipleship might be. For her, the long ending proceeds to a surprising condemnation of the Eleven and an equally unexpected exaltation of Mary of Magdala as a model of faithful discipleship.Footnote ¹⁷

2.2 Different Challenges

Cajetan and his distant successors of the twenty-first century thus concur in bringing to light the same facts concerning Mark's ending. This provides us with a first and valuable lesson. Not all good exegesis begins with Reimarus and Lessing: even if the Aufklärung wanted to give the illusion that it was carrying out a sort of tabula rasa of all previous convictions, the exegesis that followed did not cease to recycle—sometimes without sourcing them—opinions from the preceding centuries.Footnote ¹⁸

Does this mean that the two comments are saying exactly the same thing? A closer look shows that this is not the case.

Cajetan's concern with snakes and poison is primarily theological. The cardinal questions the link that the text establishes between faith and signs, that is, miracles:

Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of miracles, with which Cajetan was very familiar as the most admired Thomistic theologian of his time, is reflected in this passage. For Aquinas, miracles cannot flow systematically from salvific faith. As question 178 of the Pars Secunda-Secundæ of the Summa Theologica states, they are wrought by God in order to confirm the professed truth or to demonstrate the holiness of a particular individual whom God wishes to set as an example (ST II^a-æ, q. 178, a. 2, rep). The miracle cannot be the result of a habitus granted to a holy person, but rather of a unique will of God (ST II^a-æ, q. 178, a. 1, rep). As Benoît Bourgine summarises, the miracle plays only a secondary role in relation to sufficient faith: ‘Miracles undeniably play a role in access to faith, but this role is secondary to the interior motion coming from God by which God raises the believer above his or her nature.’Footnote ²⁰

For twenty-first century commentators, the concern is quite different. It pertains to the practical consequences that the reader could draw from these few words.

The explanation, which is repetitive and somewhat circuitous, seeks to avoid a reading which tends to apply the text in a normative manner, transforming it into a community prescription or a personal life rule.

Is it a question of dogmatic theology or of practical theology? Behind the philological position on the status of Mark's ending, a vision that goes far beyond the simple desire to understand the text emerges. This perspective can be properly understood only within the historical context of the writing of each commentary. Without taking into account the historicity of the understanding, it is possible to grasp what is said, but not why it is said, and therefore what its meaning is.

3.1 An Isolated Position…

As Michael O'Connor pointed out, biblical commentary was above all an instrument of reform for Cajetan. The Dominican judged, like many in the early sixteenth century, that the Church was in decline and he wished to restore a certain evangelical purity.Footnote ²² He, therefore, employs critical tools (the study of Greek, the consultation of manuscripts, the reading of the Church Fathers) to cast doubt on passages whose authority he deems suspect, notably some psalms, the book of Job, the epistles of James, Jude, 2 Peter, Hebrews, and, here, the ending of Mark.Footnote ²³

Jerome's testimony helps him to push these verses into a kind of second circle of canonicity. For him, they stand in absolute contradiction to his conception of faith, and likewise, to the role of the supernatural, since the consequence of keeping this promise would be that a defect would reach those who have faith, or that an impediment would arise, to explain that faith is not devoid of miracles, but that it is human beings who are devoid of faith regarding the efficacy of miracles.Footnote ²⁴ It is quite easy to reconstruct his logic: since miracles do not happen every day, either we must hold that faith from God is imperfect, or this passage must be rejected. To speak like a modern, Mark's ending is dismissed for the sake of a certain conception of rationality.

This view is quite isolated in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the Polyglot of Alcalá, the Novum Instrumentum Omne, and the Polyglot of Antwerp present the text of Mark 16.9–20 without any reluctance. If reservations are to be found, they must be sought in the annotations. In the notes of the Novum Instrumentum, Erasmus recalls Jerome's prejudices and concludes: ‘Moreover, since this last chapter of Mark is found today in all the Greek copies I have consulted, this conclusion [coronis] appears to be inserted from some apocryphal Gospel to the least daring reader.’Footnote ²⁵

Κορωνίς is the label Erasmus chose to indicate the tail end of Mk 16.Footnote ²⁶ Out of confidence in Jerome, he indicates almost in passing that the ending may be problematic, but goes no further. Erasmus shows himself to be true to the approach that Reventlow sees as characteristic of him: while his editing of the Bible may appear to be innovative, his use of the sacred text is quite conservative and even fairly pious.Footnote ²⁷

To put it plainly, until the nineteenth century, both Catholics and Protestants had a vested interest in saving this ending of Mark, for reasons that were not strictly philological. Such a respected commentator as the Jesuit, Juan Maldonado (Maldonatus, 1533–1583), who was Michel de Montaigne's friend,Footnote ²⁸ indicates the Catholic answer: not only is there nothing controversial in this passage, but above all, its authority cannot be questioned, since it was affirmed by the Council of Trent.Footnote ²⁹ The authority of the Church overrides any critical findings.

Protestants do the same for another reason. As the compiler of commentaries (Calvin, Bullinger, etc.), Marlorat (1508–1562) testifies the text did not raise any objections in the churches of the Reformation.Footnote ³⁰ Benedictus Aretius (1522–1574), a Bernese pastor, explains the reasons why. These verses provide clear instruction on the ministry as he understood it: it should be universal and not restricted to clerics; it should focus on the preaching of the gospel; it should be done by trained ministers; and eventually, it should flourish in a visible way, with signs.Footnote ³¹ Mark 16, in its long ending, corresponds perfectly to his theology; there is no way to get rid of it.

An opponent, Cornelius a Lapide, confirms the Protestant use of verse 16.Footnote ³² He invokes successively the case of the Lutherans who derive from it the idea that faith alone saves, without the necessity of works, then the Anabaptists who derive from it the thesis that only adults, in a position to believe, should be baptised and not little children, and finally the Calvinists who affirm that baptism is not required since it is of faith alone that Christ speaks in this passage.

Text-critical issues lead to casting doubt on the legitimacy of the long ending, but theological issues lead to its preservation. The most striking evidence for this is provided by Bengel. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752) is rightly regarded as one of the fathers of modern exegesis. In his critical notes (Apparatus Criticus ad Novum Testamentum), he mentions the texts already discussed by Erasmus and Theodore Beza, but he also quotes the newly edited writings of the Fathers.Footnote ³³ However, in his Gnomon Novi Testamenti, he glosses over all the verses of Chapter 16 without raising an eyebrow.Footnote ³⁴ Why did he not draw conclusions from his critical work? The reason is simple, and it is given in his commentary on verse 17: ‘In Leonberg, a town in Württemberg, according to the Fathers’ memories, a young girl was so crippled in her limbs that she could barely drag herself up a few steps with the aid of crutches; but while the dean was speaking from the pulpit about the wondrous power of the name of Jesus, she was suddenly straightened up.’Footnote ³⁵

Bengel is above all a pietist for whom signs count in the building of the Church and in the life of faith: the performative power of Dean Raumayer's preaching healing the young Katharina Hummel in 1644 is one of them.Footnote ³⁶ Verse 17, proclaiming the existence of miracles, could not be apocryphal in his eyes, because it justified the practices of his own community.

3.2 … Adopted Only in the Nineteenth Century

It was not until the nineteenth century that a new vision could be expressed. This was the outcome of an unprecedented sociological context: the German university. The latter had distinguished itself in the editing of the classical texts of antiquity and intended to adopt the same method for the texts of the New Testament, by comparing manuscripts; more importantly, the university was taking on its autonomy vis-à-vis the ecclesiastical structures and was able to scrutinise biblical exegesis issues with all the more freedom, as Michael Legaspi has convincingly shown.Footnote ³⁷

Coming after the editions of Michaelis and Wettstein, Eichhorn, who taught at Göttingen, remarked that the sole examination of the manuscripts does not allow a definitive conclusion on the adventitious character of the ending. However, the sum of the questions it begs permits doubts: ‘Criticism can in no way challenge the authenticity of this passage, and the objection must either be raised by historical combinations or excused by the low authority which Mark, as an apostolic assistant, enjoys, if he cannot be united with Matthew.’Footnote ³⁸ Eichhorn returns to Cajetan's hypothesis of secondary canonicity, repeating like him an old patristic tradition. In this case, he refers to the allegation of Clement of Alexandria (quoted by Eusebius in Hist. eccl. VI,14,5–7) that Mark was the disciple of Peter. His authority would therefore be less than that of Matthew, who was one of the Twelve.

If Eichhorn remains cautious, Johannes Schulthess (1763–1836), professor of theology in Zürich, is much more affirmative. His article exerted a constant influence on later scholars since it is quoted in the commentaries of Kühnholl (1833), Meyer (1834), Bleek (1862), etc.

Like Cajetan, who was uncomfortable with the same verse, nineteenth-century Germanic scholars do not feel attuned to the signs promised by Christ to his disciples. To declare this pericope adulterated better suits their vision of a Church very far removed from the charismatic phenomena, accused of being Kleinlichkeiten, trivialities.

Only one example expresses that the peculiar historical situation of the German university is the reason for such a claim: that of Meyer. In his famous commentary, once again on this question of the snake, he asserts with aplomb that this σημɛῖον is far too misleading not to betray its character as an apocryphal legendFootnote ⁴⁰, and he makes the connection with the snake magic (Schlangenzauberei) of the Orientals. However, what is appropriate in the German context is not at all suitable in the American context, as the translation of Meyer's book in the United States attests. Indeed, after the German scholar's text, the editor, Matthew Riddle, felt compelled to write a rather embarrassed ‘Note by the American Editor’.Footnote ⁴¹ He starts by criticising Meyer himself, acknowledging that he is quite isolated in his opinion. Then he shelters behind the authority of Westcott and Hort to cite the evidence that would justify the rejection of the final. And ultimately, he points out that many English and American scholars persist in viewing it as authentic.

More than a century later and nearly 500 years after Cajetan, the same position is still defended in Eduard Schweitzer's commentary. While he does not develop his own opinion of the text explicitly, several expressions clearly betray it, especially when he comes to the signs in verses 17–18: ‘The enumeration of the signs promised to all (!) believers reveals a Church in which miracles still happen and are important.’Footnote ⁴² The exclamation mark and the noch immer (still) indicate an obvious distancing from phenomena depicted as the remnant of a primitive time portrayed as full of Mirakulöse or Enthusiasmus.Footnote ⁴³ The argument is easy to reconstruct: these irrational beliefs have run their course and denote an era of backwardness that is now over.

Schweizer's example allows us to clarify what is meant by the historicity of understanding. It describes the unique and unsubstitutable condition of the interpreter engaged in his or her time and in his or her social position in relation to the text. The Catholic Cajetan questions Mark's ending on behalf of his Thomistic theology and his relation to the patristic tradition, while the Protestant of the late twentieth century, Eduard Schweizer (1913–2006), distances himself from it on behalf of a reconstruction of the context. But at the same time, historical situations are linked by a tradition of interpretation, a history of readings, which can lead two commentators to share the same position, because they are under the influence of the same worldview. And here, very clearly, we see that it is a similar relationship to the supernatural that binds together the cardinal who convinced Luther of heresy and the student of Karl Barth.

4.1 From Adulterated Endings to No Ending at All. Or: Towards a Postmodern Hermeneutic

Until the mid-nineteenth century, while exegetes expressed doubts about the Markan authenticity of the ending, no one went so far as to say that the gospel should stop at verse 8, after ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ. Instead, interpreters offered a spectrum of hypotheses ranging from the loss of a later completed folio to Mark's lack of time to finish his work. The majority felt that a ‘normal’ ending had been planned, which the vagaries of history failed to preserve. This is still the option defended to this day by Robert Gundry, R. T. France, or Clayton Croy, and very recently Darrell Bock.Footnote ⁴⁴

Only in the early twentieth century did another reading emerge, which dealt with the idea that the end of Mark could be 16.8. One of the first expressions of this reading can be found in the commentary of Julius Wellhausen, who states emphatically that the Gospel of Mark ends with verse 8. And he adds that those who want it to continue are erring: ‘They have not understood 16, 4. Nothing is missing; it would be a pity if something else were to follow.’Footnote ⁴⁵ To capture the meaning of this statement, the exegesis of verse 7 is worth quoting in full:

Wellhausen, coming at the end of a long rationalist tradition that rejects supernatural manifestations and confines faith to the inward, sees in Mark's economical use of literary resources a kind of argumentation that is much stronger than the rhetoric of ekphrasis. He celebrates the ellipsis because he belongs to a context that relegates faith to the side of personal experience: the description of the deeds of a resurrected dead body makes him uncomfortable, as does the promise of extraordinary actions. Not addressing the tricky ending of Mark's Gospel suits his theological view perfectly; it allows him to stick to the evidence of the empty tomb.

Some forty years later, Robert Henry Lightfoot followed this line in his 1949 lecture, which repeated much of what Lohmeyer had said.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, after apologising for rehabilitating the fear that was, according to him, an integral part of his grandparents’ religion, he advocates for the importance of this fear in order to understand what is at stake: ‘The Christian doctrine of eternal life, which is indissolubly connected with that of the Lord's resurrection, is, in the true sense of the word, a tremendous and, on one side, a terrible truth; if we do not know for ourselves that this is so, we are far astray.’Footnote ⁴⁸ The women at the tomb manifest the right attitude, the one that allows them to approach God. In this praise of the fear of women, we recognise the influence of Rudolf Otto and his mysterium tremendum et fascinans:Footnote ⁴⁹ the inner feeling of sacred terror is precisely the mark of the irrational numinous irruption within rationality.

This passage to interiority is a sign of the evolution of mentalities that emphasises the personalistic dimension of the relationship to the divine and is part of this great global evolution of the emergence of individualism. In the wake of Rudolf Otto, it is accomplished in a form of neo-Pietism which confines the divine to the inner movements of the soul to let rationality unfold in the external world.Footnote ⁵⁰ It developed successively in two directions, which surfaced at two different times, the 1970s and the 1990s, but which are two sides of the same process.

From the 1970s on, commentators sought to reconstruct the context in which the community could have allowed a gospel to end in such a void. There was no lack of answers: to oppose the enthusiasm of a realised eschatology,Footnote ⁵¹ resist the theology of glory,Footnote ⁵² or a gnostic perspective,Footnote ⁵³ or the prophetic speeches put elsewhere in the mouth of Jesus.Footnote ⁵⁴ Others postulated a violent protest against the Judeo-Christian disciples, who are disqualified by the Gentile disciples by saying that they have no mission.Footnote ⁵⁵

Werner Kelber's synthesis is a first direction. He takes up Wellhausen's argument that the absence of an apparition account of Jesus is deliberate because Jesus’ mission is fulfilled by the empty tomb, not by his apparition. But he adds that the purpose is also to challenge the disciples: has the gospel not presented their failure from the beginning?Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, if Galilee is to be the place of the parousia, as Marxsen had argued,Footnote ⁵⁷ the inability of the disciples to go to Galilee marks their absolute fiasco.Footnote ⁵⁸

Delegitimising the historical disciples of Jesus in this way is not only a position on the text, but it is an ecclesiological view, a rejection of the mission of the Church, which has long relied on the testimony of the Twelve to establish its authority, as William Telford points out.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is no coincidence that Joel Marcus portrays a community that becomes the mirror of the women—lost, haggard, terrorised, torn between fear and faith;Footnote ⁶⁰ he merely echoes the criticisms of his time regarding the history of the churches’ claims to power.

The other direction, beginning in the 1990s, is not so much interested in the first historical reader as in the current reader. David Rhoads and his reader-oriented perspective finally reach the same conclusion: the ‘actual’ reader is as disoriented as the historical reader, he remains in uncertainty. To get out of it, he must then make a decision:

Mary Anne Beavis, in the 2010s, goes further by proposing that the reader should carry on the story: ‘Such an “imaginative positing” includes the reader's own answer to if and how the messenger's commission was ultimately carried out: to supply their own Markan ending—or continuation. The open ending of Mark compels readers to envision their own sequel to the story, a sequel in which they take part.’Footnote ⁶²

With the strong affirmation that ‘only the reader can bring closure’,Footnote ⁶³ the literary reading of Mark's ending comes to the same point as the historical reading: only an individual action – which can blossom in a collective atmosphere, but which remains a personal experience – can supplement what is missing in Mark. It is up to the reader, in a way, to make Jesus appear in his own consciousness. The movement towards a postmodern hermeneutic, that is, a hermeneutic entirely centred on the interpreter, is accomplished.