ALLELUIA! BUT WHAT ABOUT ST MARK?

EADING THE NEW TESTAMENT doesn't always answer all our questions. In this 'Year of Mark', for example, we have the problem of the ending of St Mark's Gospel. There are four possible endings. Some say the Gospel ends at 16:8 where, we are told, the three women, who have come to do the burial anointing, encounter an angel and leave the tomb in some confusion: 'they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid'. Then there are the two endings, not found in the best manuscripts. One is in a footnote of the RSV, outlining that the women reported back to Peter and the disciples and then that Jesus himself sent out, east and west, by means of the disciples 'the sacred and imperishable proclamation of salvation'. This, in style and content, is obviously an editorial addition. The other, 'the long ending', printed as Mark 16:9-20, gives us something of what we find at the end of Matthew and Luke's Gospels but, scholars tell us, it doesn't really fit with the style of Mark and doesn't quite follow on as it might, re-introducing, as it does, Mary Magdalene, as if she had not been mentioned a few verses earlier. That makes three possible endings.

The fourth possible ending - and the ending supported by, for example, by Bishop Tom Wright - is the one we don't have. Much as, once or twice, I have found myself in the pulpit with a sermon without a last page - an error of printing or stapling - so, from time to time, the last page of a book or the last bit of a scroll goes missing. The Bishop of Durham's explanation allows us to believe that St Mark rounded his Gospel off properly and that kindly scribes, dealing with the missing ending, had one or two goes at doing it for him when they discovered that the ending had gone missing.

You could be forgiven for not having noticed any of this: the Sunday Mass Lectionary in 'the Year of Mark' gives us quite a bit of John, especially in Eastertide, and on the Third Sunday of Easter even gives us a bit of Luke, a real exception to the 'Mark or John' rule for Year B. The truth is that, for the Resurrection story, we do not rely on St Mark - either for what is there or for what is missing. What is there matches what others tell us. What is missing may indeed be what others tell us. The importance of the unanswered questions, the different possibilities, is that they show us what kind of book the Bible is. The Bible is not - as Muslims believe about the Koran and Mormons about the Book of Mormon - a set of Sacred Writings given or dictated by God in a final and perfect form. The Bible is a set of Sacred Writings inspired by God, but written up and assembled by human beings in all their frailty. There are different writing styles, different types of literature, different periods of composition and - occasionally - an all-too-human editorial mistake or inconsistency of detail which, like any slip of the pen, serves only to show us how reliable the rest is.

In short, and whatever the ending of St Mark, we know that the first disciples were gripped by their encounter with the Risen Lord, their lives were transformed and they went from a huddle of frightened people in an Upper Room to a group of missionaries who spread throughout the whole world what somebody - most likely not St Mark - called 'the sacred and imperishable proclamation of salvation'.

May God bless you as you celebrate in your lives the saving power of Christ's Resurrection.

+ Andrew Ebbsfleet



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