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49 A Disquieting Silence The Matter of Mark’s Ending 3 In this chapter from a book on the Gospel according to Mark, Juel argues forcefully for reckoning with the earliest known ending of Mark, where the women at Jesus’ tomb flee in terror. That scene, which captivated Juel’s imagination , becomes for him emblematic of our encounters with God through Mark and indeed through all of Scripture. Our interpretive efforts cannot conjure tidy closure out of the Bible’s stories, for the message of the gospel is about a God who eludes humanity’s attempts to make God predictable or controllable. If Bible reading brings us into an encounter with God, the tools of biblical interpretation cannot keep us safe in the process. ——— No point in a story is as significant for appreciation and interpretation as its ending. That is surely the case in Mark’s Gospel. The abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion has not surprisingly spawned a massive secondary literature —most of recent vintage, however. Interest in the ending became possible only with the publication of editions that relegated verses 9-20 to the footnotes. Until the great Alexandrian Codices were known, few paid attention to the scattered references to a Gospel of Mark that lacked a proper conclusion. Further, only after a scholarly consensus had determined that Mark could no longer be read as Matthew’s epitomizer could readers become fascinated—and troubled—by the mysterious anticlimax that forms the end of our Gospel: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). 50 Shaping the Scriptural Imagination There are perhaps additional factors in the current fascination with the Markan ending. One is the willingness to read Mark as a narrative. When the text is broken down into component parts that are the focus of investigation, as among form critics, the strange conclusion can be explained more easily. The episode at the empty tomb may be read as an effort to explain why the story appeared so late in the tradition (the women never told anyone) or as an effort to put distance between the apostolic testimony and the resurrection from the empty tomb. Such explanations require detaching the verses from their narrative setting and proposing another, hypothetical Sitz im Leben in the context of which the snippet is to be understood. The verses sound rather different as the conclusion of a narrative. Any who have been present at one of David Rhoads’ “presentations ” of Mark can testify to the uneasiness in the audience when the last words are spoken—even in an audience of sophisticates who know in advance how the narrative will end.1 There is much ground to cover in any study of Mark’s ending. Fortunately the whole field need not be replowed. Andrew Lincoln’s fine piece in the Journal of Biblical Literature has made it unnecessary to review all of the research.2 His analysis of current studies, his examination of words for “terror” and “amazement” in Mark, his brief review of evidence for ending a sentence with gar—such matters require little additional comment. I prefer to confine my study to the experience of the ending and to ask if criticism has any role at all to play in commending a particular experience of the Gospel’s ending—and thus of the narrative as a whole. While we might speak of a scholarly consensus regarding the ending of Mark, there is surely no consensus regarding its interpretation. In fact, there is still reluctance among interpreters to settle with 16:8 as the conclusion of the Gospel. That reluctance gives evidence of a feature of public imagination well analyzed by Frank Kermode in his The Sense of an Ending:3 people do not tolerate unfinished stories easily. Consider the comment in the Oxford Study Bible (RSV): Nothing is certainly known either about how this Gospel originally ended or about the origin of vv. 9-20, which cannot have been part of the original text of Mark. . . . Though it is possible that the compiler(!) of the Gospel intended this abrupt ending, one can find hints that he intended to describe events after the resurrection.4 Such speculation is a clear refusal to read the work as it appears in the bestattested readings; it is very much of the same order as the endings tacked [18.217.228.35] Project MUSE (2024-04-19...

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