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| Detail of the War Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Wikimedia |
It's Easter, and we're in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary's three-year cycle: the year of Mark. This means that this week’s gospel reading is the resurrection story in the gospel of Mark—or, as much as we have of that story, anyway. Let me explain:
The ending of Mark's gospel is very abrupt: Jesus' friends find his tomb empty, a man in white tells them Jesus is raised from the dead, and they run away frightened without telling anyone what they saw:
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 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 16:1-8, NRSV)Many Bible scholars and literary critics think that the abruptness, the darkness, and the ambiguity of this ending are intentional. Here's Anglican priest and author John Drury on the subject, in The Literary Guide to the Bible (pg 410): "The end of Mark's story is outside his text; hence one of its most extraordinary features, the abruptness of the ending, which is neither happy nor resolved...[this] incomplete ending, impressively fortissimo, [is] poised toward an ending—the ending—which is beyond the text."
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| "The Empty Tomb," Robert Smirke. Wikimedia |
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Mark was probably the first gospel of the four in the New Testament to have been written. It's the shortest of the gospels, and written in the simplest language. But that doesn't mean it's a simple book: Mark is recognized by Bible scholars and literary critics alike as a rich, complex piece of literature. In particular, Mark does a very good job of laying out moments of foreshadowing or prediction early in the book and then following up with them by the end.1 Some examples:
- 1:7 - someone will come who is “more powerful” than John the Baptist (see 1:21-28)
- 1:11 - a voice from heaven declares that Jesus is God’s beloved Son (comes back in the transfiguration, 9:7; and through the centurion at the crucifixion, 15:39)
- 1:14 - “after John was arrested” (arrest is narrated at 6:14-27)
- 2:20 - “the bridegroom will be taken away” (see the Passion narrative, 14:43-16:3)
- 3:6 - Pharisees and Herodians plot to destroy Jesus (see 8:15, 12:13)
- 14:17-21 - Jesus foretells his betrayal by Judas (see 14:10-11, 14:43-50)
- 14:26-31 - Jesus foretells the disciples’ desertion and Peter’s denial (see 14:50-52, 66-72)2
Jesus also predicts his coming death at the hands of the authorities (8:31, 9:31, 10:32-33), but each time he does so, he includes his resurrection in the prediction. And it's pretty strange that Mark doesn't actually deliver on the resurrection bit: we have an announcement at the tomb but no delivery—we never see Jesus actually show up and make his prediction a fact.
There are a few other missing items that look like they would have been in Mark's original ending. John predicts that the one who will come after him will "baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (1:8), which never happens. Jesus tells the disciples at the Last Supper that he won't drink wine again, until he drinks it in the kingdom of God (that is, after his resurrection); this doesn't take place. And there is the man-in-white's own direction to tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee, with no actual follow-up in Galilee.
NT Wright points out many other such clues in the Mark chapter of The Resurrection of the Son of God,3 but in particular, it's worth paying attention to his point that Mark would have originally been written on a scroll, rather than a codex.4 Things written on scrolls often lose their beginnings and/or endings, as those parts wear out or get damaged much easier than the middle of the scroll.
So we have good reason to believe we are missing something at the end of Mark: an appearance of Jesus to his disciples in Galilee, where, perhaps, he drinks some wine with them, and baptizes them with the Holy Spirit, and (if Wright is correct in his other proposals), where he also commissions the disciples to go out into the world to tell the good news, and explicitly forgives Peter for denying he knew Jesus when Jesus was on trial. (All of this sounds a lot like the endings of the other gospels [see, e.g., Jesus eating to show he’s not a ghost in Luke 24:41-43, imparting the Holy Spirit in John 20:22, commissioning the disciples in Matthew 26:16-20, and Jesus forgiving Peter in John 21:15-19], a compelling point in its favor—after all, Mark was source material for at least two of them.)5
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Mark isn't the only place where we're missing the authors' original words in our Bibles. At least two other books, Job and Samuel, bear signs of poor textual transmission down through the years.6
The issues with Samuel are mostly issues of poor copying by scribes, so the text is scrambled and incomprehensible in a number of places, rather than missing obvious chunks. One notable counter-example: Saul's kingship is introduced in 1 Samuel 13:1 as "Saul was . . . years old when he began to reign; and he reigned . . . and two years over Israel" (NRSV)—the years of Saul's age and length of reign have somehow gone missing in that sentence.
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| Samuel fragment from a Dead Sea Scroll. BAR |
The case of Job is even clearer: not only are many portions badly scrambled textually, there is at least one clear—and large—textual gap in chapters 26 and 27.7
Other books pose similar problems to modern interpreters: Isaiah, for example, is full of hapax legomena, or terms that occur only in that book, and whose translations can only be guessed from context.
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All this textual uncertainty generates serious questions for the interpreter who reads the Bible as an infallible text. For example:
- Were the now-missing portions infallible?
- Were they "deleted" by God in some way, and if so, why were they there in the first place?
- What if a missing word or sentence completely reversed the meaning of a key passage—which meaning is infallibly true, the original meaning, or the meaning without the missing portion?
- What if a hapax legomenon means something completely different from its usual interpretation? What if it's crucial to the meaning of the text?
- If God is transmitting infallible truths to humans through the medium of the Bible, why is God not also ensuring the accurate and complete transmission of Biblical texts?
The point is, rather, that these are irrelevant questions to ask about the Bible. They would be great questions to ask, for example, if there were missing portions of the Book of Mormon, or the Qu'ran, which are scriptures that adherents believe God communicated to humans directly through a single intermediary (Joseph Smith and Mohammed, respectively).8 The Qu'ran in particular holds an extremely crucial place in Islam, as it is the connecting point between God and humans—the only uncorrupted divine revelation to people—so questions about its transmission and fallibility would be highly relevant; if transmission has not occurred accurately, the link between God and humans might be broken.
But Christians are not united with God through the Bible. We are not baptized into the Bible. Christianity is older than the Bible—there were Christians long before there was a New Testament. Most Christians throughout history have not read the Bible, since neither Bibles nor literacy were common before the printing press, and the Bible was not widely translated into most Christians' native languages before the Protestant Revolution.
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| "Harrowing of Hades," fresco in the Chora Church, Istanbul. Wikimedia |
Jesus is the center of Christian faith. It is Jesus who came to earth to show us the way back to God, not the Bible. Jesus is infallible; the Bible is not. Errors or gaps in transmission of the Bible do not matter. The Bible is good and useful and important, but it is not Jesus. Jesus is the lens of scripture; not vice versa. The Bible tells us good and important things about Jesus, but these are also communicated to us through the traditions of the church—which is how they were first communicated, and will continue to be communicated should the church somehow ever lose the Bible.
1. There are some instances where Mark alludes to future events that do not then take place within the text, but these are distant-future events, like the death of James and John (10:35-40) and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (13:1-26).↩
2. I lifted these examples pretty much directly from The Gospel according to Mark: Literary Features & Thematic Emphases, by Felix Just, S.J., Ph.D.↩
3. I really recommend reading his whole argument, which is where I got most of my ideas for the "missing ending of Mark" portion of this post; most notably, he thinks Peter is being set up for a redemption after he denies Jesus, and the disciples will get a commission to spread the good news. Check out his argument on Google Books for free right here; once you've clicked on the link, click on the pull-down navigation menu on the top right (it should say "Front Cover"), and scroll down to "Mark," where the second section (after the introduction to the chapter) is all about the missing ending of Mark. It's great stuff.↩
4. That is, on a single long sheet of material rolled up (a scroll), rather than a bunch of single sheets bound together (a codex, aka A BOOK).↩
5. Interestingly, the lack of an ending in Mark seems to have prompted at least two ancient readers to create their own endings. The shorter ending is basically "the women told the disciples what they'd seen, and then later Jesus sent the disciples into the world." The longer ending is pretty clearly a mashup of other New Testament stories: first the appearance to Mary Magdalene from John (Mark 16:9-11), then Luke's road to Emmaus story (Mark 16:11-12), then Jesus' appearance to the disciples in John (Mark 16:14-16), then what looks like a description of some of the disciples' activities in the book of Acts, and finally Jesus' ascension from Luke (Mark 16:19-20).↩
6. Samuel probably got transmitted poorly because most of the material in the book also appears in the book of Chronicles, which seems to have been more popular in ancient times, perhaps because it makes King David, (the founder of the royal dynasty) look like less of a dick (to name just one example: in Samuel, he kills a guy and takes his wife, and he doesn't do that in Chronicles). Since there were fewer copies floating around, it was harder to cross-check for errors, and so problems that entered the manuscript tradition tended to stay there. (Remember: this is just dudes copying from one sheet onto another with their eyes and hands, so errors tend to creep in gradually over time, and tend to stay in once they're there.) Job is harder to pin down—it may also have been unpopular during ancient times for its radically dissenting theology of the origins and nature of evil, or it might just have been that a very early copy was damaged, and everything we have after that was copied from the damaged edition.↩
7. The book of Job has a very clear structure: Job speaks for a set length of time (about how miserable he is, and his innocence of any crime or sin), and then each of his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, responds at roughly equal length (about how Job is surely wrong); this pattern repeats three times. Except the last time, Zophar's speech is cut off right at the beginning, and what few words he does say are actually assigned to Job in the texts we have, even though it's clear from context that Zohar is speaking. Given the immense skill of the author of Job (widely agreed to be some of the very finest Biblical poetry, even in spite of its sometimes very garbled state and lexically difficulty), it's virtually certain that this is a transmission problem and not the author's original intent.↩
8. Technically, through an angel and a prophet (Moroni/Joseph Smith and Gabriel/Mohammed).↩
