Mark 16

Mark 16 opens before sunrise. The three women's concern about the stone — who will roll it back for us? — is the final instance of the gospel's characteristic motif: the disciples and followers worrying about practical obstacles that turn out to be already overcome. The stone is already rolled back; the tomb is already empty; the young man in white is already there. His identification of the tomb — see the place where they laid him — and his announcement — he has risen — give the resurrection as an absence and an announcement, not as an appearance or an encounter. The instruction to tell the disciples and Peter specifies Peter by name, as the angel at the empty tomb addresses the one who denied three times and wept; the risen Jesus has gone before them, the phrase used earlier in 14:28 when Jesus predicted at the Last Supper that after he was raised he would go before them to Galilee. Galilee is where the gospel began.

The women's flight and silence (16:8) is the ending of the gospel in the oldest manuscripts. The verse is difficult Greek — ephobounto gar, for they were afraid, ending the clause with gar, a conjunction that does not normally end a clause — and has generated two centuries of textual and interpretive debate. The textual argument for the originality of the ending at 16:8 is strong: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two oldest complete manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, both end at 16:8; the longer ending uses different vocabulary and a different theological register; the manuscript tradition shows exactly the pattern of multiple competing endings that develops when an unsatisfactory ending is being supplemented. The literary argument for the ending at 16:8 is that it is consistent with the gospel's whole structure: the disciples have failed throughout; the women, faithful at the cross, fail now in their turn; the announcement of the resurrection is given but the response is silence and fear. The reader is left at the empty tomb with the announcement and the instruction — go, tell — and the failure to go and tell. Mark ends the gospel by handing the reader the story the women did not yet tell.