What About the Longer Ending of Mark (16:9-20)?

Question 1048.

If you open your Bible to the end of Mark’s Gospel, you will likely find a note indicating that Mark’s longer ending does not appear in the earliest manuscripts. Some Bibles place these verses in brackets. Others include them with a footnote explaining the uncertainty. This raises an obvious pastoral question about Mark’s longer ending. Are these verses part of Scripture or not? Should I preach from them? Can I trust what they say?

I want to walk through the manuscript evidence, the internal evidence, and the range of scholarly positions on Mark’s longer ending honestly, without either dismissing the question or panicking over it, because I think this is exactly the kind of textual question evangelical scholarship is equipped to handle with integrity.

The Manuscript Evidence

The textual situation is genuinely complicated, and I want to lay it out plainly rather than minimise it. The two oldest complete manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the fourth century, end Mark’s Gospel at verse eight with the words “for they were afraid”, ephobounto gar in the Greek. This is an abrupt ending, finishing with a conjunction, which is grammatically unusual for concluding a book.

However, the vast majority of later Greek manuscripts include verses nine to twenty, known as Mark’s longer ending. This includes Codex Alexandrinus from the fifth century, Codex Ephraemi also from the fifth century, and virtually all Byzantine manuscripts from the medieval period onward. The sheer weight of numbers favours inclusion, even though weight of numbers is not the only criterion textual critics use.

The early church fathers knew of these verses well before our earliest complete manuscripts were copied. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, quotes Mark 16:19 directly in Against Heresies, and Justin Martyr, writing around AD 160, may allude to verse twenty. This tells us the material was circulating by the mid-second century at the latest, considerably earlier than either of our two great fourth-century codices.

Complications Within the Complication

But there are further complications. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing around AD 325, noted that the longer ending was absent from “almost all” the Greek manuscripts available to him at the time, an important and sobering piece of early testimony. Jerome, writing around AD 400, made similar observations about the uncertainty surrounding these verses in the manuscripts he consulted.

Some manuscripts include what is called a “Shorter Ending” instead of, or in addition to, Mark’s longer ending. One manuscript, Codex Washingtonianus from the fifth century, includes an additional insertion between verses fourteen and fifteen known as the Freer Logion, a passage found nowhere else. This diversity of endings surrounding Mark’s longer ending suggests that early scribes themselves recognised Mark’s conclusion as genuinely uncertain and attempted various solutions across different regions and traditions.

I find this diversity itself instructive. A textual tradition trying to hide uncertainty would likely have settled quickly on a single uniform ending and suppressed the alternatives. Instead we can trace, across the manuscript record, a live conversation among early scribes wrestling honestly with an unresolved question, which is precisely the kind of evidence that increases rather than decreases my confidence in the transparency of the whole transmission process.

The Internal Evidence

Beyond the manuscript witnesses themselves, scholars have carefully examined the vocabulary and style of Mark’s longer ending. The evidence here is also complex rather than one-sided. The passage contains a noticeable number of words and phrases not found elsewhere in Mark. The Greek verb poreuomai, meaning “to go”, appears three times in verses nine to twenty but never once in Mark 1:1 through 16:8.

The phrase “after he rose”, anastas de in verse nine, is an unusual grammatical construction for Mark’s normal style. The transition from verse eight to verse nine is genuinely awkward. Verse eight speaks about the women fleeing the tomb, but verse nine suddenly reintroduces Mary Magdalene as though for the first time, even though she was already mentioned by name back in verse one of the same chapter.

Defenders of the passage’s originality point out that Mark’s Gospel is short, and a small sample of unusual vocabulary is not necessarily decisive against authenticity in any ancient author’s work. Critics respond that the cumulative weight of stylistic oddities in this section, combined with the abrupt narrative seam at verse nine, points towards a different author completing an originally truncated Gospel, whether by accident of a lost final page or by deliberate later composition.

Why an Abrupt Ending at Verse Eight Is Actually Plausible

Some scholars argue that Mark deliberately ended his Gospel at verse eight, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in trembling astonishment and saying nothing to anyone out of fear, as a literary and theological statement about the appropriate human response to the resurrection: stunned, reverent silence giving way, implicitly, to faithful proclamation once the fear passes. Ending on ephobounto gar, “for they were afraid”, would then be a deliberately open, provocative conclusion rather than an accident of transmission.

Other scholars find this reading unconvincing, arguing that no ancient Greek work reasonably ends on the conjunction gar, and that the original ending, describing at minimum a resurrection appearance consistent with Matthew, Luke and John, has simply been lost, whether through a damaged final page of an early copy or some other accident of transmission we cannot now recover.

I hold this question with appropriate humility. Either position is defensible on purely text-critical grounds, and neither position touches a single point of essential Christian doctrine regarding Mark’s longer ending, since the resurrection itself is abundantly attested elsewhere in Mark and throughout the rest of the New Testament regardless of how this particular textual question is resolved.

What Mark’s longer ending Actually Contains

For readers unfamiliar with the content, Mark’s longer ending describes a resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene, a rebuke of the disciples’ unbelief, the Great Commission in a form paralleling Matthew 28, promises of miraculous signs accompanying believers including handling serpents and drinking poison without harm, and the ascension of Christ. Much of this material closely parallels accounts found elsewhere in the Gospels and Acts, which is part of why some scholars suspect a later compiler assembled it from other apostolic material to supply a fitting conclusion.

The most theologically sensitive verses are 17 and 18, describing signs that will accompany believers, including speaking in new tongues, picking up serpents, and drinking deadly poison without harm. Some fringe groups have built entire practices, including deliberate snake handling in worship services, on these verses in isolation, which I regard as a serious misapplication regardless of one’s conclusion about the passage’s authenticity, since even taken as genuine Scripture these verses describe what happened rather than commanding believers to seek out such tests of faith.

I want to be pastorally direct here. Even if I concluded with full confidence that these verses were original to Mark, I would still regard deliberate snake handling as a reckless and unbiblical misapplication of a descriptive promise into a prescriptive command, the same interpretive error Satan attempted against Jesus in the wilderness when quoting Psalm 91 to justify jumping from the temple. Genuine faith is not proved by manufactured danger.

How Evangelical Scholars Have Handled This

Evangelical textual critics are not unanimous on Mark’s longer ending, and I want to represent that honestly rather than pretend a false consensus. Some conservative scholars, including a minority within the Majority Text and Byzantine-priority camps, defend the longer ending’s originality on the grounds of its early patristic attestation and overwhelming manuscript support across the centuries. Others, representing the broader mainstream of evangelical textual scholarship reflected in the ESV’s bracketed treatment, regard the external evidence from our earliest and best manuscripts as decisive against Markan authorship, while still valuing the passage as a very early, authoritative summary of apostolic teaching.

What unites virtually every serious evangelical scholar, regardless of which side of this specific question they land on, is the conviction that no doctrine of the Christian faith depends on the outcome. The resurrection, the Great Commission, and the reality of the Spirit’s empowering work for gospel witness are all established with total clarity elsewhere in Scripture, entirely apart from Mark 16:9-20.

My Own Position, Held With Appropriate Humility

My own reading of the evidence leans towards regarding Mark’s longer ending as a very early, valuable summary of apostolic teaching that was likely added to complete Mark’s Gospel, rather than as Mark’s own original composition. The external manuscript evidence from our earliest and most reliable witnesses weighs heavily in my assessment, and I do not think the “deliberate abrupt ending” theory is required to explain verse eight satisfactorily.

That said, I preach and teach the content of these verses where it aligns with clear teaching found elsewhere in Scripture, treating it the way I would treat a well-attested early Christian summary rather than ignoring it altogether. I do not build any distinctive doctrine on Mark 16:9-20 alone, precisely because its textual status remains genuinely disputed among careful, faithful scholars.

Why This Should Not Shake Your Confidence in Scripture

I want to be direct about something important. The existence of this textual question about Mark’s longer ending is not evidence that the Bible cannot be trusted. It is evidence of exactly the opposite: that the text of the New Testament has been preserved with such abundance and such transparency that scholars can identify, discuss and footnote even a single disputed twelve-verse passage out of the entire New Testament with this degree of precision.

No other ancient document from the ancient world has anywhere near this quality or quantity of manuscript evidence available for this kind of careful analysis. The very fact that we can have this detailed a conversation about twelve verses in one Gospel, out of roughly one hundred and thirty thousand words across the whole New Testament, testifies to the remarkable preservation of the text as a whole rather than undermining it.

A Word About How This Differs From KJV-Onlyism

I want to address a related but distinct issue directly. Some believers, out of a sincere desire to defend biblical inspiration, have adopted a King James Only position that treats any bracket or footnote around Mark’s longer ending in a modern translation as an attack on Scripture itself. I do not hold that position, and I think it misunderstands what is actually happening in cases like this one. Noting a genuine textual question honestly, in a footnote, is not an attack on inspiration. It is inspiration and careful textual scholarship working together as they should.

The King James Version itself was translated from a limited set of late Byzantine manuscripts available in the sixteenth century, without access to Codex Sinaiticus or Codex Vaticanus, which were only rediscovered and properly catalogued centuries later. Modern textual scholarship has simply given us access to earlier and, in many cases, more reliable manuscript evidence than the King James translators themselves possessed, and using that evidence honestly is a strength of modern scholarship, not a weakness.

What I Tell My Own Congregation About Mark’S Longer Ending

When this question comes up in my own church, much as I discuss for a related passage in the woman caught in adultery,, and it does come up, usually from a thoughtful believer who has noticed the bracket in their own Bible for the first time, I walk through exactly this evidence rather than offering a simple slogan in either direction. I have found that believers handle textual uncertainty far better when it is explained honestly than when it is either hidden from them or exaggerated into a crisis by well-meaning but poorly informed voices online.

I also make a point of showing that this conversation about Mark’s longer ending has been happening, in the open, among faithful, Bible-believing scholars for well over a century, long before the current wave of internet apologetics discovered the topic and, in some corners, sensationalised it. Nothing here is new, hidden, or discovered by a scholar with an axe to grind against Scripture. It is old, well-documented, and handled by people who loved the Bible as much as I do.

A Final Thought on Doctrine and Textual Uncertainty

I think this passage offers a useful, general lesson about how to handle any disputed textual question in Scripture. Ask first whether any essential doctrine actually depends on the disputed material alone, or whether that doctrine is established with total clarity elsewhere. In this case, as in the vast majority of New Testament textual variants, the answer is that nothing essential is at stake. The resurrection stands. The Great Commission stands, given in nearly identical form in Matthew 28:19-20. The empowering ministry of the Spirit for gospel witness stands, established throughout Acts and the epistles.

That pattern, repeated case after case across the entire body of New Testament textual variants, is part of why conservative textual scholars remain so confident in the essential reliability of the New Testament text as a whole, even while being scrupulously honest about Mark’s longer ending and other genuinely disputed passages.

How I Would Summarise This for a New Believer

If a brand new Christian in my congregation asked me to summarise all of this in two sentences, I would say something like this: a small number of verses at the very end of Mark’s Gospel, Mark’s longer ending, are genuinely disputed among careful scholars who love and trust the Bible, but nothing you believe about Jesus, His resurrection, or your salvation depends on those specific verses, because every essential truth they contain is taught with total clarity elsewhere in Scripture. That is a simple answer, but I think it is also an honest and sufficient one.

I would rather give a new believer that honest, modest answer than either a false assurance that no question exists, or an alarmist warning that their Bible cannot be trusted. Both extremes do a disservice to a discipline, textual criticism, that has served the church well for centuries precisely by refusing to hide its work.

So, now what?

If your Bible has a bracket or a footnote around Mark’s longer ending, do not read that as a crack in the foundation of your faith. Read it as evidence of careful, transparent, centuries-long scholarship doing exactly what it should: telling you honestly what the manuscript evidence shows, rather than hiding a genuine question from you. Your confidence in the resurrection of Jesus does not depend on twelve disputed verses at the end of one Gospel. It depends on the risen Christ Himself, attested with total clarity throughout the whole of the New Testament.

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Mark 16:8 (ESV)

For Further Study

For readers who want to go deeper into New Testament textual criticism, I recommend the standard evangelical treatments of manuscript transmission found in the works of Ryrie and Walvoord, whose study Bibles address disputed passages like this one directly and fairly, alongside Erickson’s systematic theology for the doctrinal implications of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, and Chafer’s foundational treatment of bibliology for the older dispensational framework underlying this entire discussion. Pentecost and Fruchtenbaum, while writing primarily on prophecy, both model the same careful, textually honest approach to disputed passages that I have tried to bring here.