Author Description

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Mark 16:8) That’s a strange way to end a Gospel, isn’t it? How could a book that is, ostensibly, a story about the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, end on such an unsettling and unresolved note? Of course, in most of our Bibles, that’s not where the Gospel of Mark ends. In today’s Bibles, there are 12 more verses, but they’re usually set apart in various ways, whether through the use of italics or editorial notes saying something like, “the earliest and most reliable manuscripts do not have verses 9-20.” So what’s going on? Was the original ending lost? Was Mark never finished? Or is the apparently abrupt ending of Mark perfectly appropriate...when we understand what the “Gospel” of Mark actually is? In this short inquiry, Craig A. Smith, Ph.D., explores the possibility that understanding the genre of Mark as "prelude to the Gospel" rather than as a “Gospel" makes better sense of the content of the book itself and provides strong evidence for the completeness and coherence of the book as it was originally received.