The Ending of Mark

Abstract

"The ending of the Gospel of Mark has been called “the greatest of all literary mysteries,”1 and “the gravest textual problem in the NT,”2 and in recent years it has certainly been the most discussed. Although Eusebius addressed this problem, by the middle ages, it was assumed that Mark ended with the longer ending, 16:9–20. When Erasmus produced the first published Greek NT, the half-dozen Greek manuscripts available to him all contained these verses, and consequently, the users of his text all assumed that the text ended with 16:9–20.3"