⭐ The errand is already too late, and this Gospel said so in advance. The three women buy arōmata, spices, “so that they might go and anoint him.” Mark 14:8 (already on these pages) had Jesus say that the woman at Bethany “has perfumed my body beforehand for its burial,” and that chapter’s own note pointed forward to this verse: the only anointing of his body Mark records is the one done before he died. The verb here is not that one. It is aleiphō, the everyday word for rubbing on oil — the verb Mark used when the Twelve “anointed with oil many who were sick, and healed them” (6:13, already on these pages). The women bring a healer’s gesture to a corpse.

⚠ “Very early” and “when the sun had risen” — two clocks in one sentence. Lian prōi is the language of the last watch of the night (prōi, “in the morning,” is the last of the four watches Jesus names at 13:35), and anateilantos tou hēliou says the sun is already up. The other Gospels do not settle it: Matthew has the day “dawning” (28:1, already on these pages), Luke “at deep dawn” (24:1), and John has Mary Magdalene come “while it was still dark” (20:1; both not yet on these pages). The shelf mostly lets Mark’s two markers stand side by side: the KJV reads ‘at the rising of the sun’, the ASV ‘when the sun was risen’, the NWT 1984 ‘when the sun had risen’, and the NIV ‘just after sunrise’. This translation keeps both, since the Greek does.

“The first day of the week” is, word for word, “day one of the sabbaths.” Tē mia tōn sabbatōn counts the days of the week from the Sabbath, with the cardinal “one” where Greek would ordinarily use the ordinal “first” — a Hebrew way of numbering, the same shape as the “day one” of Genesis 1:5. Keep the phrase in mind: it matters again at v9.

⭐ The stone Joseph rolled against the door, found rolled away from it. 15:46 used proskyliō; the women’s question and the discovery use apokyliō, the same verb with its prefix reversed. And then Mark does something English tends to tidy away: he gives the reason for the women’s worry only after the worry has been answered — “they see that the stone has been rolled back, for it was exceedingly large.” The shelf handles the awkward gar in three different ways. The KJV keeps it in place, ‘for it was very great’, and the ASV ‘for it was exceeding great’; the NIV moves the size inside the sentence, ‘the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away’; and the NWT 1984 turns the “for” into a concession, ‘although it was very large’. This translation leaves Mark’s order and his “for”: the size of the stone is why the women could not have moved it themselves, and he says so last.

⭐ A young man, not an angel — and the second one in this Gospel. Mark never calls the figure in the tomb a messenger or an angel. He is a neaniskos, a young man, the word Mark uses for only one other figure: the young man in a linen cloth who fled naked from the arrest (14:51, already on these pages). The other Gospels each see the scene differently — Matthew’s is “a messenger of Jehovah” (28:2, already on these pages), Luke has “two men” in dazzling clothing (24:4), and John “two angels in white” (20:12; both not yet on these pages). The robe is a stolē, the long garment Mark mentioned once before, on the scribes “who like to walk around in long robes” (12:38, already on these pages); the KJV keeps the length, ‘clothed in a long white garment’, where the ASV reads only ‘arrayed in a white robe’.

“Overwhelmed with alarm” — the verb completes its run. Ekthambeomai is a word only Mark uses in the New Testament, and it stands in four verses: the crowd at the foot of the mountain (9:15), Jesus himself in Gethsemane (14:33, both already on these pages), and these two. The women feel what he felt in the garden, and are told not to. The shelf scatters on how strong it is: the KJV reads ‘affrighted’, the ASV ‘amazed’, the NWT 1984 ‘stunned’, and the NIV ‘alarmed’.

⭐ “The crucified one” — a perfect tense that does not wear off. Ton estaurōmenon is a perfect participle: not “the one who was crucified once” but the one who stands crucified. The young man announces the resurrection and names Jesus by the cross in the same breath, and Paul does the same with the same word — “we proclaim Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23, already on these pages). The NWT 1984 reads ‘who was impaled’, the rendering the stauros entry already describes as doctrinal and disputed.

“He was raised” — kept passive, as at 14:28. Ēgerthē is the aorist passive of egeirō, the verb Jesus used on the way to the Mount of Olives, “after I am raised” (14:28), and the one this translation printed at Matthew 28:6, “he was raised”. The passive leaves the one who raised him unnamed, and many readers take God as the understood agent. The shelf divides on keeping it: the KJV reads ‘he is risen’, the ASV ‘he is risen’ too, the NIV ‘He has risen!’, and TLB ‘He has come back to life!’, while the NWT 1984 keeps the passive, ‘He was raised up’. “Look — the place where they laid him” uses the same verb, tithēmi, as the last line of 15:47, where the two Marys watched “where he was laid.” They were watching the right place.

⭐⭐ “And Peter” — a phrase only Mark has. Matthew’s messenger says only “tell his disciples” (28:7). Mark’s young man adds a name, and it is the name of the man last seen in this Gospel breaking down in tears after the rooster crowed a second time (14:72, already on these pages) — the last time Peter is named until now. The message itself is the promise of 14:28, made in the same breath as the prediction of the denial, repeated almost word for word: proagei hymas eis tēn Galilaian, “he is going ahead of you into Galilee.” ⭐ And the verb has one more history. On the road up to Jerusalem, “Jesus was walking ahead of them; and they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid” (10:32, already on these pages) — proagōn, amazement and fear, in one verse. Here he goes ahead of them again, the other way, and the next verse supplies the amazement and the fear.

⭐ Trembling and amazement — the second time this Gospel has used that word, and both times for a raising. Ekstasis stands in Mark in exactly two verses: here, and at 5:42 (already on these pages), when Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter got up and walked and the room was “overcome with great amazement.” Tromos, trembling, appears as a noun nowhere else in the four Gospels, but its verb has been here before: the woman healed of her bleeding came “frightened and trembling” and “told him the whole truth” (5:33). That woman trembled and told everything. These women tremble and tell no one. The shelf renders the pair five different ways: the KJV reads ‘for they trembled and were amazed’, the ASV ‘for trembling and astonishment had come upon them’, the NWT 1984 ‘for trembling and strong emotion were gripping them’, the Douay ‘For a trembling and fear had seized them’, and the NIV ‘Trembling and bewildered’. The KJV and Geneva also have the women go out ‘quickly’: that word stands in the sixteenth-century printed Greek text of the tradition they followed (Stephanus’s edition of 1550 has it), and not in the critical text or even the Byzantine majority text.

⭐⭐ “They said nothing to anyone” — the reversal of a whole Gospel. In Mark’s first chapter a healed leper is told “See that you say nothing to anyone” (1:44, already on these pages) — mēdeni mēden, the same doubled negative — and he goes straight out and proclaims it. All through this Gospel people ordered to keep quiet talk. At the end, the first people ordered to speak are silent.

⭐⭐ The last word of the oldest text is gar, “for.” The sentence ends ephobounto gar, “they were afraid, for” in the Greek word order — a conjunction that normally looks forward to a reason still to come. Mark uses the same two words at 11:18 (already on these pages), where the chief priests seek to destroy him, “for they feared him,” and there the sentence goes on. A sentence ending on gar is unusual but not unknown: the Greek Old Testament closes Sarah’s denial with ephobēthē gar, “for she was afraid” (Genesis 18:15, already on these pages), and in 1972 the Dutch scholar Pieter van der Horst pointed to a treatise of the philosopher Plotinus that ends on the same word. Whether a whole book would end that way is the question.

⚠ What the manuscripts show. The two oldest complete Greek Bibles, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both of the fourth century, end the Gospel here, and Vaticanus leaves a column blank after it before Luke begins. In the fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea reported that the accurate copies ended with the young man’s words. A Latin manuscript from around 400, Codex Bobiensis, follows v8 with the shorter ending alone. At the same time the longer ending is old: Irenaeus, writing around 180, quotes v19 as coming from near the end of Mark’s Gospel, and Tatian worked nearly all of vv9–20 into his harmony of the four Gospels a little earlier. So both facts are true at once — the earliest complete copies stop here, and the longer ending was already being read in the second century.

⚠ Did Mark mean to stop here? Three positions have serious defenders. (1) He did: the silence is the point, and a Gospel whose disciples keep failing ends by handing the message to the reader, who has now heard what the women would not repeat. (2) The ending was lost: the last leaf of an early copy was damaged or torn away before the book was widely copied, and the promised meeting in Galilee (14:28; 16:7) was once narrated. (3) It was never finished. The endings that follow on this page are best read as early answers to this very question. This library states the three and votes for none.

How the shelf prints it. The KJV, the Geneva and the Douay run straight on into vv9–20 with no mark at all. The NIV prints them after a bracketed notice that the earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have them. The NWT 1984 prints both endings, each under its own heading, ‘SHORT CONCLUSION’ and ‘LONG CONCLUSION’, and sums up the evidence for the second in one line: ‘Certain ancient manuscripts (ACD) and versions (VgSyc,p) add the following long conclusion, but which אBSysArm omit’. Its 2013 revision, and the Spanish TNM 2019, end the chapter’s text at verse 8.

⚠ A paragraph that exists to answer v8. The women “said nothing to anyone”; this ending says they did report, “briefly,” to “those around Peter,” and then compresses the whole mission of the church into one sentence, “from the east as far as the west.” Its vocabulary is not Mark’s: kērygma, proclamation, appears nowhere else in this Gospel (Paul’s “the foolishness of the proclamation” at 1 Corinthians 1:21, already on these pages, is the same noun), and “the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation” reads like the language of a later church rather than of the Gospel it closes.

Where it is found. Alone, directly after v8, in the Latin Codex Bobiensis of around 400. Together with the longer ending — the shorter one first — in a handful of Greek manuscripts, the eighth-century Codex Regius among them, whose scribe marks each ending with a note that some copies carry it. It carries no verse number. The NWT 1984 prints it, introduced as found in ‘Some late manuscripts and versions’, and renders its close ‘the holy and incorruptible proclamation of everlasting salvation’; the KJV and Douay do not print it at all. The closing “Amen” is part of it in the text printed here.

⚠ The longer ending: what it is, and why the critical text brackets it. Verses 9–20 are in the great majority of Greek manuscripts from the fifth century on, including Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Bezae, and they were known, as the note at v8 says, by the late second century. The NWT 1984’s own heading, quoted in the note at v8, sets out the same line-up: A, C and D for it, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus against. Most critical editors judge the passage a second-century summary drawn from the resurrection accounts of the other Gospels and Acts, added to a book that seemed to stop too soon; a minority defend it as Mark’s own. Churches that read it as scripture include many who accept that Mark did not write it — authorship and authority are separate questions, and this library states both answers to each without casting a vote.

⭐ The seam is in the first sentence. Seven verses earlier, the first day of the week was tē mia tōn sabbatōn, “day one of the sabbaths” (v2). Here it is prōtē sabbatou, “the first of the week” — a different phrase for the same morning, the only time either form appears in Mark. The subject of “having risen” is not named: grammatically the last people spoken of were the frightened women, and the KJV supplies the name, ‘Now when Jesus was risen’, as does the NIV, ‘When Jesus rose’; the ASV keeps the bare pronoun, ‘Now when he was risen’. And Mary Magdalene, named three times in the previous sixteen verses (15:40, 15:47, 16:1), is introduced as if for the first time, “from whom he had cast out seven demons” — a detail Mark has never mentioned, and one Luke does (8:2, not yet on these pages). The Byzantine text even reads Luke’s own preposition there, aph’ hēs, where the critical text prints par’ hēs.

“Having risen” is a different verb from “was raised.” V6 used egeirō in the passive; v9 uses anistēmi, active, the verb of Jesus’s own predictions, “after three days rise again” (8:31, already on these pages). Mark himself uses both, and this translation keeps them distinct.

⭐ The theme of the longer ending is announced at once: they did not believe. Ēpistēsan (v11), then the same refusal at v13, then apistia, unbelief, at v14 and its verb again at v16. Mark’s Gospel used the noun twice before: Jesus “was amazed at their unbelief” in Nazareth (6:6), and a father cried “I believe — help my unbelief” (9:24, both already on these pages). The disciples who mourn and weep (penthousi kai klaiousin, and Mark’s first use of the verb ‘mourn’) do not believe the first witness to the resurrection, and she is a woman — an order of events Luke shares, where the women’s words seemed to the apostles “like nonsense, and they did not believe them” (24:11, not yet on these pages).

⭐ “In another form” — the word behind the transfiguration. Morphē, form, stands in only three verses of the New Testament: this one, and the famous pair at Philippians 2:6–7 (not yet on these pages), “in the form of God… taking the form of a slave.” Its verb, metamorphoō, is what happened on the mountain: “he was transfigured before them” (9:2, already on these pages). What the other form was, the verse does not say. The TLB fills it in from Luke’s road to Emmaus, ‘they didn’t recognize him at first because he had changed his appearance’ — an explanation the Greek does not contain.

“Made visible,” not “appeared.” V9’s “appeared” is ephanē; vv12 and 14 switch to ephanerōthē, “was made visible, made manifest,” the verb Mark used once before, of a lamp: “there is nothing hidden except in order that it should be made visible” (4:22, already on these pages). The ASV keeps the distinction, ‘he was manifested in another form’; the KJV and NWT 1984 both read ‘he appeared in another form’, the same English as v9.

⚠ “They did not believe them either” — where Luke says the opposite. The two walking into the country are widely taken to be the two on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24:13–35 (not yet on these pages). But when Luke’s two return to Jerusalem, the Eleven meet them already saying “The Lord has really been raised, and has appeared to Simon” (24:34). Here the rest refuse to believe. The two accounts differ, and this library reports the difference rather than blending it away.

⭐ The Eleven get the word he once used on Pharisees. He “reproached” them — ōneidisen, the verb the two men crucified with him used when they were “reviling” him (15:32, already on these pages) — for their apistia and their sklērokardia, hardness of heart. That compound stands in three verses of the New Testament: Matthew 19:8 and Mark 10:5 (both already on these pages), where it is aimed at Pharisees asking about divorce, and here, aimed at his own disciples. Mark’s own chapters had said as much with a different word: the disciples’ heart “was hardened” after the loaves (6:52; 8:17). One manuscript, Codex Washingtonianus, of the late fourth or early fifth century, inserts after this verse a longer exchange in which the disciples excuse themselves by blaming Satan — a passage Jerome said he found in some copies; the critical text does not print it.

“To the whole creation.” Ktisis, creation, appears twice earlier in Mark, both times in the phrase “the beginning of creation” (10:6; 13:19). The commission sends the good news to all of it, as 13:10 said it must first go to all the nations. The KJV reads ‘to every creature’, the ASV ‘to the whole creation’.

⚠ V16 — what the negative half says and does not say. “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved” names two things; “whoever does not believe will be condemned” names one. Readers who hold baptism necessary to salvation and readers who do not have both argued from that difference for centuries; the text states the two halves and this library leaves them as they stand. Katakrinō, condemn, is the verb Mark used twice of Jesus himself: the prediction that they would “condemn him to death” (10:33), and the night court where “they all condemned him” (14:64, both already on these pages). The KJV reads ‘shall be damned’, as does the Geneva; in 1611 ‘damn’ could still mean simply to condemn, its Latin sense, before English narrowed it. The ASV reads ‘shall be condemned’, and the Douay ‘shall be condemned’ as well.

⚠ Signs promised, in a Gospel that refused them. Earlier in Mark, signs are withheld and warned against: Jesus refuses one with an oath left hanging, “if a sign is given to this generation…” (8:12), and false christs “will give signs and wonders” (13:22, both already on these pages). Here they are promised to believers. “New tongues” is itself a variant: kainais, new, is in the critical text and the Byzantine text but not in Westcott and Hort’s edition, which the NWT 1984 follows, ‘they will speak with tongues’, where the KJV reads ‘they shall speak with new tongues’. Pentecost’s adjective is different: “other tongues” (Acts 2:4, already on these pages).

⚠ “They will pick up snakes” — a variant, and a documented cost. The Greek printed here reads only opheis arousin, “they will pick up snakes”; many editions, including the Nestle-Aland text, read “and in their hands they will pick up snakes,” and on this point the SBL text sides with the Byzantine tradition against them. The NIV reads ‘they will pick up snakes with their hands’ and the NWT 1984 ‘with their hands they will pick up serpents’; the KJV has no hands, ‘They shall take up serpents’; and the Geneva reads the verb airō in its other sense, ‘shall take away serpents’. The one New Testament scene that fits is accidental, not staged: Paul shaking a viper off his hand on Malta (Acts 28:3–6, not yet on these pages). ⚠ This verse is the text behind the snake-handling congregations of Appalachia. From the early twentieth century the preacher George Went Hensley taught that it commanded believers to handle venomous snakes, and he died of a snakebite in 1955 after refusing treatment; researchers have since counted roughly a hundred deaths from bites taken in the movement’s services. The grammar does not support reading a command here — the only imperative in this speech is “proclaim” (v15), with “go” attached to it; vv17–18 are future indicatives describing what will accompany believers, not instructions to test it.

Deadly drink, and the sick. Thanasimon, deadly, occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. “They will lay hands on the sick” borrows Mark’s own vocabulary: arrōstos, sick, stands in this Gospel only here and in chapter 6, where Jesus at Nazareth “laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them” (6:5) and the Twelve anointed “many who were sick” (6:13, both already on these pages).

⭐⭐ The narrator calls him “the Lord,” twice in two verses, for the first time in this Gospel. In Mark 1:1–16:8, kyrios is God in a quotation (1:3; 12:36), a title in someone’s mouth (“Lord,” the Syrophoenician woman’s address at 7:28), or Jesus’s own word (5:19, where he tells the healed man to report what “the Lord” has done, and the next verse says he told what Jesus had done). The storyteller’s own voice never once calls him “the Lord.” Verses 19 and 20 say “the Lord Jesus” and “the Lord” — the idiom of Acts and the letters, and one more sign of a different hand. The name itself is a variant: the KJV reads ‘after the Lord had spoken unto them’, following the Byzantine text’s omission, where the ASV reads ‘the Lord Jesus’.

“Taken up” and “sat down at the right hand of God.” Analambanō is the verb Acts uses of the ascension (1:2, 1:11, 1:22, already on these pages). And the posture is Psalm 110:1, a verse Mark has already had Jesus quote, “Sit at my right hand” (12:36) and then echo before the high priest, “you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power” (14:62, both already on these pages). What was a prediction before the council is told here as a thing done.

Two endings, two opposite last scenes. Verse 8 ends with three women who say nothing to anyone. Verse 20 ends with the disciples proclaiming “everywhere,” the Lord “working with them” (synergeō) and “confirming the word” with signs. The Byzantine text adds a final “Amen”, which the KJV keeps, ‘confirming the word with signs following. Amen.’, as does the ASV, ‘confirming the word by the signs that followed. Amen.’; the critical text has no Amen here, and neither does the NIV. The closing bracket after v20 is the critical text’s own, closing the passage it opened at v9.