MARK, GOSPEL ACCORDING TO

The Aramaic transliterations lilce Talitha cum(.i) are interpreted, and Jewish customs and geograpliy are explained [7*- 12" (the 'mite' was a Jewish coin) 13' IS'^]. The absence o( mention of the Jewish Law points in the same direction.

The date is probably before the Fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. (For the argument from the Discourse on the End, see art. Matthew [Gospel acc. to], § 5, and note especially Mk 13"'- "■ «»■ », which point to the fulfil-ment of the prophecy being, at the time of writing, only in prospect.) The reference to the shewbread (2», 'it is not lawful') suggests that the Temple still stood when Mark wrote. The characteristics already mentioned, the description of Jesus' inner feelings, the style and details of the Gospel, give the same indications. If the early date of Acts be adopted (see art. Acts op the Apostles, § 9), Lk. and therefore Mk. must be earlier still. The external testimony, however, raises some difficulty when we consider the date of 1 Peter. For Papias by implication and IrenEus explicitly say that Mark wrote after Peter's death, while Clement of Alexandria and Origen say that he wrote in Peter's lifetime (see § 1). If the former statement be correct, and if 1 Peter be authentic, the Epistle must have pre-ceded Mk. ; but it is not easy to assign a very early date to it (e.g. 1 P 4" 'suffer as a Christian'; though Dr. Bigg disputes this inference and thinks that 1 Peter was written before the Neronlc persecution in a.d. 64). There is no need to dispute the authenticity of 1 Peter because of supposed references to late persecutions, for there is no good reason for saying that St. Peter died in the same year as St. Paul, and it is quite possible that he survived him for some considerable time, during which Mark acted as his 'interpreter.' If, then, we are led by internal evidence so strongly to prefer an early date for Mk., we must either choose an early date for 1 Peter, or else prefer the Alexandrian tradition that Mark wrote in Peter's lifetime [Dr. Swete gives c. 69 for Mk., Dean Robinson c. 65].

7. Was Mk. written in Greek or Aramaic? — The Second Gospel is more strongly tinged with Aramaisms than any other. It retains several Aramaic words ti^nsliterated into Greek: — Boanerges 3", Talitha cum(i) 5", Cm-ban 7", Eph-phatha 7^ (these Mk. only) , ^66a 14s« (so Ro 8l^ Gal 4?) , Babbi 9^ ll^i 14^^, Hosanna 11^ (these two also in Mt. and Jn.), Babboni lO^i (Jn.also), Eloi Elm lamasabachthani 15^ (eras II Mt. Eli); and several Aramaic proper names are notice-able: Bartimceus 10** (a patronymic), Canancean 3^^, Iscariot 3'^, Beelzebub 3^2, Golgotha 15^. Aramaisms are also found freely in the grammar of Mk. and in several phrases. From these facts it is argued (Blass, Allen) that Aramaic was the original language. Dr. Blass also suggests that St. Luke in Ac 1-12 used an Aramaic source, while the rest of that book was his own independent work. In these twelve chapters, unlike the rest, Aramaisms abound, and the style is rough. The argument is that Mark, the son of a prominent lady in Jerusalem, wrote the Aramaic source of Ac 1-12, and that if so his former work (our Second Gospel) would be in Aramaic also. This argument will probably be thought to be too unsubstantial for acceptance. There is no reason for saying that Mark wrote the supposed Aramaic source of Ac 1-12, and even if he did, he might, being confessedly bilingual, have written his Gospel equally well in Greek as in Aramaic. The Aramaic tinge is probably best explained by the fact that Mark thought in Aramaic. If our Greek were a translation, the Aramaic phrases like Talitha cumii) might have been bodily incorporated by transhteration, or else translated: but they never would have been transliterated and then interpreted, as is actually the case. The Fathers, from Papias downwards, had clearly never heard of an Aramaic original. The most fatal objection to the theory, however, is the freshness of the style of the Gospel. Even the best translation loses freshness. The Greek of Mk. reads as if it were original; and we may safely say that this is really the language in which the Evangelist wrote.

8. The last twelve verses. — The MSS and versions have three different ways of ending the Gospel. The vast majority have the ending of our ordinary Bibles, which is explicitly quoted by Irenjeus as a genuine work of St. Mark, is probably quoted by Justin Martyr, possibly earlier still by 'Barnabas' and Hermas, but

IHARK, GOSPEL ACCORDING TO

in the last three cases we are not certain that the writer knew it as part of the Gospel. The two oldest Greek MSS (the Vatican and the Sinaitic), the old Syriac version (Sinaitic), and the oldest MSS of the Armenian and Ethiopic versions, end at 16', as Eusebius tells us that the most accurate copies of his day did. An intermediate ending is found In some Greek MSS (the earliest of the 7th cent.), in addition to the ordinary ending; and in a MS of the Old Latin (pre-Hieronymian) version, standing alone. It is as follows: — 'And they immedi-ately (or briefly) made known all things that had been commanded (them) to those about Peter. And after this Jesus himself [appeared to them and] sent out by means of them from the East even to the "West the holy and incorruptible preaching of the eternal salvation.' This intermediate ending is certainly not genuine; it was written as a conclusion to the Gospel by some one who had the ordinary ending before him and objected to it as unauthentic, or who had a MS before him ending at 16S and thought this abrupt. It appears that the copy from which most of these MSS with the inter-mediate ending were made, ended at 16'.

Now it is confessed that the style of the last twelve veraes is not that of the Gospel. There are, then, two possible explanations. One is tlmt Mark, writing at a comparatively late date, took the ' Petrine tradition,' a written work, as his basis, incorporated it almost intact into his own work, and added the veises l^-i' 16^-, and a few editorial touches such as 35 6'- ^2, which are not found in the other Synoptics, and which resemble phrases in the last twelve verses (16"- "'■)• This was Dr. Salmon's solution. There are various objections to it; two seem fatal — (1) that ecclesiastical writers never represent Peter as writing a Gospel either by himself or by any scribe or interpreter except Mack, and yet this theory supposes that the Petrine tradition' was "not first written down by Mark; and (2) that the last twelve veraes seem not to have been written as an end to the Gospel at all, being apparently a fragment of some other work, probably a summary of the Gospel story. For the beginning of 16^ is not continuous with 16'; the subject of the verb 'appeared' had evidently been indicated in the sentence wmch had preceded: yet the necessary 'Jesus' cannot be understood from anything in v.'. Further, Mary Magdalene is intro-duced in V.' as a new person, although she had just been mentioned by name in Id*^- *7 16^ and was one of the women spoken of throughout w. 1-'. — On the other hand, it is incon-ceivable that 16' with its abrui>t and inauspicious 'they were afraid' could be the conclxision of a Gospel. — that the book should deUberately end without any incident of the risen life of our Lord, and with a note of terror. The other possible explanation, therefore, is that some verses have been lost. Probably the last leaf of the original, or at least of the copy from which all the MSS existing in the 2nd cent, were taken, has disappeared. This is conceivable, the last leaf of a MS being that which is most Ukely to drop; and the difficulty that the original MS of Mk. must have been copied before it got so old that the last leaf fell may perhaps be satisfactorily met by supposing that (as we know was the case later) the Second Gospel was not highly prized in its youth, as not giving us much additional information, and as being almost entirely .contained in Mt. and Lk. On thelother hand, the last twelve veraes are extremely ancient. Most scholara look on them as belonging to the firat few yeara of the 2nd cent., and Aristion has been suggested as the writer, on the strength of a late Armenian MS. But it is quite possible that they are part of an even earlier summary of the Gospel story; and, like the passage about the woman taken in adultery (Jn 7^3-8"), tney are to be reverenced as a very ancient and authoritative record.

9. Have we the original Mark? — This has been denied from two different and incompatible points of view, (a) Papias speaks of Mk. being 'not in order' and of Matthew writing the 'oracles' or 'logia' (see § 1 above, and art. Matthew [Gospel acc. to]). It is objected that our Second Gospel is an orderly narrative, and cannot be that mentioned by Papias. Renan main-tained that Mark wrote a disconnected series of anecdotes about Christ, and Matthew a collection of discourses, and that our present First and Second Gospels took their present form by a process of assimilation, the former assimilating the anecdotes and adding them to the discourses, the latter adopting the reverse process.

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