Mark 16

Syntactic observation

The text does not say angel. νεανίσκον — a young man. And the word occurs twice in Mark, the other at 14:51: the young man who left the linen and fled naked. Here he sits clothed in a white στολή. στολή likewise occurs twice, the other at 12:38, where the scribes love to walk about in long robes. περιβεβλημένον, clothed, is the same participial form as the περιβεβλημένος of 14:51 — only what is wrapped around him has changed. The women's reaction, ἐξεθαμβήθησαν, is one of four in the book: at 9:15 when the crowd saw Jesus, at 14:33 of Jesus in Gethsemane, and here at 16:5 and 6 of the women. Mark says nothing about who this person is.

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Lost in translation

Syntactic observation

ἠγέρθη is aorist passive — he was raised. Not that he rose but that he was raised, and by whom the sentence does not say. Elsewhere the book uses both voices for it (the ἀναστῆναι of 8:31, 9:31, 10:34 active; the ἐγερθῆναι of 14:28 passive). τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον is a perfect passive participle — the crucified one: the act finished and its state still on him. The aorist of being raised stands beside the perfect of having been crucified. ἴδε ὁ τόπος, see the place, is not look, the tomb is empty but look at the spot where they laid him — and 15:47, where the two Marys were watching where he was laid, has marked that spot in advance.

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Lost in translation

Syntactic observation

καὶ τῷ Πέτρῳ — and to Peter. After the disciples have already been named, one name is attached separately. Peter is one of the twelve, so grammatically it is redundant; what fills the redundancy is that he is the man who denied three times at 14:66-72. The last thing Peter did in this book was weep (14:72), and after that he does not act — here he is only named. Προάγει, he goes ahead, is present tense, and it is the verb of the promise at 14:28: after I am raised I will go ahead of you into Galilee. That promise is laid down again here, and καθὼς εἶπεν ὑμῖν, as he told you, points to it. προάγω comes five times in Mark; at 10:32 he walked ahead of them going up to Jerusalem. And in v.8 the women do not deliver the message.

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Syntactic observation

The last word of the body is γάρ — ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ, for they were afraid. γάρ is the conjunction that hooks what follows onto what precedes, so it rarely stands at the end of a sentence, let alone of a book. The sentence breaks where it should continue. And the vocabulary of the last paragraph echoes backwards: ἔκστασις, being out of oneself, is what came over the people at 5:42 when the girl rose; ἔφυγον, they fled, is what the disciples did at 14:50 and the young man at 14:52. The women flee too. οὐδενὶ οὐδὲν εἶπαν, they said nothing to anyone, is the place where the silence commanded throughout the book (1:44, 5:43, 7:36, 8:30, 9:9) turns over at the end — told to speak (v.7), they do not. SBLGNT then prints, inside double brackets ⟦…⟧, the shorter ending. The brackets are the editor's mark that he does not take it for the original text, and we render neither with the mark erased nor with the bracketed matter hidden. SBLGNT marks a variant in this verse (⸀γὰρ ⸁γάρ.).

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Lost in translation

Syntactic observation

SBLGNT prints vv.9-20 inside double brackets ⟦…⟧ — the opening bracket at the head of v.9, the closing one at the end of v.20. Present in the body, marked as not original. The style backs the mark. Verse 9 begins having risen with no subject named, while the subject of v.8 just before is the women, so the sentence does not continue from it. And Mary Magdalene is introduced here as though for the first time, with the note that seven demons had been cast out of her — though she has already appeared three times, at 15:40, 47 and 16:1. For a reader who has come through the book that introduction is unnecessary. The vocabulary parts too: 16:9-20 uses φανερόω (12, 14), ἀπιστέω (11, 16), βλάπτω, θανάσιμος, ἄρρωστος — words the earlier book does not use — while εὐθύς, the word Mark leans on throughout, does not occur here once. SBLGNT marks a variant in this verse (⸀παρ’).

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