The Mutilation of Mark's Gospel.

The Mutilation of Mark's Gospel. By N. Clayton Croy. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press: 2003. Pp. 230. Paper, $22.00.

Clayton Croy makes a serious challenge to the current scholarly consensus that the Gospel of Mark was originally intended to end at verse 16:8 with the women fleeing from the empty tomb and narrating no post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. He does not argue for the authenticity of either the so-called longer ending (verses 16:9-19) present in most manuscripts of Mark or the shorter ending often inserted after verse 14 of the longer ending. Instead, he uses the fact that later editors felt the need to add these endings as part of his case that the original ending of Mark was lost and that verse 16:8 did not provide a satisfactory ending by the standards of ancient literature.

The Mutilation of Mark's Gospel has eight chapters. The first introduces the problem of the ending of Mark, and the second chronicles the shift in scholarly consensus through the course of the twentieth century from belief in a lost ending to the belief that Mark was intended to end at 16:8. In the third chapter, Croy argues that this shift was due to a change in contemporary attitudes about literature, and particularly about what constitutes a good ending, which would be anachronistic to project onto the ancient world. The heart of the book is in chapters four and five, in which Croy argues that there are serious problems with the theory that Mark was intended to end at 16:8 and that the various hypotheses scholars have put forward do not solve them. In chapter six, Croy introduces the argument that Mark's original beginning, as well as its ending, has been lost. In chapter seven he hypothesizes that this may have been because Mark was first published in "book" or codex form and that the codex's outer leaves were damaged early in the course of its transmission. Chapter eight, the conclusion, very briefly addresses what difference it would make if the theories Croy has presented in the book are correct.

Croy writes with force, clarity, and even wit. The way he skewers some of the more esoteric literary theories presented in chapter five may inspire a few chuckles. The book is written for an educated but non-specialist audience, and few readers will have any difficulty following Croy's argument. Greek words are rare and they are always translated and explained. The few technical terms are explained both within the text and in a glossary at the end of the book.

Unfortunately, there are few new arguments in the book, and Croy is sometimes less than effective in dealing with counterevidence. Only a few examples can be dealt with here. Croy adopts the old argument that, linguistically speaking, "for they were afraid" is an unlikely way to end a sentence or a book. He tries to get around the known counter-evidence by narrowing his criteria to exclude it. One can make anything "unique" or "unparalleled" by such a method, but the terms lose their significance when this is done.

Croy brings the charge of anachronism against those who accept that Mark intended to end his text at 16:8 and let the readers (or hearers) themselves supply the ending to the story. He claims that the literary technique of the "suspended ending" is popular in modern literature but unknown in the ancient world.

He does not discuss Mark's heavy use of dramatic irony, where the audience knows things that the characters in the story do not. He discounts several examples of suspended endings in ancient literature surveyed by J. L. Magness in Sense and Absence (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986) without adequate discussion. Croy notes that Euripides' Medea, in which Medea's murder of her children takes place offstage, is not a true example of a suspended ending because the action does take place within the narrated time of the story and is communicated to the audience by a report. He does not note that the same is true of the resurrection in Mark's Gospel, nor does he discuss Sophocles' Elektra or Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, which are better examples of true suspended endings. He also dismisses the parallel of the biblical book of Jonah, which ends with God's rhetorical question to the prophet, by saying that "while the ending of Jonah may not have the nicely rounded closure that some readers would like, neither does it subvert the book's trajectory and constitute an anticlimax as Mark 16:8 does" (p. 96). But that Mark's presumably Christian audiences would have found 16:8 an anticlimax and would not have inferred Jesus' post-resurrection appearances from their own knowledge and the clues in the text is exactly what Croy needs to show.

Ken Olson

Duke University

Durham, NC 27708