The Fakest Part of Mark (And It Isn’t “Secret Mark”)

If you ask which bit of Mark “looks fakest” on internal grounds, the answer isn’t the Mar Saba Lazarus scene. It’s the longer ending, Mark 16:9–20.

Take Mark chapter by chapter and treat each one as its own stylistic “fingerprint.” When you compare basic features—word frequencies, function-words, hapax density, type–token ratios, sentence-length, and how the chapters cluster in principal-components space—two regions drift away from the rest. One is Mark 13, the big apocalyptic speech. The other is 16:9–20.

The Mark 13 anomaly turns out to be boring in the best possible way. It is a sustained discourse rather than narrative, so of course its sentence-lengths, particles, and imagery cluster differently. Shift from fast-cut miracle stories and travel scenes to continuous prophetic monologue and the statistics register that shift. Once you adjust for genre, the underlying vocabulary and connective habits still look like Mark.

Mark 16:9–20 is another story entirely. Here you get a genuine stylistic break. The longer ending throws in a bundle of verbs and nouns that simply don’t occur elsewhere in Mark: terms for “disbelieve,” “harm,” and generalized temporal summaries like “afterward,” as well as the title phrase “the Lord Jesus” which feels much more like later Christian liturgical language than Mark’s usual narrative voice. At the same time, some of Mark’s most characteristic habits quietly vanish. The historic present tenses that drive the Gospel’s vivid, filmic pacing fade out. The beloved εὐθύς, which peppers Mark as a kind of narrative drumbeat, disappears. The whole thing shifts into résumé mode: instead of scene-by-scene parataxis, you get a chain of compressed post-resurrection vignettes.

Put differently, the longer ending still talks about Jesus, but it talks like a different writer from a different stage in the tradition. The stylistic diagnostics and the external manuscript evidence line up: early Greek witnesses that stop at 16:8, patristic awareness of an abrupt ending, and then this smoother, more ecclesiastical coda that reads like a later patch.

By contrast, the rest of Mark—including the famously strange “naked youth” in 14:51–52—remains within the same stylistic envelope. Narrative oddity alone doesn’t show a different hand. Mark is already a bit weird: abrupt scene changes, dangling details, unexplained characters. Stylometry, when you zoom out to the chapter level, records that weirdness as part of the normal Markan range, not as a separate authorial fingerprint.

That perspective has obvious consequences for how we talk about “fake” Markan material. If you want an example of something that is both stylistically non-Markan and externally second-class, you already have one printed in most Bibles at 16:9–20. Three independent signals converge: new vocabulary, loss of core habits, and a rhetoric that no longer sounds like the evangelist “on the ground” but like a later preacher summarizing what should happen next. That’s what a real interpolation looks like when both internal and external controls are in place.

Once you see this, it becomes harder to use “this feels different” as a knock-down argument against any contested Markan passage, canonical or otherwise. Feeling stitched or strange is not enough; you need the full battery of diagnostics and the larger textual tradition. Mark 16:9–20 clears that bar. Most other disputed regions don’t.

For the longer Lazarus-like scene preserved under Clement’s name, the lesson is indirect but important. The mere fact that a pericope looks like a mosaic, or that it includes an odd naked-youth motif, doesn’t automatically push it into the realm of modern fakery. Canonical Mark itself indulges in quirky narrative moves, and where the Gospel truly has late material attached, the internal signs are dramatically stronger than anything usually adduced against the Mar Saba text.

That doesn’t prove the longer Lazarus scene is authentic or ancient. It does reset the burden of argument. If the question is “what looks more like a foreign body inside Mark?” internal Greek style points decisively toward the longer ending, not toward a nocturnal catechesis scene echoed in a letter. Authenticity debates, in turn, have to be anchored in the things that actually discriminate hand and date—material history, manuscript transmission, and careful comparison with undisputed Markan usage—rather than in a generalized unease with passages that happen to be narratively or theologically uncomfortable.