On Crossan's Proposition that Mark Ended at 15:39

Mark’s Gospel may have circulated first as a tightly framed “passion gospel” that actually ends at 15:39, with the centurion’s cry, and that 15:40–16:8 represents a later extension attaching burial, empty tomb, and Galilee-promise material to an earlier crucifixion-focused script. The proposal is that 15:33–39 completes the book’s architecture by mirroring the prologue: the opening gives the programmatic title (“Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God”), moves through Scripture, and then into the ministry; the ending reverses the order, driving through the passion to a final Scripture-saturated scene of darkness and torn veil, climaxing in a human confession that this crucified figure is “truly … Son of God” (ἀληθῶς οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος υἱὸς θεοῦ ἦν, Mk 15:39).  Within that frame, the dominant motif of misunderstanding and abandonment—disciples failing, fleeing, and denying—finds a grim but coherent resolution at the cross: only an outsider, a Roman executioner, finally speaks the truth that the heavenly voice proclaimed at the baptism, so the story can close without appearances or vindication narratives and still feel theologically complete.

On this reading, 15:40–16:8 looks different in tone and purpose. The burial and empty-tomb pericopes carry no fresh Scripture-fulfilment formulae and no new christological pronouncement, but they do bundle up what look like apologetic and explanatory details: the official confirmation that Jesus is really dead, the specific tomb, the stone, the reason for the women’s visit, and an explanation for why, despite an angelic command to speak, “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk 16:8). These units also show features that can be read as “evolutionary seams”: the women appear suddenly after the centurion’s confession, their names vary across adjacent scenes, and promises of a Galilee encounter are retrofitted both into the Last Supper and the tomb narrative even though the disciples have already scattered. None of these is decisive by itself—living oral tradition and performance can easily generate such tensions—but together they make 15:40–16:8 look like a secondary layer that domesticates an earlier, starker ending at the cross.

Against that, the broader field still strongly favors an ending at 16:8 as the earliest recoverable text: major manuscripts break there, the longer ending is widely judged secondary, and Matthew and Luke appear to know a Mark that already includes the women-at-the-tomb scene and the Galilee promise, which pushes any hypothesized 15:39-stop back behind our extant textual archetype. Stylistically, 15:40–16:8 reads like Mark, not like a later church hand, so if it is an add-on it is probably by the same author or a very early redactor. The strongest counter-argument to Crossan-style reconstructions is therefore reception: whatever Mark once was in hypothetical earlier editions, the Mark known to the evangelists who follow it already contains the empty tomb.

The deeper conceptual payoff of the 15:39-stop hypothesis is not that it disproves the empty tomb, but that it makes a passion-only gospel a live possibility. Long before Crossan, C. H. Dodd could write that “the earliest Gospel is pre-eminently a Gospel of the Passion,” with the Galilean ministry functioning as a kind of extended preface to a kerygma whose core was the death of Christ.  A scenario in which an earlier Mark ended at the centurion’s line and only later acquired 15:40–16:8 fits that older intuition: first a lean passion narrative climaxing in paradoxical recognition at the cross, then a subsequent textual stage in which communities that already cherished resurrection stories in oral or liturgical form began to attach a burial-and-empty-tomb postscript. In that frame, the debate over where Mark “really” ends becomes less about finding a single correct verse and more about mapping how early Christians experimented with closure—sometimes stopping at the crucified Son of God, sometimes at the terrified silence of the women, and sometimes with fuller appearance stories—while telling the same underlying story of Jesus’ death and vindication.