Gospel of Mark 16.9 · 16.9

<p>The double brackets in our frozen text (Nestle 1904) mark the Longer Ending, 16:9 to 20, which is absent from the oldest witnesses: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus end at 16:8, and the vocabulary and style of these verses differ from the rest of Mark. Everything here is, textually, an addition. We print the seam rather than smooth it away.</p><p>When the tradition did supply an ending, the first person the risen Jesus appears to is Mary the Magdalene. The note that follows, from whom he had cast out seven demons, is imported from Luke 8:2; it is attached to her nowhere in Mark's own text. In first-century idiom <span class="gk">ἑπτὰ δαιμόνια</span> marks the severity of an affliction, a cluster of illness, more than a tally of sins, seven being a number of completeness; the reading of it as seven vices belongs to a later hand (Gregory the Great, <em>Hom.</em> 33, 591).</p>

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