Los Tres Geckos (Aesthetic)
Tag: fdtd
Every Tv Show I Love [2/??]: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series (2014-2017)
“Here is to getting rich and fat. And dying in the arms of a beautiful woman”
There’s no more love left.
The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Please take this opportunity to ask me about the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark
[Image Description: Tag reading “maybe the real cult is the snakes we picked up along the way”]
Wow, I really can’t imagine why everybody’s suddenly so interested in the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark. It’s a pretty niche subject, and I really don’t know why I’ve suddenly gotten so many asks about it, but since y’all are curious….
Basically, the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark (from the 300s AD) don’t have the last 12 verses of Mark. After that, the manuscript tradition records at least 2 alternate endings, one of which (known creatively as the “long ending”) was accepted canonically as Mark 16:9 – 20.
Why does this matter? Well, given that the earliest manuscripts don’t have these last 12 verses and that later manuscripts that do have different things after the original ending, the Occam’s Razor conclusion is that the Gospel originally ended at 16:8 and other people added various endings to it later on. Again, why does this matter? Because, if you remove the 12 interpolated verses, the Gospel of Mark doesn’t have a resurrected Jesus. Without those verses, the gospel ends with Mary Magdalene and the other women finding Jesus’s tomb empty, but Jesus never appears resurrected to the apostles, which is, you know, kind of an important part of the story. So basically, people were concerned by the fact that Mark didn’t explicitly show that Jesus had been resurrected, so they wrote some extra verses to make that clear.
Now, if you’ve followed this all the way from the beginning, you might be wondering what the hell any of this has to do with handling snakes. In the interpolated verses (specifically 16:17-18) Jesus, who’s now appeared resurrected because, you know, that’s important, tells the disciples that those who follow him will be able to speak in tongues, handle snakes, and be immune to poison. And that, friends, is why there are Christian communities in Appalachia today who babble randomly and pick up poisonous snakes as part of their worship. Because of a couple of verses that weren’t originally part of the Gospel of Mark.
More information about all this can be found here. (Yes, I know it’s Wikipedia, but it’s the easiest way to provide links to all the relevant scholarship without taking hours compiling it. That’s what Wikipedia is for!)
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