Three women come to finish a burial and find the stone already moved and the body already gone. The message they’re given makes a point of including, by name, the one disciple who three days earlier swore with curses that he had never known Jesus at all. And this Gospel — the earliest written, the leanest, the one most in a hurry to get everywhere it goes — ends with something almost no other book of Scripture dares: women running from an empty tomb, too afraid to say a single word to anyone.
A study in Mark 16 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 15 min read
He Is Risen; He Is Not Here
“And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him. And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun. And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.”
Mark 16:1-4
“An earthquake marked the hour when Christ laid down His life, and another earthquake witnessed the moment when He took it up in triumph. He who had vanquished death and the grave came forth from the tomb with the tread of a conqueror, amid the reeling of the earth, the flashing of lightning, and the roaring of thunder.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 780
Three women set out that morning with nothing more than spices and a question they hadn’t solved — who would move a stone too heavy for any of them to lift alone. By the time they arrive, the only obstacle they had planned for is already gone.
“And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.”
Mark 16:5-6
Mark’s own understatement — “a young man” where Matthew describes an angel whose countenance was like lightning — is characteristic of this whole Gospel’s habit of trusting a plain sentence to carry enormous weight without any help from adjectives.
“But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.”
Mark 16:7
“‘Tell His disciples and Peter,’ the angels said. … All the disciples had forsaken Jesus, and the call to meet Him again includes them all. He has not cast them off.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 793
Two words — “and Peter” — are found in no other Gospel’s account of this same message. Mark alone, in the very book several early traditions say was shaped by Peter’s own preaching, makes certain the man who wept bitterly after his third denial knows by name that he has not been written off.
“And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.”
Mark 16:8
The oldest and most reliable Greek manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel end exactly here, at this verse — trembling, amazement, silence, fear. It is, by any measure, one of the strangest endings in the whole Bible: not a triumphant appearance, not a commission, just three terrified women and an empty tomb. Whatever else can be said about it, it is not the ending a writer inventing a story would have chosen. It reads like the ending of someone recording, with total honesty, exactly how the news first landed — before there was time for anyone to compose themselves, let alone compose a tidy conclusion.
Go Ye Into All The World
Every English Bible in wide use today, including the King James translation this site quotes throughout, continues from verse 8 into the twelve verses that follow. It is worth saying plainly, in the spirit of honesty this whole series has tried to keep toward its readers: the earliest and best-preserved Greek manuscripts of Mark’s Gospel do not contain verses 9 through 20. Serious students of the New Testament text, across every Christian tradition, generally agree that these verses were added sometime after Mark’s own lifetime, likely to supply the resurrection appearances his own account seems to stop just short of narrating. Nothing in these verses is unsupported doctrine invented from nothing — every event in them is independently and abundantly told elsewhere, in Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts. What follows is offered on that footing: not as Mark’s own original ending, most likely, but as Scripture the church has long received, read here for what it says.
“Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept. And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.”
Mark 16:9-11
The first witness to the resurrection is a woman the disciples don’t believe, remembered for a deliverance so severe that this verse names it again even after everything else that has happened since.
“After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country. And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them. Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.”
Mark 16:12-14
Three separate reports, three separate refusals to believe them — the same men who will shortly be entrusted with carrying this news to every nation on earth cannot, at first, carry it across their own dinner table.
“And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned. And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
Mark 16:15-18
Men who could not believe three separate eyewitnesses an hour ago are handed, in the very next breath, the whole world to go and tell. The commission does not wait for their unbelief to fully resolve itself. It is given to the same hesitant, doubting, hardened hearts that have just been upbraided for exactly that hesitancy — because the mission was never going to wait for perfect confidence before it started.
“So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.”
Mark 16:19-20
“The commission had been given to the twelve when Christ met with them in the upper chamber; but it was now to be given to a larger number. At the meeting on a mountain in Galilee, all the believers who could be called together were assembled.”
Ellen G. White · The Desire of Ages, p. 818
Sixteen chapters that began with a voice crying in the wilderness and a man too obscure for any historian outside these pages to have thought worth recording close with Him seated at the right hand of God, and with ordinary men — the same ones who slept through His agony, fled at His arrest, and doubted His resurrection three times over — sent out to tell the whole world what they had finally come to believe. Whatever verse this Gospel was originally meant to end on, that is where the story itself was always going: not to a tomb, but out from it, into every place its first readers, and every reader since, would ever go.
