Jerusalem are silent about the Long Ending ; and this would be very significant if it were not that Cyril of Alexandria and Theodoret are also silent, though they must have known verses which were in wide circulation in their time. Here we must note, further, that the fact that the Short Ending could scarcely have been the original close of the Gospel (see below), is no argument for the genuine- ness of the other two extant endings.
The Long Ending is found in practically all the authorities except those mentioned above— in almost all the uncials and cursives, the lectionaries, in the great majority of versions. It is explicitly quoted by Iren;«us as a genuine part of Mk. (iii. 10. 6 : ' in fine autem evangelii ait Marcus, Et quidem Dominus Jesus,' etc. = Mk 16'^). It is also probably referred to by Justin [Apol. i. 45 : e^eX- dbvTes iravTaxov eK7]pv^ai' = M'k 16""); possibly by 'Barnabas' (xv. 9, (pavipwdels dve(3ri els ovpavovs ; cf. Mk IB''* ((pavepMrj) and Hernias {Sim. IX. xxv. 1, 2 ; cf. Mk 16'^). But these last two cases are quite uncertain, and there is no evidence at all that any Father before Irenseus knew these verses as part, of the Gospel ; they may have known them from some other writer. Dr. Salmon argues with some force (IntrocL, appendix to Lect. ix.) that though KB have not got these verses, yet in this part tliey are copied from one archetype which pi'obably did contain them. The scribes seem to have pur- posely omitted something which was in the arche- tjpe, leaving a blank or distending the writing, and that something mus":. have been of about the same length as the Long Ending. Salmon con- jectures that the scribes of K and B were of the school of Eusebius, and that they left out these verses, though they had them in their original, because Eusebius disapproved of them. No writer before Eusebius is known to have rejected them, and their presence in all later MSS shows that the successors of Eusebius, in spite of his great authority, did not follow his judgment in the matter. If, however, Salmon's argument on this part of the subject is sound, and if i<B when cross- examined give evidence, as he says, for the dis- puted ending and not against it, yet the absence of the ending in syr s>n and in Eusebius' ' more accurate copies' remains a stumbling-block to accepting the further i:iference that the Long Ending is genuine. Mr. F. C. Conybeare has sug- gested {Expositor, 4th series, viii. 241) that these verses are the work of the Aristion mentioned by Papias as one of our Lord's disciples. In an Ar- menian MS. of the Gospels written A.D. 986 (only discovered in 1891), the Long Ending is said to be ' of the presbyter Ariston,' and it is not unreason- able to understand Aristion to be meant, the iota having fallen in transcription into Ai'menian. But the evidence is too late to be of much worth.
The internal evidence is important. It is freely admitted by the supporters of the Long Ending that its style and vocabulary are entirely difierent from those of the main part of the Gospel ; and this consideration is decisive against the author- ship being the same. But this does not at once bring us to a solution of all our difficulties. As far as style goes, it does not necessarily follow that the Long Ending is not by St. Mark. Salmon {loc. cit.) suggests that our Second Gospel is, in its present form, the latest of the Synoptics, St. Mark having, indeed, followed the written Petrine tra- dition more faithfully than the others, and having incorporated it in his Gospel almost in its own words, prefixing l'-'^ and adding 16'"''-, inserting also various editorial touciies (for which see § vii. 2 below). Certainly both the first fifteen and the last twelve verses of our Gospel show the same system of summarizing events, — Salmon suggests that it was these two passages which led Augustine
to call Mark an abbreviator of Matthew, — and so far they might be by the same author. Yet the style of the 'preface' and that of the 'appendix' are not similar. A greater objection to this view is that it supposes in reality a Peter-Gospel not written by St. Mark ; but ecclesiastical writers never represent St. Peter as writing a Gospel, either by himself or by any scribe or ' interpreter * except St. Mark. For we notice that this theory will not bear tiie weight of the additional hypo- thesis (not Salmon's), that St. Mark wrote a first edition, jjerhaps at Rome, and afterwards a later one, with added matter, perhaps at Alexandria. The style-argument is decisively against this ; more- over, some traces of the original ending would have survived, and the Church to which he gave his first edition would have pi-eserved the words ^ith which that edition closed.
There is one consideration which seems to the present writer decisive against Dr. Salmon's view. The Long Ending could not, like the Intermediate one, have been written — whether by Mark or by another — expressly to finish the Gospel left un- finished at 16*. For the beginning of v.^ is not continuous with v.^. The subject of i<fidv7i had evi- dently been indicated in the sentence which had preceded ; yet the necessary ' Jesus ' cannot be understood from anything in v.*. Further, Mary Magdalene is introduced in v." as a new person, — she is indicated as one irap ^s iK^e^XyjKn etrrd 8ai/x6via, — though she had just been mentioned by name in lo^"- '*'' 16\ and though she was one of the women spoken of throughout the eight verse.s pre- ceding the Long Ending. Tiiis i)aragraph, then, must be a fragment of a lai'ger work, and could not have been composed on purpose to end the Gospel. It is, indeed, too much to say that it is a summary of events of the Forty Days, complete in itself, but at least it fits very badly on to the rest of the Gospel.