In my note on “The Synoptic Problem” I mentioned the ending of “Mark”. This is really the ending of Andrew, who authored the second canonical narrative of Jesus, known in the Bible canon and church history and theology as Mark.
A great deal has been theorized about why the second narrative ends the way that it does. One of the most popular, if not the most popular today is that the author intended to end with the women fleeing from the empty tomb of Jesus in fear to serve as a doorway for all readers to take up the narrative in enacted and progressive gospel drama to make the message a living and breathing play for every audience who would hear God and join in the pageant for spiritual enrichment and life. This is total nonsense! It is an elaborated fantasy. It joins the rest of the church doctrinal endings of Mark in it’s propagation of reading into the scriptures what is definitely not there.
A lot has been made out of a simple reality. No one knows why the narrative of Andrew ends the way it does. Most people have an opinion. I give mine below.
Andrew most likely constructed his own codex. At this point in time, single stitching was the technique used in the nascent world of codex book binding. Andrew probably was not proficient in book-binding. Because of its inferior construction quality, it is highly likely that the last section of his codex got detached from the book very early in its existence. This, and this alone, accounts for the abrupt ending.
Obviously, the narrative of Andrew was not given the same standing as that of Matthew. For reasons only known to the original Roman recipients, the writing of Andrew was not publicly used, like Matthew was among the Jews, until a few decades after it was finalized and delivered to its recipients. When it surfaced as a public “church” document, right away the leaders felt that it needed an appropriate ending. Hence, the different endings arose for their own purposes.
A lot has been made over a true non-issue!