Mark 16:15

Note

Mark's Gospel opens with "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1). In this verse the risen Jesus hands that gospel to the Eleven and sends them out with it into the whole world.

The verse before tells how Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating and "rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart" (Mark 16:14), because they had not believed those who saw Him risen. The commission follows the rebuke without a pause. Men who would not take the word of the witnesses are made witnesses whose word others must take. The sayings on believing and baptism and the signs come next, and the book ends with the command carried out: "they went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked through them" (Mark 16:20). The command says what the risen Lord says in Matthew 28:19, Luke 24:47 and Acts 1:8.

Mark uses the noun euangelion in eight verses, this one among them, and never the verb "to bring good news." For Mark the gospel is always the message itself, something that can be handed over and carried. Here it is the object of an aorist imperative, kēruxate, "proclaim" (kērussō), the herald's word for crying a decree aloud. The participle before it, poreuthentes, "having gone," takes the journey for granted; the weight of the command falls on the proclaiming. Twice Jesus had spoken of this moment: "the gospel must first be proclaimed to all the nations" (Mark 13:10), and "wherever the gospel is preached in all the world" (Mark 14:9). Here the forecast becomes an order. Its field is "every creature," ktisis, the word for all that God has made.

The KJV and the BSB agree here word for word: "preach the gospel to every creature." The LSV has "proclaim the good news to all the creation," keeping the Greek article and the full breadth of the noun, and giving euangelion its plain sense of good news. Gregory, below, takes "every creature" as every human being; the words themselves leave no one out. The KJV prints verses 9–20 as the rest of the chapter, without comment; the LSV sets them within double brackets, as many modern editions mark them off.

John Wesley notes that "Our Lord speaks without any limitation or restriction" Wesley, and draws a hard conclusion: wherever someone in any age has not heard, those who should have preached, or those who should have heard, or both, have made void God's purpose. In the Catena, Gregory explains why "every creature" means every person: a human being shares in all creation, for "he has existence as have stones, life as trees, feeling as animals, understanding as have Angels" Gregory. Augustine asks why the Lord rebuked the Eleven just before He left them, and answers that "after His ascension even the Gentiles on their preaching were to believe a Gospel, which they had not seen" Augustine. Matthew Henry sums it up: "The commission of Christ's ministers extends to every creature throughout the world" Matthew Henry.

A reader should know how these verses have come down. The two oldest manuscripts that preserve the close of Mark, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both of the fourth century, end at 16:8; the great majority of manuscripts have verses 9–20. Around AD 180 Irenaeus quotes verse 19 as the words with which Mark ends his Gospel Irenaeus, Against Heresies, and the church has long read the passage as Scripture.

The first to receive this command were men just rebuked for unbelief. Whoever hears the gospel today hears it as Augustine says the nations would: from witnesses, without having seen, and under a command that left no creature out.