Mark 16

Mark 16 always puts me on edge.  I don't know what to do with the parenthetical information from verse 9-20.  It brings to mind all kinds of questions about the integrity of early manuscripts, the hand of the early church in shaping things, the inerrant nature of the Word of God, etc.

I wish I had time to dig into it, but I suspect that one could spend their entire life digging into it and still not get to the bottom.

The rubber meets the road issue is whether God can guarantee the integrity of His Word as a source of truth for all generations, how literally we take that text, how to treat it with intelligence, how to interpret scholarship and how to discern the bias or impartiality of this scholarship.  Ouch.  It makes my head hurt.

Meanwhile, I have school to get up and running, dishes to clean and errands to run.  I understand what Virginia Woolf meant when she said that a woman writer needs a room of her own, although I'm still not convinced that such a room is the best use of one's life in all but a handful of circumstances.  Instead it seems to me that most writers are unhappy, brooding sorts.  Yes, they have the ability to inspire, but they can also weigh us down with too much ponderous thought.

I've sifted through a bit of the scholarship on the authenticity of the various endings--no easy conclusions.