For centuries, the strange ending of Mark’s Gospel has provoked heated debates. Is it possible that the “original” Gospel, the first “edition” of Mark, ends ...

A Saint (Mark?) Reading, a painting by Bartolomeo Vivarini at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, circa 1470 (Wikimedia Commons). Why does Jesus rebuke Peter, admonishing him to “Get behind me, Satan”?

In the summer of 1958, Morton Smith, a newly hired Columbia University historian, traveled to an ancient monastery outside Jerusalem. In its library, he found what he said was a lost gospel. His ...