We all know that Alexander had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. It was so bad that, according to Judith Viorst, Alexander wanted to move to Australia. But that is not all we know. We also know that Mark had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ending. Unfortunately, we can’t ship Mark 16 off to the Land Down Under and hope that all our problems go away. No, we have to do something. We already know the extended version (vv. 9-20) is not authentic, and we made a pretty good case that verse 8 is not as bad of an ending as we might have thought at first blush (just like calling our favorite country to the south, “Straya,” is not as bad of a name as we originally thought). But there are two other options that we have not yet considered. But to grasp those arguments,

Horrible endings. We’ve all read them, watched them and experienced them. Agatha Christie made us endure page after page on a train, trying to figure out who did it, only to discover that everyone did it. We saved Private Ryan only for him to be consumed at the end of the movie, not with gratitude, but with a deep fear that he hadn’t earned the right to be saved (don’t you think he should have worried about that decades ago?). Tony Soprano was sitting at a booth enjoying a nice meal and then it all went black; and by “all,” I mean the whole series. And we won’t even bring up my time with my first girlfriend which indeed ended very badly. Maybe even horribly. And that is the point: We’ve all encountered bad endings. The question is, do we encounter one at the end of Mark? Let’s admit it

Quick, name one of the absolute worst movies ever made. If your list included any of the following three classics, you win. Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) or They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968). Why? In Plan 9, Bela Lugosi (the star of the movie) died midmovie and was replaced by his body-double who didn’t look anything like him, but he “fooled” the audience by covering his face in every scene with his cape. Classic! The name of the movie alone should land Santa and the Martians on this list; and if that is not enough, the plot is also horrific. And any movie where Hitler’s dead, severed head hopes to rule over a new Third Reich from South America can’t, by definition alone, be any good. All of these could qualify as the worst movie ever. Quicker, name one of the