Broadly defined, a paratext is any textual material that appears secondary or supplementary to the primary text. The latter can exist without the former, while the opposite cannot be true. The general role of the paratext is to create a situation of communication between the writer and reader, as Genette Gérard puts it.1 Paratexts have no fixed location or a single layout, but instead differ significantly from one culture or period or even one scribe and another. In his recent study of paratexts and materiality in the Greek classical tradition, Glenn W. Most observed that, in this setting, a paratext commonly includes productive and receptive aspects: the former is expressed in the decisions a scribe has to make regarding its appearance (font, ink etc.), and the latter is in the reader’s learning of how to read the paratext along with the central text.2 Borrowing Most’s terminology, this study will show that scribes could employ the productive aspect creatively, in a way that brought their own views to the project. With the “receptive aspect,” Most also draws attention to the effect of materiality on the use of paratexts. While the paratexts of rolls were limited and mostly sporadic, codices that contained several works provided a far better opportunity to provide comprehensive paratexts.3 Paratexts could therefore appear in different forms and layouts, without the necessity to have the text and its associated paratext “be placed within the same immediate visual field.”4
The codex had an impact on paratextuality in Christian copies, which adopted the codex layout at a very early stage; the cross-referencing system of the Eusebian canons, for example, depends upon the codex format, as Matthew Crawford argued.5 However, a definition and categorisation of biblical paratexts remains a challenge. Patrick Andrist, a member of the ParatexBib project dedicated to the study of paratexts in biblical manuscripts,6 justifiably states that “there is a striking lack of shared terminology and methodology for dealing with paratexts, marginal notes and other types of secondary content in ancient codices in general and for the way they relate to one another and to the main contents in the same book.”7
Applying these remarks to Mark 16 in a codicological context, I analyse the question of what scribes and scholars encountered in Mark’s endings and how they received and transmitted this information through paratexts located (i) before the Gospels (the hypotheses or argumenta to the Gospels), (ii) alongside the Gospel in associated marginalia (primarily the Ammonian/Eusebian numbers given to the endings), and (iii) following the Gospels as postscripts that appear after the endings (and consequently after the Gospel itself). Scribes exhibited a degree of freedom in understanding and reporting the endings and that paratexts refer to chapters in the history of the struggle to respond to the multiplicity of Markan endings.
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, ET by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 8.
Most, Impagination—Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 29–30.
Most, Impagination, 34–36, 38–39.
G.W. Most, Impagination, 26.
M. Crawford, “The Eusebian Canon Tables as a Corpus-Organizing Paratext within the Multiple-Text Manuscript of the Fourfold Gospel,” in A. Bausi, M. Friedrich and M. Maniaci (eds.), The Emergence of Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 107–124, at 108.
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P. Andrist, “Toward a definition of paratexts and paratextuality: The case of ancient Greek manuscripts.” In L. Lied, and M. Maniaci (eds.), Bible as Notepad (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 130–149, at 130.