Fortress Press

“Thoughtful readers of the New Testament have long puzzled over the different endings to Mark’s Gospel. Coombs’s work throws fresh light on this problem by discussing how the early church wrestled with it and Eusebius’s ingenious, inclusive “solution” based on the reception of the Gospel. But in the process, he also considers a range of other historical issues of interest to Christians today, such as the presence of prophecy and miracles in the post-apostolic church and discrepancies in the resurrection accounts of the four Gospels, in a fascinating study of a range of patristic authors. This is a masterpiece of contemporary patristic scholarship.”

In A Dual Reception: Eusebius and the Gospel of Mark, Clayton Coombs examines in depth the struggles of fourth-century Christians to make sense of the apparent discrepancies in the account of the Resurrection found in the Synoptics, and to reconcile the manuscript traditions of the ending of Mark—is it the long ending or the short that Christians ought to accept as canonical? On the way, Coombs offers a most fascinating look into the Christian communities of fourth-century eastern Mediterranean and shows how attentive they were to the details of Scripture; how sophisticated was their approach to both doctrine and worship; and how pastoral care was at the center of theology. A Dual Reception is an indispensable resource for those interested in early Christian understandings of inspiration, canonicity, and manuscript reception.

 “Coombs’s book gathers together many interesting ideas about one of the major ancient texts concerning the ending clause of Mark’s Gospel, the Questions  of Eusebius of Caesarea, providing us a fresh interpretation of this discussion as well as plenty of new paths to follow. Some of these tracks might seem rather unsafe and risky, either in their start or in their run; however, they lead to some unique hypotheses worth the attention of anyone interested in such a topic.”