Clayton Coombs: Ancient antidotes for a modern poison: Irenaeus, Eusebius and Augustine, and the Interpretive problem of Mark 16:18

Of the accompanying signs promised in Mark 16:17 – 18, four out of five are arguably demonstrated in the book of Acts. The meaning of the fifth sign has long been a problem for interpreters since there are no reports of believers receiving immunity from drinking poison in the book of Acts and only one apparent reference in the early Patristic Tradition. As far as responses to this problem go, the contemporary interpretive milieu is characteristically one-dimensional—unless one counts the heterodox fringe of the Pentecostal movement which practices ritualistic drinking of poison as a test of faith. And yet there is a richness in the Patristic tradition that needs to be reclaimed. This paper presents a reception history of Mark 16:18b from the second through the fifth centuries. In particular it surveys three distinct approaches from the Papias material, through Irenaeus and the Apostolic Constitutions to Augustine’s “spiritual reading.” The result is the (re-)emergence of a fuller picture; one that corrects the modern fascination with authorship, while at the same time reinforcing the text’s inherent authority, and one that ultimately is far more familiar to the experience of the contemporary Church than has been imagined.