Lecture 17 |
Here's an excerpt (from the part about the Shorter Ending):
The textual variant known as the “Shorter Ending” goes like this:
“Everything that had been told
to them, they related to Peter and those with him. And after this, Jesus Himself appeared to
them and sent forth, through them, from east to west, the sacred and
imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.
Amen.”
This is found between verse 8 and verse 9 in six Greek manuscripts: Codex L, Codex Ψ, 083 – this is the same manuscript as 0112 – 099, and 579. All six Greek manuscripts that attest to the Shorter Ending also support the inclusion of verses 9-20, although a few of them are damaged.
This note echoes a situation in which the scribes
were aware of some copies in which the Shorter Ending was present after verse
8, and also aware of some copies in which verses 9-20 were present after verse
8.
In Codex Psi, there is no such note between verse 8 and the Shorter Ending, but after the Shorter Ending, Codex Psi has the same note that is seen in Codex L: “There is also this, appearing after ephobounto gar.”
083 is a damaged fragment.
After Mark 16:8, 083 has the closing-title of Mark at the end of a
column. In the next column, the Shorter
Ending appears, and then before the beginning of verse 9, 083 has the
note: “There is also this, appearing after ephobounto gar.” It is possible that 083 also had the same
note that is found in Codex L before the Shorter Ending, but that part of the
page is not extant, so it can only be said that there appears to have been
enough room on the page for that note.
083 thus testifies to a situation in which copyists were
aware of copies of Mark in which the text of Mark ended at verse 8, copies in
which the text ended with the Shorter Ending, and copies in which the text
ended with verses 9-20.
099 is another heavily damaged fragment, from the
White Monastery in
Greek-Sahidic Lect 1602 (Image from the digital holdings of the Albert Ludwig University of Frieburg) |
Then the Shorter Ending appears. After the Shorter Ending, there is another
note – the note also found in Codex L, Codex Psi, and 083: estin de
kai tauta meta feromena.” Then, like 099, it
repeats the second half of verse 8, beginning with the words eichen gar, and verse 8 is followed by
verses 9-20.
So: Codex
L, Codex Psi, 083, and the Greek-Sahidic Lectionary 1602 share the same note
after the Shorter Ending: they all
introduce verses 9-20 with the note that says, “Estin de kai tauta meta
feromena.”
099 and Greek-Sahidic Lectionary 1602 both repeat
the same part of verse 8 before verse 9.
Thus, four of the six Greek witnesses to the
Shorter Ending are all connected to the
same locale, namely, a location in
Greek-Sahidic Lect 1602 (Image from the digital holdings of the Albert Ludwig University of Frieburg) |
Minuscule
274 has Mark 16:9-20 in its main text. Mark
16:9 begins on the same line where verse 8 ends. The Shorter Ending is featured at the bottom
of the page, like a footnote, with a column of five asterisks beside it. An asterisk beside the end of verse 8 conveys
that the Shorter Ending was seen in the text at that point.
Thus, the Greek evidence points to
Versional evidence interlocks with this very well. The Old Latin Codex Bobbiensis, the only
manuscript in which only the Shorter
Ending is included after verse 8, almost certainly was produced in
The Bohairic-Arabic MS Huntington 17, made in 1174, has verses 9-20 in the text, and the Shorter Ending is in the margin.
The Ethiopic version was closely considered by
Bruce Metzger in 1980, in the course of a detailed essay in which he retracted
the claim that some Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark do not have Mark 16:9-20. Metzger observed that out of 194 Ethiopic
manuscripts consulted by himself and another researcher, 131 included both the Shorter
Ending and verses 9-20.
Some copies of the Harklean Syriac version,
made in the early 600s on the basis of manuscripts in
According to E.
C. Colwell, even a medieval Armenian manuscript, Etchmiadzin 303, which has
verses 9-20 at the end of Mark, managed to include the Shorter Ending as the
final verse of the Gospel of Luke.
The Shorter
Ending clearly had wide distribution in versional transmission-lines. But those lines all echo, in one way or
another, a form of the text that began in
Before moving on to the internal evidence, it
should be observed that it is misleading to convey that there were “multiple
endings” of the Gospel of Mark, as if four or five different endings were written
to continue the narrative after verse 8.
Aside from the abrupt non-ending at verse 8, there
are two independent endings of the
Gospel of Mark: one is the Shorter
Ending, attested in six [2022 update: eight] Greek manuscripts, all of which also support verses
9-20. The other one is verses 9-20.
The Freer Logion, which was mentioned in the
previous lecture, is not a different ending.
It is a textual variant. Its
existence depends upon the previous existence of verses 9-20. It does not turn into a different ending any
more than a whale turns into an eagle when a barnacle attaches itself.
Likewise,
the notes in some members of the family-1 cluster of manuscripts do not turn
verses 9-20 into something that is not verses 9-20.
And, the
inclusion of both the Shorter Ending and verses 9-20 is also not a different
ending; it is the combination of the two endings that circulated side-by-side
in
And, as far as I can tell, non-annotated Greek manuscripts in which Mark 16:9-20 is accompanied by asterisks or obeli do not really exist.
So when someone refers to “multiple endings” as a reason to doubt the genuineness of verses 9-20, the first thing to do is to clarify that in terms of independent endings of the Gospel Mark after verse 8, there are exactly two.
P.S. Thanks to Georgi Parpulov and Daniel Buck for help finding those page-views of Gr.-Sah. Lect 1602!
No comments:
Post a Comment