Watch the new video about the false claims that Grace To You has been spreading about Mark 16:9-20 for the past ten years on YouTube. It has
been almost ten years since Dr. John MacArthur preached a sermon titled “The Fitting End to Mark’s Gospel,” in
which he called Mark 16:9-20 a “bad ending.”
Since then, the ministry of Grace to You has promoted his claims over
and over.
But many
of his claims are false. I’m not
challenging his doctrines here; I
mean that he says many things in that
sermon that are flat-out untrue. He says
things that are fictitious. In the next
ten minutes, I will focus on just some of them.
(1) John MacArthur
says, “I would say there is massive evidence that the Holy Spirit not only
inspired the Scripture but preserved it in its purity through all history.” He also says, “There are twenty-five
thousand ancient manuscripts of the New Testament. Such an abundance preserved by the Holy
Spirit through faithful men in the church makes it possible to reconstruct the
original books with virtually complete accuracy.”
There are 1,653 Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of
Mark. Almost all of them – over 99% –
include the 12 verses that MacArthur calls a “bad ending.” There are just three Greek manuscripts in
which the text of Mark ends at Mark 16:8.
If
“massive evidence” shows that the text of Scripture has been preserved in its
purity through all history, then massive evidence also refutes MacArthur’s idea
that Mark 16:9-20 should be rejected.
To put it
another way: if “massive evidence” –
say, 99% of the Greek manuscripts, 99%
of the Syriac manuscripts, 99% of the Latin manuscripts, and 100% of the
Ethiopic manuscripts – is what shows us the text that the Holy Spirit has
preserved for the church to use, then Mark 16:9-20 is part of that
divinely-approved text. But if, instead,
we should rely on 1% of the Greek manuscripts, 1% of the Syriac manuscripts, 1%
of the Greek manuscripts, and none of the Ethiopic manuscripts. what happens to
MacArthur’s claim about “massive evidence”?
It disintegrates. It dissolves
into dust.
(2) John MacArthur claims
that after the Council of Nicea in 325, as Christianity became established as
the religion of the Roman Empire, persecution
ended, and starting then you have the proliferation of manuscripts. “They all survived,” he said, “because no one
is banning them or destroying them.”
That
claim is downright silly. Even after
Roman persecutions stopped, humidity still worked. Outside the exceptionally dry climate of Egypt, papyrus
manuscripts experienced natural decay. Eusebius
of Caesarea claimed that Emperor Constantine instructed him to make 50
manuscripts for churches in Constantinople. Do we have 50 Greek manuscripts from the 300s? No we do not.
The claim that “they all survived” is ridiculous.
(3) MacArthur demonstrated his ignorance of New Testament
manuscripts again when he identified Codex Sinaiticus as “The earliest and most
important of the Biblical texts that have been discovered.” But Sinaiticus is not the earliest New
Testament text; other substantial manuscripts, such as Papyrus 45, and Papyrus
46, are earlier.
(4) As part of the basis for his rejection of Mark
16:9-20, MacArthur appeals to “Eight thousand copies of Jerome’s Vulgate.” The thing is, in Jerome’s Vulgate, Mark
16:9-20 is included. MacArthur also appealed
to “Three hundred and fifty-plus copies of the Syriac Bible.” But in the standard Syriac text, Mark 16:9-20 is
included.
(5) MacArthur then
says, “When you compare all of these
manuscripts, they’re all saying exactly the same thing.”
But that
is not true. The text in Vaticanus and
Sinaiticus is different from the text of the Vulgate, and it is different from
the text of the Peshitta – and one difference is that the Syriac Peshitta and
the Latin Vulgate include Mark 16:9-20. When
you compare the vast majority of the Greek, Latin, and Syriac manuscripts, they
say the opposite of what MacArthur seems to think they say!
If we’re
going to say, “Let’s accept the text that is supported by all these Greek and Latin and Syriac manuscripts,” we should be
accepting Mark 16:9-20.
(6) John MacArthur tries
to appeal to patristic quotations, claiming that “you can virtually put the
entire New Testament together from the quotes of the fathers and it matches
perfectly all other manuscript sources.”
That
claim is fiction. You can easily
demonstrate that it is fiction by picking up a textual apparatus and looking
through the list of patristic writers who are listed as support for different
rival readings.
But MacArthur
doesn’t let the obviously false nature of his claim slow him down. He keeps going: he says, “There are over 19 thousand
quotations of just the Gospels in their writings, and they read the Gospel text
the very same way you read them in your Bible today.” That is another fictitious
claim. MacArthur seems unaware that what
he calls a “bad ending” is quoted far and wide by patristic writers from the
days of the Roman Empire.
(7) MacArthur
continues to spread falsehoods when he compares the history of the transmission
of the New Testament with the transmission of Homer’s Iliad. He claims that “The
oldest manuscript of the Iliad that we
have is in the thirteenth century A.D.”
That is false. There are dozens
of fragments of the Iliad from way
before the thirteenth century A.D.
Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 560, from the 200s, is just one example. Are the personnel at Grace To You aware that John MacArthur is making these false
claims? Then why has Grace To
You been spreading them for the past 10 years? Do they just not care? It’s been ten years. So much for the pretense that Grace To You believes that truth
matters.
(8) John MacArthur
says we can be confident that our English translations are accurate because “We
have so many accurate, consistent manuscripts.”
But he’s not relying on many Greek manuscripts in this case; he is
relying on three. One is a medieval
commentary-manuscript. The two early
ones are the ones that matter, and one of them has a distinct blank space that includes
a whole column after Mark 16:8, and in the other one, the last page of Mark is written
by a different scribe than the scribe who wrote the surrounding pages.
John
MacArthur is thus rejecting the testimony of 1,653 Greek manuscripts,
including early manuscripts such as Codex A, Codex C, and Codex D, and he is basically depending on two Greek
manuscripts. And, inasmuch as they
disagree with each other at 3,036 places in the Gospels, they can’t both be very “accurate, consistent” copies
of the Gospels.
(9) MacArthur claims
that “Somewhere along the line, they started piling up optional endings.” But in real life, besides verses 9-20, there
was just one other ending after verse 8:
the “Shorter Ending” – and that was in one particular locale: Egypt. It is preserved in eight Greek manuscripts,
and all eight of them also support the usual 12 verses.
Let me
say that again: a total of eight Greek
manuscripts have preserved one rival ending, along with the normal ending. There is also one manuscript, Codex W, which
has extra material between verse 14 and verse 15, but that is an interpolation,
not an ending. The claim that endings “started piling up” is rubbish and nonsense! Anyone who tells you that there were “several
endings” or “various endings” – I’m looking at you, Philip Comfort; I’m looking at you, New Living Translation footnote-maker
– is deceiving his readers.
(10) MacArthur makes
his false fantasy even falser, if it were possible, when he says that “Justin Martyr
and Tatian show knowledge of other endings,” and that “Even Irenaeus shows
knowledge of other endings starting to float around.”
What Justin Martyr and Tatian and Irenaeus show is that they used a
text of Mark that included Mark 16:9-20.
There is no evidence in their writings of any other ending. MacArthur is just making things up! Instead, he should state that Irenaeus' quotation from Mark 16:19 in Against
Heresies, Book 3, chapter 10, around the year 180, (long before Vaticanus
and Sinaiticus were made in the 300s), it means that Irenaeus’ manuscripts of
Mark 16 included verses 9-20.
In conclusion:
I call on John MacArthur to retract the false claims that he has been
spreading for the past ten years. And I
call on Grace To You to stop
circulating the materials that contain and promote those false claims.
Until
this is done, I say to everyone who regards John MacArthur as a reliable source
of information about New Testament manuscripts, and to everyone who thinks of Grace To You as a responsible
organization that would never promote false claims: you have my pity.
