Fact-checking Bart Ehrman's Skepticism Course about the Gospel of Mark

The tradition about the origin of the Gospel of Mark is that Mark composed it in Rome to preserve a record of Peter's remembrances about Jesus.  I see no reason not to subscribe to that.

Bart Ehrman  

Dr. Bart Ehrman has recently focused on this, asking his readers about the Gospel of Mark's author, date, and purpose.  Let's put some of his claims under my analytical magnifying glass.

He called Sinaiticus and Vaticanus "our oldest two manuscripts, assigning them both to "toward the end of the fourth century  (around 375 CE)."  In real life Papyrus 45 is older.  And Vaticanus probably dates from the early 300s, not the later 300s (by which the Eusebian Sections had become very popular among scribes transcribing the Gospels).

He also stated that "they have the shortest titles," but in real life Sinaiticus has the longer form of the subscription to the Gospel of Mark (see picture).

"The titles were added by a later scribe (in a different hand" he state, and this is correct - but "later" in this case may simply be a matter of days; the diorthotes (supervisor/proofreader) acting as scribe as he finished approving the codex book by book via the addition of the closing titles.

Ehrman then claimed "the manuscripts that the authors of both these 4^th century manuscripts used apparently didn’t have titles at all (since they lacked them until the later scribe added them)."  At this point Dr. Ehrman was over-extrapolating and making little sense.   It is simply baseless to look at a systematic approach to adding page-titles and book subscriptions and conclude that it is an echo of exemplars rather than simply show tighter compartamentalization of the labor assigned to the transcription team of scribes. 

Ehrman supposes that it's anyone's guess whether the titles were added a year after 01 and 03 were made, but in real life it would require less than a minute before manuscript-readers of the Gospels in the 300s would encounter no book-titles and no subscriptions before they would demand a refund and/or send it back to the scriptorium to be finished.

For some reason - probably an irrational adherence to skepticism - Ehrman questions the testimony of Papias about Mark's authorship.  First he claims "There’s no way of knowing for certain that he’s talking about our Mark.  I’m not just being overly skeptical here."

Bart Ehrman certainly is being overly skeptical, as usual.  It's not as if there were multiple small books floating around Rome in the late 100s and reporting testimony about Jesus.  Papias' report made sense to subsequent generations.  If Ehrman really considers it "odd" that second-century writers prior to Irenaeus did not make their reports of the origins of the Gospels more explicit I invite him to consider that they were writing for audiences informed by oral tradition, not for atheistic readers 1900 years later.  

Papias wasn't throwing down words from the clear blue sky.  As Eusebius of Caesarea wrote, "he shows by the words which he uses that he received the doctrines of the faith from those who were their friends."  Papias wrote that he "learned carefully from the elders and carefully remembered" what he heard.   

For those new to Papias, I remind everyone what Timothy Mitchell pointed out in 2016, :  Papias perpetuated an older tradition when he wrote "And the elder used to say this: "Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered - though not in  systematic order - about the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him.  But afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teachings as needed but had no intention of giving an ordered account of the Lord's discourses. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong by writing down some things as he remembered them, for he made it his primary concern not to omit anything which he heard, and to avoid making any false statement in them."  This is preserved in Eusebius' Church History Book 3:39.  

(I mention in passing that this does not seem to be how anyone would describe Mark's Gospel without 16:9-20.)

Ehrman wrote, "Earlier authors who appear to quote Mark (e.g., Justin in 150 CE) - "

Allow me to pause and consider Ehrman's needless nebulosity.  Justin Martyr utilized Mark 3:16-17 when he mentioned that Jesus changed the moniker of the sons of Zebedee to Boanerges (in Dialogue with Trypho 106).   

Ehrman claimed that "If we look for any evidence in the Gospel itself that it was written by Mark or from provides Peter’s perspective on Jesus, there’s really nothing there."  He is incorrect again, as a thoughtful reading of Broadus' commentary on the Gospel of Mark demonstrates. [Take ten minutes and use the embedded link to obtain this wonderful resource.]

Ehrman assumed that Peter didn't know what Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane - as if Peter and Jesus could not have discussed the subject when Peter and Jesus were eating during the 40 days following Jesus' resurrection.  That's his atheism talking.

Ehrman correctly observed that "Peter is not portrayed in a positive light in the Gospel: he cannot understand who Jesus is, he puts his foot in his mouth, he denies him three times, and at one point Jesus calls him Satan."  So what?  Peter did not want to brag about himself; he honestly pointed out some of his faults to his Roman audience.  Of course he wanted to point to Jesus and Mark in his Gospel recorded Peter's accounts.  

Ehrman's irrational skepticism is on display when he wrote that Mark "almost certainly could not have written this kind of subtle and elaborate account in Greek" on the grounds that Mark's native tongue was Aramaic.   Dr. Ehrman simply underestimated how thoroughly being raised in a bilingual society - in this case, Judea-Samaria-Galilee - produced a literate mind such as that of Mark.  His incredulosity that Mark produced his Gospel (totaling 52 page if written in a tidy little book today) in the course of his lifetime is hard to understand anything other than a theatrical effect.  

Ehrman claimed that to compose Mark's little Greek book "was highly unusual."  Considering the educational system organized by Queen Salome Alexandra that was already in place when Mark was born this assumption is unwarranted.  The Septuagint was in play.  Many Jews in Roman-occupied Judea were literate in Greek.

When Ehrman asked why the Gospel of Mark was attributed to Mark he seems to overlook the historical reason that the Christians at Rome who knew Peter and Mark were aware that Mark was writing a composition to preserve Peter's recollections about Jesus, and when Mark passed his work along to them it was simply the natural thing to do.  

Like most liberals, Ehrman assigned the Gospel of Mark to "maybe" 70-75.  Being a skeptic who denies the miraculous he seemingly considers certain sayings of Jesus foreseeing the destruction of Jerusalem as if they were concocted after the fact.  A production-date in the mid-60s (not to put too fine a line on it but I suspect 68) seems to me more probable, with earlier stages of the composition being accessible to Christians such as Luke.  (Independent records of early apostolic traditions about Jesus were also circulating as Luke attested in the opening verses of his Gospel).  

Ehrman didn't go far enough when he observed that in the Gospel of Mark "Jesus repeatedly declares he has to die for others and not even his closest intimates can get their minds around it."  Peter and his fellow apostles didn't have an accurate idea of Jesus' mission prior to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ - but afterwards, following the coming of the Holy Spirit, they did.  Their enlightenment didn't start with the composition of Mark's Gospel; Mark's Gospel echoes Peter's education.  Considering that Peter died as a crucified martyr rather than deny Christ, that ought to say something about his integrity and the truthfulness of his testimony about Jesus as written by Mark.

How (And How Not) to Define a Text-type

 In the ninth lecture in my online introduction to New Testament textual criticism, I describe text-types.  There has been a recent wave of resistance in academia to affirm the reality of text-types, on the grounds that only the Byzantine text has an archetype capable of confident reconstruction.  This resistance is due to a failure to acknowledge the proper way to define a text-type.  Instead of profiling entire collections of readings in separate genres of the New Testament (Gospels, Acts, General Epistles, Pauline Epistles, Revelation) , a constellation of 50 or less distinct readings is all that is needed to separate manuscripts into the traditionally recognized text-types (Alexandrian, Byzantine, Western, Caesarean).  

Because of pervasive mixture and each manuscript's scribe's uniqueness, once each text-type's distinct variants - the stars in the constellation, so to speak - are identified, 45 out of 50 variants, rather than 50 out of 50, sufficiently shows the type of text a manuscript contains.

This approach is applicable to the full text across a genre; it does not apply to small fragmentary manuscripts, the classification of which should be made and which should also be considered provisional.   Why provisional?  Because block-mixture is real.  It was once proposed that a small sample is sufficient to show the text-type of a manuscript:  the text-type of the extant sample was extrapolated to apply hypothetically to the non-extant portion.   The logic seemed sound:  if you open a jar and stick a spoon inside and pull it out full of grape jelly, it's reasonable to conclude that the whole jar is full of grape jelly.

But sometimes there's a jar like Smucker's Goober-Grape.  One small spoon is an insufficient basis to ascertain the jar's contents.  Some manuscript are like that.  The textual character of Codex Washingtoniensis, 032, varies widely in different segments of text.  Codex Regius, 019, shifts from being predominantly Byzantine at the beginning of Matthew to being mainly Alexandrian by the end of John.  The large manuscripts that only survive as small fragments might have been like that too.  

When we have the text of a full genre preserved in a manuscript, its text can be validly assigned to a type.  Over a century ago, Edward Ardron Hutton, assisted by F. C. Burkitt,  helpfully wrote An Atlas of Textual Criticism in which he presented (or re-presented) a valid basis for dividing groups of manuscripts' text into families.  Hutton affirmed that "The test of antiquity is decidedly against the Syrian," i.e., against the Byzantine text.  Built into his statement is the assumption that we can identify what the Byzantine text is.

Hutton observed that the same kind of close relationship seen in family 13 (see the diagram here) can exists - at a lesser degree of magnification - between larger groups of manuscripts.  He proceeded to list "Triple readings" - variation-units which are so to speak a three-horse race and the three horses are Byzantine ("S"), Alexandrian ("A"), and Western (W").

The text of a non-fragmentary manuscript can easily be assigned to a text-type, or be recognized as mixed, on the basis of Hutton's Triple Readings.  There is no need to add comets and fireflies to the constellation while the stars are blazing bright.

Meet GA 0206

GA 0206 was found and catalogued by Grenfell and Hunt and was featured in Volume XI of their series  Oxyrhynchus Papyri.  Its text of from First Peter 5 has been assigned to the 300s, and when Don Barker re-read its page-number as 829 instead of 229 (the second digit is basically a toss-up between 10 and 20 (Ι and Κ), it became clear that 0206 is what remains of quite a hefty volume; possibly a pandect like Codex Sinaiticus.  

 
At Wikipedia one can read details about its text.  

 ● 5:8a – 0206 reads ο before διαβολος along with p72 and 33, disagreeing with NA27 and the Byzantine Text.

● 5:8b – after ζητων 0206 lacks τινα, agreeing with Codex Vaticanus, and disagreeing with the Byzantine Text.   NA 27 has τινα in brackets.

 ●5:9b – 0206 lacks τω, agreeing with the Byzantine text and disagreeing with Papyrus 72 and Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  Again the NA27 uselessly resorted to brackets.

 ● 5:9c – 0206 reads επιτελεισθαι (to be experiencing) along with the majority,  disagreeing with Papyrus 72 (επειτελειται) and with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus and  (επιτελεισθε) (you are experiencing).

● 5:10 – 0206 lacks τω agreeing with the Byzantine Text, disagreeing with Papyrus 72 and Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.

 ● 5:10 – 0206 lacks the nomina sacra for “Jesus” agreeing with Vaticanus and Sinaiticus.  NA27 resorts to brackets.

 ● 5:10 – 0206 reads καταρτιει (an orthographic error, probably elicited by the scribe's line of sight drifting ahead in the text of his exemplar.  The word υμας is not included, disagreeing with the Byzantine text.

 ● 5:10 – the final word of the verse θεμελιώσει is absent, a parableptic error elicited by homoeoteleuton.  

 ● 5:11a – 0206 reads αυτω κρατος (to whom [is to be attributed] dominion), agreeing with NA27 and Papyrus 72 02 03, disagreeing with the longer Byzantine reading αυτω η δοξα και το κρατος.   (A liturgical flourish appears to be have been added to the Byzantine text here.)

 ● 5:11b – 0206 reads εις τους αιωνας των αιωνων αμην (to the ages of the ages, Amen), agreeing with the Byzantine text and disagreeing with the more economical Papyrus 72 and Vaticanus and NA27 (εις τους αιωνας αμην) (to the ages Amen).  Simple parablepsis accounts for the shorter reading.

 ● 5:12 – 0206 lacks the του after χαριν, agreeing with Papyrus and disagreeing with the Byzantine text and NA27.

Not only does this fragment excavated in Egypt show that Byzantine readings were floating around in Egypt in the 300s in a large multi-book manuscript, but this analysis shows that the editors of NA27 were, in this particular passage. seem to have been timidly averse to doing their job.

Hand to Hand Combat in the Love Chapter

First Corinthians 13:1-5 is the arena for today's combat.  In the Evangelical Heritage Version this passage runs as follows:  "If I speak in the tongues[a] of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and know all the mysteries and have all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away everything I own, and if I give up my body that I may be burned[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.  Love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not brag. It is not arrogant.  It does not behave indecently. It is not selfish. It is not irritable. It does not keep a record of wrongs."

Our combatants are a lectionary from the 1300s - GA l2466 - and Papyrus 46, which despite some evangelicals' desire to give it a dating earlier than it really merits I assign to the first half of the 200s.   The text of First Corinthians 13:1-5 in lectionary 2466 is almost perfectly Byzantine, agreeing with either the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform or the Hodges-Farstad Majority Text throughout, except for the omicron in καυθήσομαι.

Using the UBS4 compilation as the standard of comparison here are l2466's deviations:

1 - no variants

2 - μεθιστάνειν – UBS 4 has μεθιστάναι (+2, -1)

3 - καὶ ἐὰν – UBS4 has καν (+3)

3 – καυθήσομαι – UBS4 has καυχησωμαι (+2 , -2)

4 - η αγαπη – UBS4 has ἡ αγάπη in brackets [inasmuch as brackets were not in the autograph this variant is not counted]

5 - no variants


With 7 letters' worth of addition and 4 letters' worth of omissions l2466 has a total of 11 letters' worth of corruption in First Corinthians 13:1-5.

Let's compare the text of Papyrus 46.  It is lacunose in verse 1, as can be seen in the picture.

1 – ει τι (after και) – (+1)

1 – υμειν (instead of υμιν) – (+1)

2 – καν (instead of και εαν) – (-3)

2 – καν (instead of και εαν) – (-3)

3 – και (instead of και εαν) – (-2)

3 – ουθεν (instead of ουδεν) – (+1, -1)

4 – η αγαπη after περπερεύεται - (+6) [inasmuch as brackets were not in the autograph this variant is not counted]

5 – ευσχμονει (instead of ασχημονει) – (+2, -1)

5 – το (instead of τα) – (+1, -1)

Thus, ignoring the non-decision of the UBS editorial team in v. 4, the text of P46 has 6 letters’ worth of additions and 11 letters’ worth of omission, for a total of 17 letters’ worth of corruption.


The victor:  l2466.

How did a lectionary from the 1300s manage to preserve a more accurate text of First Corinthians 13:1-5 than a papyrus from the 200s?  The impact of proof-reading in the Byzantine transmission-line, and the lack of consistent careful proof-reading in the early Alexandrian transmission-line, cannot be underestimated.

This post was created at the request of Larry Thompson Jr.

James White: Will He Fix His Errors in 2025?

In a video years ago, Dr. James White asked some questions about Mark 16:9-20.  In 2019 I posted some answers. Let's review.

(1)  How do you define overwhelming evidence?

Something like this: 
99.9% of the extant Greek manuscripts of Mark 16.  The score is something like 1,650 to 3.

99.9% of the extant Latin manuscripts of Mark 16. The score is something like 8,000 to 1 (and the one, Codex Bobbiensis, is the worst-copied Latin manuscript of Mark in existence).

99% of the extant Syriac manuscripts of Mark 16.  The score is at least 100 to 1. 

100% of the extant Gothic manuscripts of Mark 16.  The score is 1 to 0.

At least 80% of the extant Sahidic manuscripts of Mark 16.  The score is at least 5 to 1.

100% of the extant Bohairic manuscripts of Mark 16.  

100% of the Ethiopic manuscripts of Mark 16.  The score is about 200 to 0.   

100% of the extant Greek lectionaries with the Heothina series. 

(The ratios regarding Syriac and Sahidic manuscripts should be increased; I used low amounts here.  The one Syriac manuscript that ends the text of Mark at 16:8 is the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript; the one Sahidic manuscript that ends the text of Mark at 16:8 is Codex P. Palau-Ribes Inv. Nr. 182.) 

(2)  How could Eusebius and Jerome have said what they said?

            For some preliminary data about the testimony of Eusebius and Jerome regarding the ending of Mark, see section #2 of the 2016 post, Mark 16:9-20:  Sorting Out Some Common Mistakes.  As David Parker has acknowledged, Jerome simply recycled material from Eusebius to save time when facing a broad question about reconciling the Gospel-accounts.  (Additional details are in Authentic:  The Case for Mark 16:9-20 (Now in its fourth edition).
            Eusebius worked at Caesarea in the early 300s, and part of the library there had been passed along from Origen in the 200s.  Origen had previously worked in Egypt, and it can be safely deduced that some copies of Mark in Egypt in the 200s ended their text at 16:8.  Eusebius’ comments reflect his awareness of such copies, or of copies at Caesarea descended from such copies. 

            In his composition Ad Marinum, however, Eusebius did not reject Mark 16:9-20.  He addressed Marinus’ question of how a person can harmonize Matthew 28:1-2 with Mark 16:9, regarding the question of the timing of Jesus’ resurrection.  Eusebius said that there are two ways to resolve the question:   one way might be to reject Mark 16:9, and everything that follows it, on the grounds that the passage is not in every manuscript, or is in some copies but not in others, or that it is seldom found.  But that is not the option that Eusebius recommends.  Instead, he advises Marinus to retain the text he has, and to resolve the question by understanding that there is a pause, or comma, in Mark 16:9, so that “early on the first day of the week” refers to the time of Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene, rather than to the time He arose.    

              The Greek text of Eusebius’ composition can be read in Roger Pearse’s free book, Eusebius of Caesarea: Gospel Problems and Solutions, with an English translation.  The things to see are that (a) Eusebius framed the claim that one could reject Mark 16:9-20 on the grounds that it is not in most manuscripts as something that could be said, not as his own favored option, even though there were manuscripts at Caesarea (descended from manuscripts from Egypt) which ended at 16:8, and (b) Eusebius recommended to Marinus that Mark 16:9-20 should be retained, and (c) he used Mark 16:9 on two other occasions in the same composition, and (d) Eusebius showed no awareness of the Shorter Ending.

            (It is extremely likely that Eusebius of Caesarea rejected Mark 16:9-20 when he developed his Canon-Tables, but that is a separate subject from his statements in Ad Marinum.)  

(3) Why do you have early fourth-century codices that do not contain this text?

            We have two fourth-century Greek codices in which Mark stops at 16:8 because those two fourth-century codices were based on manuscripts from, or descended from, Egypt, where Mark 16:9-20 had been lost or taken from the text in a previous generation. 
            Unusual features in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus show that their copyists were aware of the absent verses; for details see this post about Codex Vaticanus and this post about Codex Sinaiticus.  I show, among other things, that Codex Vaticanus has a blank space after Mark 16:8 that is capable of containing Mark 16:9-20, and that the page on which the text of Mark ends at 16:8 in Sinaiticus is part of a cancel-sheet, that is, four pages that replaced the work of the main copyist.  

(4)  Why do other early fathers never mention material from that passage?  

            Who is Dr. White talking about?  Clement and Origen?  Clement never quoted from 12 entire chapters of Mark.  Saying that Clement never mentioned material from Mark 16:9-20 is like saying, “Clement used Mark 16:9-20 as much as he used 90% of the book.”

            Origen might allude to Mark 16:17-20 in the reworked composition Philocalia, but even if one is not persuaded that he did so, Origen didn’t use the Gospel of Mark very much; there are very large segments of Mark that Origen never quoted.  Here is one way of picturing the situation:  if you divide the text of Mark into fifty-six 12-verse segments, Origen only quotes from 22 of them.  Even if we were to arbitrary increase that amount, and say that Origen used half of the 12-verse segments in Mark, the point would stand that we should approach the data from Origen with the understanding that the chance of Origen quoting from any 12-verse segment of the Gospel of Mark is 50%. 

            Origen did not use 54 consecutive verses from Mark 1:36 to 3:16.  Origen did not use 41 consecutive verses of Mark from 5:2 to 5:43.  Origen did not use 22 consecutive verses from 8:7 to 8:29, and Origen did not use 39 consecutive verses from 10:3 to 10:42. 

            So when he does not quote from 12 verses in Mark 16:9-20, is that supposed to suggest that the passage wasn’t in his manuscripts?  Seriously?  Too many apologists have read “Clement and Origen show no knowledge of these verses” in Metzger’s Textual Commentary, and thought, “Well, that sounds important,” and rephrased Metzger’s claim without ever investigating whether it’s solid evidence, or propaganda.  Well, folks, it is empty propaganda.  Origen shows no knowledge of 450 verses of Mark.  The claim that Origen does not use Mark 16:9-20 – if he wasn’t doing so in Philocalia – has no real force as an argument against the passage, and commentators who use it as if it does deserve to be ignored.

            While we are on the subject of patristic evidence:  when someone claims that early church fathers never use the contents of Mark 16:9-20, that person shows that he is not qualified to give an informed opinion on the subject.  Lots of patristic writers mention material from Mark 16:9-20.  

            In the 100s, Justin Martyr alluded to Mark 16:20.  Tatian incorporated almost the whole passage in his Diatessaron.  And Irenaeus, in what is now France, specifically quoted Mark 16:19, in his work Against Heresies, in Book Three.  In the 200s, passages from Mark 16:9-20 are used in Syriac in the Didascalia Apostolorum, and in a Latin statement by Vincent of Thibaris at a council in Carthage, and in the Latin composition De Rebaptismate, in the 250’s.            

            In the late 200s or early 300s, the pagan writer Hierocles, in the area that is now Turkey, used Mark 16:18 in the course of mockingly challenging Christians to select their leaders by poison-drinking contests.  Also in the 300s, the Latin writer Fortunatianus mentioned that Mark told about the ascension of Christ.  In the same century, the unknown author of the Acts of Pilate used Mark 16:15-16, and so did the author of the Syriac text of The Story of John the Son of Zebedee.    Meanwhile, Aphrahat the Persian Sage utilized Mark 16:17 in his composition First Demonstration, in 337.  Elsewhere, Wulfilas included Mark 16:9-20 in the Gothic version in the mid-300s.  In Syria in the late 300s or early 400s, the translators of the Syriac Peshitta included Mark 16:9-20.  Meanwhile in Milan, Ambrose quoted from Mark 16:9-20 in the 380s. 

            In 383, Jerome made the Vulgate, stating specifically that he had consulted ancient Greek manuscripts for the purpose, and he included Mark 16:9-20.  A little later on, in the early 400s, Jerome made a reference to the interpolation known as the Freer Logion, and said that he had seen it “especially in Greek codices.”  Metzger proposes that the Freer Logion itself was composed and inserted into the text between Mark 16:14 and 16:15 sometime in the second or third century.   

            In the 400s, Patrick quoted from Mark 16:16 in Ireland; Augustine quoted from Mark 16:9-20 in North Africa – and he casually mentioned that his Greek copies affirmed a reading in verse 12 – and Macarius Magnes used it in Asia Minor, and Marcus Eremita used it in Israel, and Eznik of Golb quotes verses 17 and 18 way over in Armenia, and five forms of the Old Latin chapter-summaries, displayed for instance in Codex Corbeiensis, refer to the contents of Mark 16:9-20. 

            How many names of patristic writers who utilized Mark 16:9-20 are found in The King James Only Controversy in the section where James White focuses on external evidence about this passage?    Is Justin mentioned?  No.  Tatian?  No.  White mentioned two Georgian copies made after the time of Charlemagne, but did he mention Irenaeus?  No.  He mentioned the Slavonic version from the ninth century, because he thought it supports non-inclusion (it actually supports inclusion), but did he mention the Gothic version from the fourth century?  No.  Why not?

            James White didn’t mention the evidence from Justin, and Tatian, and Vincent of Thibaris, and Hierocles, and Fortunatianus, and Wulfilas.  But why should his readers feel as if they have been misled?

            James White didn’t mention Acts of Pilate, and the repeated quotations of Mark 16:9-20 by Ambrose in Italy, or by Augustine in North Africa. He didn’t mention that Augustine’s Greek manuscripts had Mark 16:9-20.  But why should his readers feel misled?    

            James White didn’t mention Patrick’s use of Mark 16:15-16 in Ireland, or Macarius Magnes’ extensive use of the passage in Asia Minor, or the use of Mark 16:18 by Marcus Eremita in Israel – but he did not lie to anyone.  Maybe his readers just misunderstood what they were being told.  

            White didn’t mention that Pelagius, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Peter Chrysologus used Mark 16:9-20.  But his readers have not been lied to.   

            James White did not mention a single one of these Roman-era witnesses that support Mark 16:9-20.  He did not mention that Irenaeus, c. 180, had a manuscript that contained Mark 16:9-20, over a century before Vaticanus was made. But why should anyone feel misled by White’s selectivity in choosing what evidence to share, and what to hide?      

(5)  Why the differing endings if the one is original?

            The question is, in part, a request for a hypothesis, so I shall offer one:  in the first century, after the Gospel of Mark began to be disseminated from the city of Rome (with 16:9-20 included), a copy reached Egypt.  At this point, the last twelve verses were lost; a simple accident is possible, but I think they were removed or obelized (and then later removed) deliberately by someone who recognized them as resembling a short composition which Mark had written on another occasion as a freestanding text, summarizing Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances.  This individual regarded Peter as the primary author of the Gospel of Mark; Mark being merely a recorder and organizer of Petrine material.  He therefore obelized verses 9-20 as something that was not the work of the primary author, and in the next generation, the obelized portion was not perpetuated.   

            Of course we do not have this on video – just as we do not have any of the dozens of scribal corruptions that James White proposes in his book on video.  And this hypothesis can be tweaked without essential change; for example, it is possible that verses 9-20 were removed in a single step.  But this or something like this accounts for the absence of Mark 16:9-20 in Egypt, while the Gospel of Mark spread with 16:9-20 included everywhere else, as the patristic evidence shows – that is, as the patristic evidence would show, if the patristic writers had not been tied up and gagged, and thrown in a pit where they cannot be heard.

            In a later generation, in Egypt, the Shorter Ending was created by someone who could not stand the abruptness of the text in its truncated form (ending at the end of 16:8).  There are eight Greek manuscripts that have the Shorter Ending; some of them are damaged, but all eight also have verse 9, which implies that all eight also had verses 9-20 when the manuscripts were in pristine condition. 

            Did James White tell you about the notes that appear in some of those manuscripts?  No?  Maybe that has something to do with why he is asking this question.  Let’s take a few minutes to zoom in on those notes.  Without getting bogged down in details, the thing to see is that most of these six manuscripts are related to the same narrow Egyptian transmission-stream.  Here are the basic details:

            In Codex L, a note appears before the Short Ending:  “In some, there is also this.”  And between the Shorter Ending and 16:9, a note says, “There is also this, appearing after ‘for they were afraid.”  It may be safely deduced from these notes that the person who wrote these notes knew of some copies with the Shorter Ending after verse 8, and some copies with verses 9-20 after verse 8.

            In Codex Ψ, the six lines that follow the line on which Mark 16:8 ends contain the Short Ending, and then there is a note:  “This also appears, following ‘for they were afraid.’”  The wording of the note is not quite identical to the note in L, but it is very close. 

            083 is a damaged fragment, but enough has survived to show that 083 has the closing-title “Gospel According to Mark” after 16:8, and then has the Shorter Ending in the next column, and before 16:9, the note, “There is also this, appearing after ‘for they were afraid,’” exactly as in Codex L. 

            099, which is even more fragmentary than 083, has a feature which creates a link to a locale in Egypt.  16:8 is followed by a gap, which is followed by the Shorter Ending, which is followed by another gap.  Then, instead of the beginning of 16:9, the contents of 16:8b are repeated (beginning with ειχεν γαρ αυτας τρομος ) and after 16:8 is completed, 16:9 begins.

            Why does this link these manuscripts to Egypt?  Because of the Greek-Sahidic lectionary 1602 – which James White mislabeled “l, 1602” in the second edition of his book, just as he mislabeled lectionary 153 as “l, 153” on the previous page.  In l 1602, a note appears between 16:8 and the Shorter Ending:  “In other copies this is not written.”  Then, after the Shorter Ending, there is the same note that appears in Codex L.  After the note, instead of beginning 16:9, the text resumes in 16:8b (at ειχεν γαρ, as in 099), which is followed by 16:9ff. 

            To review:  L and Ψ and 083 and  l 1602 have the note “There is also this, appearing after ‘for they were afraid,’” before 16:9.  099 and l 1602 both repeat the text of 16:8b before 16:9.  Thus, all five of these witnesses are traced to the same narrow transmission-stream, where Sahidic was read (i.e., in Egypt).     

 

            That leaves two Greek manuscripts with the Shorter Ending:  579 and 274.  579 (from the 1200s) does not share any of the notes that L, Ψ, 099 and 083 have, but it shares (approximately) the rare chapter-divisions that are displayed in Codex Vaticanus, the flagship manuscript of the Alexandrian Text.  It also shares many readings with Vaticanus, such as the non-inclusion of Luke 22:43-44 and Luke 23:34a.

            That leaves 274.  In the main text of 274 (from the 900s), 16:9 begins on the same line on which 16:8 ends (the verses are separated by an abbreviated lectionary-related note, “End of the second Heothina-reading”).  The Shorter Ending has been added in the lower margin of the page, to the right of a column of five asterisks; another asterisk appears to the left of 16:9 so as to indicate where the Shorter Ending was seen in another manuscript.    The Shorter Ending in 274 is more like an incidental margin-note, mentioning an interesting feature in some secondary exemplar, than part of the manuscript’s text copied from the main exemplar.

           

            The takeaway from this is that the Greek witnesses for the Shorter Ending echo situations in one particular locale, namely Egypt, where Mark 16:9-20 was first lost (or excised), and the Shorter Ending was then created to relieve the resultant abrupt stop of the narrative, and then copies appeared in which 16:9-20 followed 16:8.  Copyists in Egypt, facing some exemplars with no text after 16:8, and some exemplars with the Shorter Ending after 16:8, and some exemplars with verses 9-20 after 16:8, resolved the situation by including both endings.  Meanwhile, everywhere else – from Ireland to France to Rome to North Africa to the coast of Italy to Asia Minor to Palestine to Cyprus to Israel to parts of Egypt to Syria to Armenia – copies of Mark were being used in which 16:8 was followed unremarkably by 16:9-20.          

            The Sahidic, Bohairic, and Ethiopic versions, like almost all versions, echoed the Greek manuscripts accessible to their translators:  the earliest strata of the Sahidic version echoes a situation in Egypt when and where the text of Mark ended at 16:8; the versions with the double-ending (always with the Shorter Ending first, when it appears in the text – for it would be superfluous after 16:20) echo later situations.  (Notably, the Garima Gospels, the oldest Ethiopic Gospels-manuscript, does not have the Shorter Ending after 16:8; it has 16:9-20.)

                       

            It is now 2025.   I call upon James White yet again to face me in a cordial debate and defend his claims.  Anywhere, any place, any time.

Readers are invited to double-check the data in this post.

Spotlight on John 11 (Again) - BAR's Alliance With Silliness

            Since the editors of Biblical Archeological Review have decided to spread Elizabeth Schrader's (now Schrader Polczer, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Villanova University) wild ideas about the text of John 11 (already debunked in 2019) in the article The Mystery of Mary and Martha, I decided to revisit the subject today.  The idea that the original text of John 11 is no longer extant is simply ridiculous.  Even a novice textual critic should be intelligent enough to realize that that what she claimed to be a demonstration that "one in five Greek witnesses and one in three Old Latin manuscripts display some sort of inconsistency" pertaining to Martha are not meaningful inconsistencies at all, but merely a collection of ordinary and unremarkable scribal errors. 

          Papyrus 66 (shown here) was corrected to amend the scribe's initial error (repeating Mary's name twice) and the reason why Schrader noted that "perhaps this was just a mistake" is because it WAS a mistake; the fact that other scribes of other manuscripts made other mistakes will not make it anything else.  Having noticed a parableptic error in Codex Alexandrinus, the sensible thing to do would be to acknowledge it for what it is and move on undisturbed.  Every scribe, generally speaking, makes such errors if they write enough.  Nevertheless Schrader chose to consider Codex A's scribe (or the scribe of its ancestor) "apparently uncertain" about whether one or two women were present in John's narrative in 11:1 - as if scribes in the early fifth century, after the story had circulated in churches for over 300 years, would be clueless on the subject.

            Nobody should imagine that the scribe of Alexandrinus or the scribe of any of its its ancestors harbored the doubts that Schrader has attributed to him (or her).  What Schrader was looking at had already been analyzed correctly by B. H. Cowper in 1840.  In most copies of the Gospel of John the text of 11:1 is Ἦν δέ τις ἀσθενῶν Λάζαρος ἀπὸ Βηθανίας, ἐκ τῆς κώμης Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας τῆς ἀδελφῆς αὐτῆς – “Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.”  In 02, though, besides shifting from αυτης to αυτου (and thus causing the text to refer to “his sister Martha”), the copyist skipped the two words καὶ Μάρθας.  Perceiving that this could be salvaged, the scribe erased the word κώμης and rewrote it in small letters at the end of the previous line.  Following that, the scribe filled in the newly blank space was filled with the words Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας. 

There is nothing here that even remotely suggests an agenda in the early church to diminish the influence of Mary by adding an extra character (Martha) to John's narrative, and the editors of BAR only make themselves look like fools publishing this sort of sensationalized nonsense to sell more copies.  You just need to realize that a scholar who has testified that Mary Magdalene spoke to her – in other words, that she somehow engaged in necromancy – might not be the best source for serious analysis of the text.

            BAR personnel Nathan Steinmeyer and C. Moyer are invited to pay attention.