Mark 5:21 - "In the Boat" - When Trusting the Science and Trusting the Church are Different Things

             Relying on the most up-to-date scholarship can have its drawbacks.  Case in point:  the scholarship that questioned the authenticity of the words “in the boat” in Mark 5:21.  Once, the words were universally accepted as part of the original text – affirmed in the Vulgate (Latin), the  Peshitta (Syriac) and in the Byzantine and Alexandrian transmission-lines of the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark.  

            By 1970, though, according to Bruce Metzger (in Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament) “a minority of the Committee regarded the phrase ἐν τῷ πλοιῳ [in the boat] as an early scribal insertion,” and so the decision to include the words was ranked as a “D” – meaning that “there is a very high degree of doubt concerning the reading selected for the text.”  The words were absent from UBS2 and were bracketed in UBS4 and NA27.  Translators using the most up-to-date authority in 1966 (UBS1) or 1968 (UBS2) would have omitted these words, and with a “B” difficulty-rating in the apparatus at the time, they would not have considered it controversial to do so.

            Do you remember the TEV, Today’s English Version, popularly issued as Good News for Modern Man?  It was a paraphrastic version made by Robert G. Bratcher (1920-2010) with line illustrations by Annie Vallotton published by the American Bible Society.   Bratcher is still remembered for his vigorous and vocal rejection of the doctrine of inerrancy.  In 2026, his version of the New Testament is still included in the list of English versions on Bible Gateway.  In Mark 5:21 it reads “Jesus went back across to the other side of the lake. There at the lakeside a large crowd gathered around him.”  It’s missing these words in Mark 5:21 that are in major English versions such as the KJV, NKJV, ESV, NIV, NLT, NRSV, WEB, EHV, etc.

            Bratcher probably thought in 1966 that he was safely following the science.  Advocates of the Byzantine Text, the Textus Receptus, and other more stable editions of the New Testament immune to the filter of the scholarly minds on the UBS compilation committee can only say in retrospect, “Told you so.”  Compilers and translators must be weighed, not counted.