Mary, Martha, and John 11

            Back in 2016, an interesting text-critical thesis was proposed in Harvard Theological Review:   unusual readings in Papyrus 66, considered alongside textual variants in many other manuscripts, indicate that the character of Martha did not originally appear in the Gospel of John; she was inserted by a later writer who understood Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene to be the same person, and who wished to diminish the role of Mary Magdalene.

            Lately this theory has been getting some attention;  in 2018, Candida Moss (of Notre Dame University) concluded an article about it by stating, “for the first time there is a plausible scholarly argument for the idea that Mary Magdalene was written out of the Bible and the history books.”  And in July of 2019, Elizabeth Schrader, the thesis-writer, made an appearance at the Religion for Breakfast video-show, promoting the theory.

            Is Schrader’s main idea plausible, or has she misread the evidence?  She has misread the evidence, mainly by consistently misinterpreting scribal errors as if they have implications that they simply do not have.  This may be concisely demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt by undertaking the challenge that Schrader issued near the end of her Religion for Breakfast interview:  to demonstrate that Martha is not an addition to the Gospel of John, one needs to do the following:
            ● explain the unusual readings in P66.

            ● explain why the names are always changing in John 11:5. 

            ● explain why there’s only one sister in so much early artwork.

            ● explain why there is not similar confusion involving the names of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42.

            ● explain the reading of Codex Alexandrinus in John 11:1, where the name Mary is changed to Martha, and the verse ends by referring to his sister rather than her sister.

Let’s begin.

● THE UNUSUAL READINGS IN JOHN 11:1-3 IN PAPYRUS 66

            The copyist who transcribed the text of P66 was not particularly competent.  Occasionally, he got ahead of himself and over-anticipated the text he was copying, somewhat it the same way that a typist, upon encountering the phrase “The quick brown fox jumped” at the end of a page, might continue to type “over the lazy dogs,” without bothering to turn the page – only to find a different phrase after the page is turned. 

            In John 11:1, the copyist of P66 initially wrote the Greek equivalent of “Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and Mary her sister.”  Then, realizing that he had written “Mary” twice,” he went back and corrected the text by erasing the letter iota in the second Μαριας and replacing it with the letter theta, so as to write Μαρθας.  This kind of mistake is not particularly unusual for this copyist; he made at least 15 other mistakes of dittography (writing twice what should be written once) in the text of John.  

            Apart from this careless one-letter mistake, the copyist of P66 initially wrote a normal text of John 11:1, identical to what is found in the Textus Receptus.  In verse 3, we find a reading in which, according to Schrader, “one named woman has been split into two unnamed women.”  After writing the Greek equivalent of “Sent, therefore,” (απεστιλεν ουν) the copyist initially wrote a name – either Μαριας  or Μαρθας – and continued on a little further, to the end of the line he was writing:  προς αυτον λεγουσα, that is, “to Him, saying.”  (Probably he also started the verse with και (and) and then declined to keep the word, but this does not figure into the subject at hand.)  At this point, the copyist of P66 realized that he had over-anticipated the text in his exemplar (perhaps when he finished writing λεγουσα, consulted his exemplar, and saw that it read λεγουσαι), went back, adjusted the endings of the verbs so to as to turn them into plurals (απεστιλαν and λεγουσαι), erased the name (which is why we’re not sure whether it was Μαριας  or Μαρθας , but I suspect it was Μαριας), and in the space where the name had been, wrote αι αδελφαι, that is, “the sisters.” 

            It could be said that one woman has been replaced with a reference to two woman – but to what extent is this saying anything more than that the copyist of P66 began verse 3 by assuming that it was about one woman, and then corrected his mistake?  If the presence of αι αδελφαι was the special property of an interpolated manuscript in the hands of the copyist of P66, then it certainly was well-travelled:  αι αδελφαι is the reading here in John 11:3 in Codex Vaticanus, and in Codex Sinaiticus; αι αδελφαι is the reading in Papyrus 45, and in Papyrus 75.  Likewise Origen, in his Commentary on John, VI:40, in the course of discussing a textual variant in John 1:28, mentions that John says that Bethany was the town of Lazarus, and of Martha and Mary.  If one consults Schrader’s data-tables in which the contents of many manuscripts are compared, it appears that αι αδελφαι is supported in every extant Greek manuscript in the list in which verse 3 appears – except P66, in which the copyist almost immediately fixed his mistake. 

            Schrader seems to consider problematic the inclusion of αυτης (her sister) at the end of John 11:1, arguing that the original text was αυτου.  However, by asserting that αυτου is the original reading, Schrader is arguing for a reading that originated as an expression of a tendency among some copyists (especially in Old Latin texts) to adjust the text in favor of the dominance of men – that is, in Codex A (from the 400s), 841 (from the 1400s), 1009 (from the 1200s), 1071 (from the 1100s), and in two medieval lectionaries, we see the effect of a scribal preference to refer to “his sister” instead of “her sister.”  In such a smattering of witnesses, the reading αυτου simply pops up; meanwhile in P66, P75, B, ℵ, K, L, M, S, W, Y, Δ, Θ, Π, 047, and so on, αυτης has ancient, abundant, and coherent support.

            To put it another way:  there is no genealogical connection between Codex A and the medieval minuscules 423, 841, 1009, 1071, and two lectionaries; the reading αυτου at the end of John 11:1 appears in these manuscripts not as something with ancient roots, but as something more like a weed that has sprouted from the minds of what a few copyists thought the text should say.              

           

            Before moving on to the next point, I should address a reading in the important medieval minuscule 157:  In John 11:1, the words και Μαρθας are absent.  Is this evidence that minuscule 157 echoes some ancient exemplar in which Martha did not appear in the narrative?  No; what has happened is that the preceding word Μαριας appears at the end of a line; the copyist lost his line of sight as he began the next line, shifting forward to the letters at the end of και Μαρθας.  Thus he accidentally skipped those two words – but their presence in his exemplar is obvious from the words that he wrote next:  της αδελφης αυτης (that is, her sister).  Schrader observes that 157 thus “nonsensically” applies a feminine pronoun to Lazarus, but it seems not to have registered that the obvious explanation of this nonsense-reading is that a simple scribal mistake has been made, rather than that a lost Martha-less form of John 11 is being attested.

● THE DIFFERENT ORDERS OF NAMES IN JOHN 11:5

            The text of John 11:5 in most Greek manuscripts says, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.”  Whether one consults the UBS compilation or the Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, or Michael Holmes’ SBL-GNT, or even the Textus Receptus, they all agree:  ἠγάπα δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς τὴν Μάρθαν καὶ τὴν ἀδελφὴν αὐτῆς καὶ τὸν Λάζαρον.  The text of P66 is identical with the exception that Jesus’ name is contracted (as is typical in Greek manuscripts) and the word αὐτῆς is not in the text; however it is supplied in the margin.   

            An assortment of other manuscripts disagree, primarily because of two scribal tendencies:  (1)  the tendency to supply names, so as to make the text more explicit, and
(2)  the tendency to put Mary’s name first, so as to correspond to the order of names given when the characters are introduced in John 11:1.

            Under the influence of those two natural tendencies, some copyists rewrote the verse to say, “Now Jesus loved Mary and her sister Martha, and Lazarus.”  This may be considered the Caesarean form of the verse, attested in a special cluster of manuscripts (consisting mainly of Θ, f¹, f¹³, 543, 565, 828, and others), the members of which share other textual features, such as unusual placements of the pericope adulterae (John 7:53-8:11).  

            A few other manuscripts list Martha first, but add Mary’s name, so as to say, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister Mary, and Lazarus.”  Schrader lists two medieval manuscripts – 2561 and 2680 – which support the form, “Now Jesus loved Mary and her sister and Lazarus,” thus putting Mary’s name in the place formerly occupied by Martha’s name.  

            What is not seen in any of these Greek manuscripts is a form of the text in which Martha is entirely absent.  Even in the few relatively late manuscripts in which her name does not appear in 11:5, she is referred to as Mary’s sister.  When the rival readings are analyzed, from the more explicit to the less specific, and from those harmonized to 11:1 to those less harmonized, the anomalies are easily sorted out and the usual, ordinary text is confirmed, and the flow from more specific to less specific, and from more harmonized to less harmonized, is generally matched by the flow from the  younger to the older witnesses.  In other words, the consistent picture shown by Greek manuscripts in John 11:5 is that the insertion of Mary’s name, and the transposition of Mary’s name to the front of the list, and the loss of Martha’s name, are late scribal adjustments, not echoes of an ancient exemplar.

            Furthermore, it is not accurate to say that the names in John 11:5 are “always changing.”  The verse is altered in the Caesarean Text, i.e., in select members of f¹ and  f¹³.  But in most manuscripts (including P45, P75, ℵ, B, A, K, L, W) it is stable.  In all Greek manuscripts of John 11:5, the verse conveys that Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus, whether the names of all three individuals are supplied in this verse or not.

● THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ARTWORK

            In Schrader’s thesis, there is very little emphasis on artwork; her appeal to artwork in the Religion for Breakfast interview may be something that was just thrown in.  Nevertheless, it may be briefly considered:  artwork is art, and the degree of detail provided in a work of art is subject to the whims, abilities, and resources of the artist.  Artists have creative freedom which copyists do not.  A depiction of the resurrection of Lazarus in the Catacomb of the Giordani shows only Jesus and Lazarus.  Similarly in a mosaic on the wall of the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, made around 530, a scene depicts the raising of Lazarus without any females present.  Likewise the Murano Diptych, from the 400s-500s, depicts Jesus and Lazarus, but no women.  And at the Museo Pio-Cristiano at the Vatican, a scene on a sarcophagus-lid from the cemetery of Saint Agnes depicts the resurrection of Lazarus, but without anyone except Jesus and Lazarus. 

               Should we therefore assume that the artists of these four early works of art knew a form of John 11 in which Mary and Martha (and the crowd of mourners accompanying them) do not appear?  (Meanwhile The Jonah Sarcophagus depicts two women present at the raising of Lazarus.)  I think the point is already clear:  it would be absurd to treat ancient artwork as a means to answer the question at hand.

● THE STABILITY OF NAMES IN LUKE 10:38-42

            Why, we are invited to ask, is there instability involving the names of Mary and Martha in John 11:1-12:2, but not in Luke 10:38-42, where the same two characters are depicted?  There are two very simple reasons why this is the case.  First, Luke 10:38-42 constitutes only five verses, in which Mary’s name appears twice and Martha’s name appears four times, and the two names never appear side-by-side; in contrast, John 11:1-12:2 constitutes 59 verses – or 46, if we exclude John 11:47-57, which is really a different scene – in which Mary’s name appears eight times and Martha’s name appears eight times, and both names appear in the same sentence twice (in v. 1 and v. 19).  The passage in Luke is one-eighth the length of the passage in John, and it provides very little opportunity to get the sisters’ names mixed up.

            The second reason is that while in John, each sister is described as a sister of Lazarus, and both sisters undertake similar actions (both say the same thing to Jesus, in John 11:21 and 11:32), in Luke their actions and attitudes form a stark contrast; Martha is busy, while Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet.  It is impossible not to see this contrast in the episode in Luke; it forms the foundation of the lesson that is intended to be conveyed.  Meanwhile, in John, the two sisters are described similarly, and say similar things.  There is a stark contrast between them in Luke which precludes confusion of the two individuals, whereas in John there is not.  

A hypothetical reconstruction
of the uncorrected text of John 11:1
in Codex A.  The manuscript is online.

● THE TEXT OF JOHN 11:1 IN CODEX ALEXANDRINUS

            In Codex Alexandrinus, the text that stands in the manuscript now says, “Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and Martha his sister,” differing from the usual text only by the presence of “his” (αυτου) instead of “her” (αυτης), a difference addressed already.  When the copyist initially wrote out this verse, however, he made another, more significant mistake (which was detected by the researcher Cowper in 1840). 

            Normally, the text of John 11:1 goes, 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.”  But besides shifting from αυτης to αυτου (and thus causing the text to refer to “his sister Martha”), the copyist of Codex A made a parableptic error, skipping from the letters –as at the end of Μαρίας to the same letters at the end of καὶ Μάρθας, thus skipping the two words καὶ Μάρθας.  A clever correction was made:  the word κώμης was erased, and then written in small letters at the end of the previous line, and the newly blank space was filled with the words Μαρίας καὶ Μάρθας. 

            That’s all there is to that scribal mistake and correction.  The other mistake in John 11:1 in Codex A – αυτου instead of αὐτῆς – was addressed in the first point.

            Although Schrader’s five-part challenge has been answered, there are two additional components of her thesis that I will address here. 

● IS “ΑΥΤΗ” IN JOHN 11:4 A DATIVE FEMININE SINGULAR?

            This point is slightly technical:  should the word αυτη in 11:4 be understood as if it was meant to signify the person Jesus was addressing – causing the sentence to begin, “Upon hearing that, Jesus said to her” – or should it be understood (as most English translations render it) instead as a nominative term, causing the sentence to begin, “Upon hearing that, Jesus said, “This,” and so forth.   The copyist of P66 put a comma-like mark before αυτη, as if he perceived that the text could initially seem ambiguous without it, and wished to ensure that readers would understand the αυτη to mean “This” instead of “to her.”

            And the copyist of P66 wasn’t the only scribe to do so.  Codex Sinaiticus has a separating mark between ειπεν and αυτη.  In Codex Vaticanus, ειπεν ends a line, and some empty space is leftover, before αυτη begins the next line.   Jumping ahead several hundred years, the Elfleda Bond Goodspeed Gospels displays a separating dot between ειπεν and αυτη.  I am confident that many other copies share this feature, so as to elicit the understanding that “This sickness” was the intended meaning.  In some other manuscripts, such as 138 and 1321, the risk of ambiguity has been eliminated by moving αυτη to the other side of ἡ ἀσθένεια. (Schrader lists a total of 12 Greek manuscripts with this reading, and seems to consider each one as somehow problematic, but this is simply a clarifying transposition.)   Following this clever adjustment, some copyists conflated both placements; as a result, seven manuscripts Schrader has examined have αυτη both before, and after, ἡ ἀσθένεια.  (These, too, are counted as problematic by Schrader.)

            The translator of the Latin text in the Old Latin Codex Carotensis (VL 33) seems to have been at a disadvantage; his Greek exemplar(s) apparently did not have distinction-making marks or separation-spaces in this verse, and due to this ambiguity, this manuscript has the phrase “dixit ei,” that is, “said to her,” in John 11:4.  This is a symptom of a Latin translator’s confusion, however; it does not indicate that αυτη was meant to be understood this way. 

● WHO SERVES SUPPER IN JOHN 12:2?

            In P66 – after Martha’s name has appeared in – John 12:2 begins not with the usual ἐποίησαν (“they made), but with the singular ἐποίησεν.  This is a very slight variation, probably elicited by a scribe’s desire to relieve readers of the burden of asking who “they” were; the resultant sense, with ἐποίησεν, is that Lazarus made a supper for Jesus.  Minuscules 295 and 841, Schrader has observed, share this reading.

            A little further along in the verse, P66 says that Martha served.  This is the reading of almost all manuscripts, whether early or late – but – but Schrader has observed that minuscules 27, 63, and 1194 have Mary’s name here, instead of Martha’s.  I leave it to readers to mull over the probabilities:  is this a simple effect of scribal inattentiveness, sparked by anticipation of Mary’s actions in the following verse, or do three Byzantine minuscules preserve the original reading, against all other Greek manuscripts?

IN CONCLUSION . . .

            There is more material in Schrader’s thesis that I have not considered in this brief essay.  However, the major points have been covered, and her five-point challenge has been answered.  Although Schrader has collected many variant-readings in John 11 (which must have taken considerable work), a very large majority of the readings in question, and especially the variants at the core of her arguments, are the effects of scribal carelessness, or the effects of scribes’ desire to augment the clarity the text.   

            This tends to hollow out her claim that one in five of the Greek manuscripts she has examined displays some problem involving the character of Martha in John 11:1-12:2; the evidence points toward a different and unremarkable direction:  copyists were sometimes careless, and sometimes desired to augment the clarity of the text.  None of these textual variants suggests anything remotely resembling the massive interpolation that Schrader has proposed.



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

[In the first posting of this post, I had the words απεστιλεν and απεστιλαν mixed up.  My bad.]

           

Mark 16:9-20, Inerrancy, and Liberal Propaganda

            Have you ever been told that textual variants have no impact on Christian doctrine? Of course you have, if you have read text-critical handbooks by evangelical authors. However, some textual variants exist which are capable of having a strong doctrinal impact. For example, consider the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. This doctrine is so cherished by some Christians that Dallas Theological Seminary lists it among seven “essentials” for students. 

            The adoption of some Alexandrian readings, however, would render the doctrine of inerrancy unsustainable. In Codex Sinaiticus (popularized as “The World’s Oldest Bible”), Matthew 13:35 attributes to Isaiah a passage from Psalm 78 – which was composed by Asaph, not Isaiah. And in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the text of Matthew 27:49 includes a report that Jesus was pierced with a spear before He died – in direct contradiction to the account in John 19:30-35, which says clearly that Jesus was pierced with a spear after He died. If inerrancy is an important doctrine, then at least two textual variants found in manuscripts that some Bible-footnote writers consider “the most reliable manuscripts” are capable of having an impact on at least one important doctrine.

            Perhaps, in addition to Sinaiticus’ textual variant in Matthew 13:35, and in addition to the variant found in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in Matthew 27:49, the abrupt ending of Mark (a reading unique to Vaticanus and Sinaiticus among all our early Greek manuscripts) should be added to the list of textual variants that can have a doctrinal impact, because some liberal theologians who prefer the abrupt ending – rejecting verses 9-20 as a scribal accretion – tend to use it as a platform for the notion that the accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection in the other three Gospels are embellishments that originated with later sources, rather than with eyewitnesses.

            For example, a recent article by Dr. Candida Moss, published at The Daily Beast, describes a book by Dallas Theological Seminary graduate Matthew Larsen, Gospels before the Book, in which the author proposes that the Gospel of Mark “might never have been intended for publication and was more like a rough draft or collection of notes than a book.” The textual contest about the ending of the Gospel of Mark comes into play in Larsen’s theory. Moss writes: “The conclusion to Mark bears the hallmarks of a draft. Historians will tell you that the oldest manuscripts (and, we thus say, the earliest “original” version) of Mark finish at Mark 16:8, with the women who had come to the tomb running away in fear. But there are at least four other endings to the Gospel in the ancient manuscripts, which serve as evidence of early Christian readers’ efforts to revise, polish, and improve the text.”
            This is used as a platform for the idea that accounts about Jesus’ bodily resurrection were later additions to the story of Jesus. Moss continues: “Later texts, including the Gospel of Matthew, added additional resurrection stories and prologues to the text and constantly repurposed this collection of notes.”
            Now, I have no intention of investing time today to review Larsen’s interesting book, or to address the proposal that the Gospel of Mark is a mere collection of notes. I just want to zoom in on what was not said by Moss: she did not mention any of the evidence that is earlier than Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Due to this omission, readers who believe Moss are likely to draw two conclusions:
            (A) The earliest evidence supports ending the Gospel of Mark at 16:8,
            (B) There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.

Both statements are false. Moss has put two manuscripts from the 300s in the spotlight, while keeping evidence from the 100s in the shadows. As I explain in my book Authentic: The Case for Mark 16:9-20, four patristic writers in the 100s (and more in the 200s, 300s, and 400s) utilized Mark 16:9-20 in one way or another:

● Epistula Apostolorum (written c. 150, and reissued c. 180) owes some of its narrative framework and verbiage to Mark 16:9-20. For example, nowhere in the Gospels except in Mark 16:10-11 is there a report of a woman seeing Jesus after His resurrection, and then telling the disciples that Jesus is alive, and not being believed by them. This sequence of events is related, however, in Epistula Apostolorum; the disciples are depicted stating, “We believed her not that the Savior was risen from the dead. Then she returned to the Lord and said to him, ‘None of them has believed me, that you live.’” (For more examples, see my book.)  Specialist Julian Hills (Th.D., Harvard) has stated, “I would vote for a high degree of probability that the author knew the Longer Ending.”

● Justin Martyr’s First Apology (written in 160) features the following excerpt in its 45th chapter, as Justin interprets part of Psalm 110 as a prophetic description of Jesus’ ascension to heaven:
            His statement, “He shall send to Thee the rod of power out of Jerusalem,” [i.e., David’s statement in Psalm 110:2] is predictive of the mighty word, which His apostles, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere.”
            (Only rarely in any of his writings did Justin make specific quotations; most of his utilizations of the Gospels are loose and imprecise; it is not unusual to see Justin combine phrases from more than one Gospel when relating episodes in Jesus’ ministry, and this phenomenon has led some researchers to deduce that Justin often relied not upon a copy of the Gospel of Matthew, and a copy of the Gospel of Mark, and a copy of the Gospel of Luke, but upon a Gospels-harmony in which the contents of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were blended together.)
In his statement about Psalm 110:2, Justin utilizes Mark 16:19, using three words which appear together nowhere else in Scripture except in Mark 16:19:
            Justin’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες πανταχου εκήρυξαν
            Justin’s phrase in English: went forth everywhere preaching
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in Greek: εξελθόντες εκήρυξαν πανταχου
            Mark 16:20’s phrase in English: went forth preaching everywhere.

Justin may also utilize the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in chapter 50 of his First Apology, where he states, after a lengthy quotation from Isaiah 53, that after Jesus’ crucifixion, “Even those who were acquainted with him all denied and forsook him. But afterward, when he had risen from the dead, and was seen by them, and they were taught to understand the prophecies in which all of this was foretold as about to happen, and when they had seen him depart into heaven, and had believed . . . they went forth to the whole race of mankind.”
            The phrase in bold print is reminiscent of the text of Mark 16:14 as preserved in the early Greek manuscript Codex Alexandrinus, which adds “from the dead” to the words “after He was risen.”

● Tatian, in his Diatessaron (produced in the 170s), blended together the contents of the four Gospels. (Tatian was, for a while, a student of Justin, and it is possible that Tatian got the idea to present the contents of all four Gospels into one continuous narrative from Justin’s Gospels-harmony that blended together Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)  The Diatessaron has only survived in versional and fragmentary evidence, but by comparing the different branches of evidence for its contents, the Diatessaron’s treatment of Mark 16:9-20 can be reconstructed: by comparing the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in the Arabic Diatessaron (a translation of an earlier Syriac copy) to the arrangement of the contents of Mark 16:9-20 in Codex Fuldensis (made in 546), we can see that the arrangement in both of these witnesses – one from the Western transmission-branch, and one from the Eastern transmission-branch – is almost exactly the same, implying that both echo the earlier arrangement by Tatian.
            Further evidence of Tatian’s use of Mark 16:9-20 comes from Ephrem Syrus’ commentary on the Diatessaron, upon which some fresh light has been provided by the discovery of Chester Beatty Syriac MS 709, from c. 500: In the eighth segment of his commentary, Ephrem Syrus wrote that Jesus had told His disciples, “Go into all the world and baptize in the name of the Father, and Son, and Spirit.” This is a combination of Mark 16:15a and Matthew 28:19. In the Armenian text of Ephrem’s commentary, Ephrem utilizes Mark 16:15 again later in his commentary, as he describes Jesus saying, “Go out into all the world and preach My gospel to all creation” (Mk. 16:15).

● Irenaeus, in Book 3, chapter 10 of Against Heresies (c. 180), specifically quoted Mark 16:19:  “Toward the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: ‘So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God.’”
            Irenaeus’ testimony is not only clear and specific, but it also reflects the view of someonw who was familiar with the Gospels-text used in three locales:   Irenaeus grew up in Asia Minor; he visited Rome, and he served as bishop in what is now southern France.  Irenaeus was not hesitant to point out the existence of textual variants in his discussion of Revelation 13:18 (he refers to copies which read “616” instead of “666,” but rejects them, appealing to the oldest manuscripts, and to those with a known provenance); yet here he mentions no rival variants, as if the only form of the Gospel of Mark that he encountered anywhere was the text with 16:19 present.
            Irenaeus may also allude to Mark 16:15-19 in Book 2, chapter 32 of Against Heresies; although his comments there lack striking verbal parallels, he writes there like a person with that passage on his mind; after mentioning that the risen Lord “manifested himself to his disciples, and was in their sight received up into heaven,” he proceeds to point out that true disciples perform miracles in Jesus’ name, and drive out demons, and foresee future events, and that some “heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are made whole” (see Mark 16:18).

            Yet these four pieces of evidence from the 100s, supportive of the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20 in the text of the Gospel of Mark, seem unworthy of mention in the world of liberal theologians who are intent on obscuring or simply ignoring whatever affirms the bodily resurrection of Christ. So let the reader beware: researchers who mention that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus end the text of Mark at 16:8, without mentioning that second-century patristic testimony supports the inclusion of Mark 16:9-20, are misleading their readers. And the same can be said for vague Bible-footnotes that mention “the oldest manuscripts” while leaving readers in the dark about patristic evidence that is much older than those two fourth-century manuscripts,

(In the interest of brevity, I skip over the testimony of other patristic witnesses as old or older than Codex Sinaiticus such as Hippolytus, Vincent of Thibaris, Hierocles, Acts of Pilate/Gospel of Nicodemus, the pagan writer Hierocles, and the Latin written Fortunatianus.)

            Now about the claim by Moss that “There are at least four other endings of Mark in the ancient manuscripts.”  One can truthfully say that there are two endings that follow Mark 16:8 in the ancient manuscripts, but only writers who want their readers to get a false impression would leave it at that.  More than 99.5% of the Greek manuscripts of Mark include 16:9-20. Besides Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, there is only one other Greek manuscript in which the text stops abruptly at the end of 16:8 – the medieval commentary-manuscript 304, which does not include a subscription to the Gospel of Mark, and which has undergone some damage, and which may be just the first volume of a two-volume set (the second volume of which, per this theory, began with the final comments on Mark before moving on to Luke and John).
            The “Shorter Ending” appears in six Greek manuscripts, all of which also include at least part of 16:9-20 – and various small but cumulatively decisive features in these manuscripts’ presentation of the Shorter Ending show that they all echo the text that circulated in a particular region in Egypt. In other words, while verses 9-20 are attested by early witnesses from Ireland, France, Rome, North Africa, Asia Minor, Constantinople, Cyprus, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Armenia, etc., the Shorter Ending’s early support is traceable to one locale. Nobody imagines that the Shorter Ending is original, and readers may reasonably suspect, as George Salmon did in 1890, that the primary reason why the Shorter Ending is given any prominence is to distract from the wide support given to the usual twelve verses. (For similar reasons, some commentators mention that Clement does not show an awareness of Mark 16:9-20, as if this is some suggestive thing – neglecting to tell their readers that Clement also does not show an awareness of twelve of Mark’s sixteen chapters.)          

More data is in my e-book,
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          The way to justify claiming that there are “four other endings of Mark” is to call 16:9-20 an ending, and call the Shorter Ending an ending (and so far, all is well) – and to call the inclusion of both the Shorter Ending and 16:9-20 an ending, and to call 16:9-20 with the Freer Logion (an interpolation preserved in Codex W between verses 14 and 15) an ending. But that is a nonsensical way to describe the evidence; to illustrate:
            Suppose I have two dogs – let’s name them Magnus and Parvus – and I have 1,600 pictures of Magnus, and six pictures of Magnus and Parvus together, one blurry picture of Parvus, and a picture of Magnus wearing a hat. If I were to tell you that this means that I have four dogs, or a multitude of dogs, you might tell me that I am misrepresenting the evidence, and that I need to sober up. And when any writer claims that there are “at least four other endings of Mark,” (or, as Larsen says in his book, that there were “a multitude of options” regarding how to conclude the Gospel of Mark), that should be the gist of readers’ responses. Whenever such misleading language is used, you may confidently conclude that you are reading propaganda, and not honest research.


Readers are invited to explore the embedded links for addition resources.